Excellent points, Allen, on the need for precision and specificity when 
we discuss these questions.

As far as the claims about the transformative nature of information 
technologies, see Standage's wonderful book on the telegraph — The 
Victorian Internet. The same claims that were made for the networked 
computng were also made about microfilm (H G Wells, etc).

I do, however, think that by digital we generally mean  something very 
different than counting on one's fingers — the medium or infotech that 
is computer based (and often networked) in which, for the first time, 
writing becomes a matter of stacking codes on codes rather than making 
physical marks on physical surfaces. Digital text has certain qualities 
that distinguish it from physical text: it variable, duplicatable at 
virtually no expenditure of energy or money, easily networked, 
processed, manipulated, and so on.

On Jul 2, 2005, at 7:36 PM, Alan Sondheim wrote:

> I am still missing the point here, and continue to do so. And for me 
> this is odd, since I'm working on a book with Sandy Baldwin dealing 
> with the phenomenological distinction between the analog and digital. 
> However, on a fundamentally cultural level, there are problems.
>
> For example, I have no idea what the 'literary imagination' is. Whose? 
> What period? What time-frame? What culture?
>
> Nor is there necessarily a pre-digital. The earliest examples of 
> writing might well be considered digital; as you know, they are 
> tallies which permit only of whole numbers, which led to the abacus - 
> a digital machine to any particular number base. The written 
> characters of any language also form a digital matrix of sorts; in an 
> arbitary word one has (a-z)(a-z)... in English - already a system. 
> It's such a system that made the morse code, and before that the 
> semaphore, etc., an easy mapping.
>
> And when you say 'radical reconceptualization in literature' - what 
> literature? Romance novels, early hypertext experiments, newsgroup 
> 'strange attractors' like the monster truck neutopians and their 
> writings?
>
> I think the problem I have is that I don't think there _is_ digital 
> life, in any sense of the term except AI experiments (neural networked 
> models of cockroaches for example - I have one on my machine) (the 
> model, not the cockroach). There have always been new technologies, 
> and new writing technologies, and new archiving possibilties, and 
> people like Polyani worked well in describing the kinds of tacit 
> knowledge employed in adopting and adapting them. And just as we don't 
> talk about electrical life or gasoline life or wheat life, but life in 
> relation to these, it seems to me, the 'digital' doesn't imply 
> 'digital life' but a phenomeno- logical study of the 
> interrelationships among humans and electronic computers. Things get 
> sidetracked, however, once this is admitted - the fact there are such 
> phenomenologies at work doesn't imply that the 'literary imagination' 
> - whatever and however that is - changes as a result. The best one can 
> do is define carefully what the literary imagination is (Mikel 
> Dufrenne is good), i.e. the world of the work, and see how this 
> interacts in particular and culturally-specific situations, ranging 
> from Hopscotch and Tristam Shandy, through Bosewell's Johnson, John 
> Cayley, myself for that matter, mez, etc.
>
> People of all periods, perhaps have felt _utterly transformed,_ and 
> this is a characteristic of people, not techne. (A good example: the 
> book Practical Radio, which outlines child radio hackers and their 
> language/ boundary/culture - from 1924. It's no different than the 
> current hacking tradition; the attidues, generation and knowledge 
> gaps, competition, agro, etc. are identical.)
>
> - Alan, not trying to step on anyone's toes here. -
>
>
>> Dear List Members,
>>
>> Digital literature being literature, how can we=20
>> (1) distinguish it from the pre-digital?
>> (2) understand the way it modifies the literary imaginary as it
>> existed before the digital? (Specifically, does it mean a radical
>> reconceptualization of literature?)
>>
>> Can anyone help me understand the issues not really techinically but
>> philosophically/phenomenologically?
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Rajesh
>>
>> **********
>>
>
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George P. Landow
Professor of English and the History of Art
Brown University

www.landow.com

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