Morris+-+As+We+May+Think

Morris ‑ As We May Think

This introduction references the Memex article by Vannevar Bush in that paradigms shift when you’re on the brink of breaking into something new, and nobody can live outside of his or her time. Bush was still thinking within his time even though he was projecting into and imagining the future.

Morris’s main distinction is between doing and knowing: “What we see and do is conditioned by a technoenvironment of digital computers….what we think is conditioned by concepts developed, for the most part, in a world of print” (2).Morris uses Gertrude Stein to show that experientially there are lots of things that we do that we don’t know because there’s no real vocabulary to have a discourse about it. There will always be a gap between the past, present, and future, but we, like Stein, can help narrow that gap.

How does this relate to e-lit? We already DO it, but e-lit makes the computer aspect more apparent so that a discourse can be opened about it and we can KNOW it. E-lit authors are in the unstable gap mentioned above. Digital literature is in the position to be avant garde in that it is present, of the moment.