Sherwood+on+Hayles

KS notes


 * C2: Intermediation from Page to Screen**

E-Literature is computational (43). It requires a different reading paradigm because it's in conversation with **computational media** and **"users' embodied interactions**" (44). Interacting with E-lit, we are involved in a "**dynamic heterarchy**" or a system in which "different levels continuously inform and mutually determine each other" (45). In artificial intelligence, we see examples of primitive cognition (eg. Hoffstader's "codelets") where the program not only provides output but effectively "understand" the problem (50). E-lit goes beyond the boundaries of the print book which "functions as a receptacle for the cognitions of the writer [which] are stored and activated by the reader" (57).
 * Intermediation** occurs "when the text performs a change that binds author and program, player and computer, into a complex system" (56).


 * C3 Contexts for Electronic Literature: The Body and the Machine:**

NKH observes a problematic dichotomy between body and machine (87). Privileging of either is problematic for literary study. "**Technical media**" -- or the privileging of machine -- is represented by Kittler, whose approach is post-structuralist / Foucauldian: it makes "social formations interior to media conditions" (91) but, for NKH consequently fails to account for how change occurs and so incompletely accounts for how media interacts with the social / cultural realm. The virtual trading space with its highly gendered dynamics shows how "media conditions alone, then, are under-determining" (101). "**Embodimed knowledge**" Mark Hansen's constrasting empahsis, asserts the body as the locus of meaning and authority. (103). But NKH observes a "tension between Hansen's insight that techno0logy and the body coevolve dogether and his ideological committment to the priority of embodiment over technology" (108). Research shows a co-evolution of human biology (brains) and primitive tools (114), just as today digital media "are catalyzing contemporary ontogenic adaptations," for example, producing a generation predisposed to the "**hyper attentiveness**" of the stimulating, multi-stream gaming environment over the "**deep attention**" associated with textual anaylsis. (117)