I couldn't agree more. This familiarity issue that us "old media" types are running into just doesn't seem avoidable. In "Afternoon," I found myself cycling foward and backwards just to see what effects the technology was having on narrative. I think in doing this, I missed some of the point. In my distracted state, it was difficult to reflect on the differences that placement of text had on the story in its entirety. Is this something I'll get over, if this glorious electronic revolution finally stomps everything in its path? Are these issues (nostalgia, confusion, or whatever) similar to those experienced by scroll readers coming in contact with codexes? I know we have spent a good deal of time mentioning this problem, but it seems that most resistence (to repeat my catch word from last week) of new media can, in at least some ways, be tied to the "it just doesn't feel right" aspect.

Nice post, Jenny. Jay Bolter, one of the earliest hypertext theorists, was fond of the idea of "topographic writing." The text was a space to be explored, cartographically. (Interesting resonances to Adventure and its central conceit of cave exploration.) The maps in some hypertexts obviously make the metaphor explicit. Maybe this is another way of coming to Aarseth's central point, which is that hypertexts are not finally narratives, but rather true ergodic texts and perhaps closer to games.

though i'm interested in the idea of frame theory, i don't have the mental capacity to deal with it at the moment. but i would like to post a link related to your comments about electronic voting and perhaps more related to posthumanism than the great programmer/nonprogrammer divide. I heard a commentary on NPR last week, maybe?, and the guy was discussing why electronic voting doesn't *feel* like voting, why it doesn't feel *real*, *visceral*, *experiential*. i for one am TERRIFIED at the thought of these machines with questionable security and no backup for knowing how people voted and how those votes were counted. Does that make me a technological dinosaur? or just more afraid of rush limbaugh than maybe i should be?

anyway, here's the link if you want to take a listen:

http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=1800361

melissa

I guess this is as good a place as any to bring up the whole ugly spectre of technophobia again. I am still not entirely convinced that Ullman's _The Bug_ is not in some way playing into the reader's/the culture's (naturalized) distrust of computers, of the digital, of data. As with Jenny's post on electronic voting and Melissa's very emphatic TERRIFIED response to the idea of computerized voting, I have to ask how do we negotiate, demystify, and eventually collapse this tension we have in our culture--being fearful of the computer and wary of its potentials, promises yet surrounded and inculcated by computers?

Granted this technophobia is really no different than any of the other mass culture fears/narratives being accreted over time and space by the media and bought into by the people (e.g. killer bees, lightning kills, fears of the immigrant, homosexual agenda, Y2K, identity theft, lead in water). I'm not saying that these narratives don't exist or that they don't happen, but I'm with Michael Moore in that our cultural imaginary is fed and full of conspicuous fears... fear of technology is one of them.

So, what do we do with the whole last presidential election Florida "chad" debacle? That is a completely "human" and analogy error?

I personally am a bit more trusting of computerized voting (and I don't know if the NPR dicussion is about the fancy LCD touch screen type voting or voting over the WEB) than hand-punching and hand-counting. But maybe I'm just biased toward the digital. I think the likelihood of physical, material ballot stuffing is similar to likelihood of electronic fraud. We already file our taxes via the web and phone, buy hundreds of millions of dollars of merchandise via the web, participate in millions of transactions (e.g. email, file sharing, websurfing, cookiedownlading, image swapping)...I would think that such things would be far more problematic than voting. I guess "voting" has an essence, an aura that makes it categorically different and therefore more "vulnerable" than credit card numbers?

The more important questions with electronic voting, to me, is access and not the fear of tampering. Who can vote electronically? Will e-voting be more democratic? Will e-voting bring out more voters?

Don't fear the digital,
ED

Um, "anlogy" => "analog"... ironic that it appears in a line about human error.

ED

There was another report on NPR yesterday, 4/14, about the IRS computer system that is apparently a ticking time bomb. There are no programmers left who understand the code, so the entire organization lives in fear of the moment that a bug will come into the system and disrupt the IRS's ability to collect revenue and pay the government's bills. So our nation's financial backbone is run by a computer, whose language no one speaks. It struck me that a hacker could mess with the system, and no one would know. We assume it is vulnerable as hell, but have no means of defending it.

The IRS has tried to hire CIO's to coordinate a team to update the system, but the government has only thrown $600,000,000 at it so far. That sounds like a lot of money, but there are start up tech companies that get that kind of funding with an idea and no product. The reporter claimed that the IRS wouldn't pay a programming specialist enough to draw their attention for long, and the culture of the IRS was death to innovative thinking.