dematerialisation in literature

[sufi]

Some people's "normal life" involves a lot of being on the internet, and it sounds like the Cooper's aiming for something specific rather than simply being The Great Internet Novel.

Also, an issue we run into when looking to simulate the internet via the novel is some of the core problems thrown up by it were already present, it's just turbocharged them. People were worrying about too much information and how to discern truth long before we got online.

I read a story online that stretched over a set of online reviews - I thought I'd probably linked it here or maybe I got it from here?
I cant remember was it a love story or a whodunnit
Ring any bells?
There must be loads of that type of narrative online, mainly not intentional of course
You could probably pick out a tale or two from here

 

[IdleRich]

Some people's "normal life" involves a lot of being on the internet,

Yeah but not everyone's

and it sounds like the Cooper's aiming for something specific rather than simply being The Great Internet Novel.

Sure. I meant to say at the end of that post that the book sounded good and I would order if I thought Portuguese post would manage to deliver it. But I'm just miusing on what such a thing should be.

Also, an issue we run into when looking to simulate the internet via the novel is some of the core problems thrown up by it were already present, it's just turbocharged them. People were worrying about too much information and how to discern truth long before we got online.

Yeah very true. Hence the continuing relevance of Burroughs & Faulkner I guess. Supercharge them to describe a supercharged InfoWorld.

 

[version]

Yeah but not everyone's

Right, but that particular book clearly isn't concerned with mass appeal.

 

[IdleRich]

I get that this book is what it is and isn't trying to be something else, but I can still use its description to help me arrive at an idea of what a more general book might be. No criticism of the book - which of course I haven't read - implied or intended.

 

[version]

Maybe demanding the novel incorporate the experience of using the internet's wrongheaded. Are we asking the same of films and TV shows? There are some that deal with things to do with the internet, but I can't think of any that aim to simulate the online experience.

Also, similar to what I said the other day about the internet acting as a catalyst for things like information overload rather than inventing them, the internet isn't necessarily that dramatic a shift from novels, shows and films as it's still text and image-based. The jump from novels to films was much greater as you went from telling a story through text to telling a story through sound and image. With the internet, it's still text, sound and image, just lots more of it.

When we talk about film techniques being applied to literature, we talk about things like montage, things seen within a film, the way you'd talk about techniques within a novel. We don't tend to talk about the physical medium itself. There isn't a novel that simulates sitting in a cinema, watching a screen. So, I suppose we have to think about what mechanisms are at play within online platforms that can be applied to the novel rather than thinking about how we can simulate one medium in another.

This circles back round to the problem mentioned earlier of writers like Joyce, Gaddis, Burroughs, Pynchon, DeLillo and David Foster Wallace already having written things which approximate hyperlinks, memes, threads, pop-up ads, and so on, and discuss information, entropy, social atomisation and all the usual things people talk about when they talk about the internet.

 

[version]

Another thing that comes to mind is some of us finding the thought of tweets and emails in a novel a bit clunky and superficial yet being fine with earlier novelists inserting letters, scripts, diary entries, newspaper clippings and so on into theirs. Why is that?

You could argue it's simply a case of doing it well and that those earlier novelists were better than the ones we have now, but I don't think that covers it. There's a knee jerk reaction to the thought of sticking tweets in a novel that there isn't to the newspaper headlines in Ulysses.

The obvious response is that Joyce was doing this stuff long before anyone here was even born and enough time's passed that he's been chewed, processed and accepted, and that perhaps we'd have had a similar aversion to him and his newspaper clippings had we been around in 1922.

It's a strong argument, but there's something about the way those earlier novelists did this stuff that feels serious and purposeful whereas hearing someone's incorporated tweets into their novel feels half-arsed for some reason, maybe it's just that it takes no imagination and isn't a great leap from Joyce's experiments a hundred years ago.

 

[IdleRich]

Maybe demanding the novel incorporate the experience of using the internet's wrongheaded. Are we asking the same of films and TV shows? There are some that deal with things to do with the internet, but I can't think of any that aim to simulate the online

That's not quite what I said though, I said books that capture the experience of living in the internet age... I was saying books should capture the experience of the internet but only to the extent that life is like that.

 

[shakahislop]

i thought that patricia lockwood book no one is talking about this did a pretty good job of describing what it's like to be on the internet, what it does to your brain and so on

 

[IdleRich]

Another thing that comes to mind is some of us finding the thought of tweets and emails in a novel a bit clunky and superficial yet being fine with earlier novelists inserting letters, scripts, diary entries, newspaper clippings and so on into theirs. Why is that?

You could argue it's simply a case of doing it well and that those earlier novelists were better than the ones we have now, but I don't think that covers it. There's a knee jerk reaction to the thought of sticking tweets in a novel that there isn't to the newspaper headlines in Ulysses.

The obvious response is that Joyce was doing this stuff long before anyone here was even born and enough time's passed that he's been chewed, processed and accepted, and that perhaps we'd have had a similar aversion to him and his newspaper clippings had we been around in 1922.

It's a strong argument, but there's something about the way those earlier novelists did this stuff that feels serious and purposeful whereas hearing someone's incorporated tweets into their novel feels half-arsed for some reason, maybe it's just that it takes no imagination and isn't a great leap from Joyce's experiments a hundred years ago.

Gotta say I've no automatic problem with tweets.

 

[version]

That's not quite what I said though, I said books that capture the experience of living in the internet age... I was saying books should capture the experience of the internet but only to the extent that life is like that.

I was thinking about the discussion in general and some of the things I'd said earlier in the thread.

 

[IdleRich]

I think it was certainly helpful to clarify the distinction between books trying to capture the experience of living in the internet age which itself at times is so affected by being constantly online that aspects of daily life come to resemble being online, and books slavishly and pointlessly aping the internet.