INTERACTIVE TEXT AND CYBER TEXT

Established ways of thinking about how meaning is produced between readers and texts assumed a stability of the text but a fluidity of interpretation. Under conditions of interactivity this traditional stability of the text has also become fluid. Hence as critics we find ourselves having to reconceptualise the status of our own interpretations of the interactive text.

The problem in Cybertext: ‘the new interactive digital media consist of “interactive dynamic” elements, a fact that renders traditional semiotic models and terminology, which were developed for objects that are mostly static, useless in their present unmodified form’ (Aarseth 1997). Instead of the traditional text/user relations the many kinds of interactivity now available have suggested the need to think of the user as a component in cybernetic circuit of machine, text and body.
Cybertext is the wide range (or perspective) of possible textualities seen as a typology of machines, as various kinds of literary communication systems where the functional differences among the mechanical parts play a defining role in determining the aesthetic process.

Cybertext shifts the focus from the traditional threesome of author/sender, text/message, and reader/receiver to the cybernetic intercourse between the various participants in the textual machine. (Aarseth 1997)
Understandings of the role of the body in this circuit have become increasingly frequent following Marie-Laure Ryan’s (2001) work calling for a phenomenology that analyses ‘the sense of “presence” through which the user feels corporeally connected to the virtual world’ (2001).

These approaches are particularly appropriate where the interactive pleasures on offer are primarily kinaesthetic rather than cognitive as in the case of the immersive interactions offered by computer games for example. As Dovey and Kennedy (2006) argued, ‘The idea of a disembodied spectator/viewer/reader is a fictional subject created by particular ways of conceptualizing the relationship between “texts” and “readers”. This fiction is founded on the Cartesian model of perception whereby consciousness is seen as separate to and distinct from embodiment.’

The cybernetic quality of interactions afforded by digital textualities has led some commentators (see Aarseth 2001, Eskelinen 2001 and Moulthrop 2004) to adopt the use of the term ‘configuration’ in preference to ‘interaction’. This term carries the double force of its derivation from Actor Network Theory inflected study of technological design (Woolgar 1991) and its more colloquial meaning of the ways in which were all called upon to individually ‘configure’ or simply ‘set up’ our own technological environments.

In his study of usability trials Woolgar defines configuration as designers’ attempts to ‘define, enable, and constrain’ the user, through the design of an object which will ‘define and delimit’ the user’s possible behaviours. In this sense technologies ‘configure’ us, affording particular kinds of behavioural patterns. So whereas the term ‘interaction’ implies a two-way communication, ‘configuration’ suggests a two-way, mutually constitutive process through which both user and software are dynamically engaged in refashioning one another in a feedback loop. Moulthrop argues that understanding computer gameplay helps to explain how we are all increasingly called upon to have configurative relationships with our media environments.

Games; computer games in particular appeal because they are configurative, offering the chance to manipulate complex systems within continuous loops of intervention, observation, and response. Interest in such activities grows as more people exchange email, surf the world wide web, post to newsgroups, build web logs, engage in chat and instant messaging, and trade media files through peer-to-peer networks. As in various sorts of gaming, these are all in some degree configurative practices, involving manipulation of dynamic systems that develop in unpredictable or emergent ways (Moulthrop, 2004).

Generally; is argument makes a similar claim to the neo-Frankfurt School position on ‘interaction’ that ‘configuration’ is a necessarily active way for us to understand not just software systems but also political and cultural systems.
If people conceive of configuration as a way of engaging not just immediate game elements, but also the game’s social and material conditions and by extension, the conditions of other rule-systems such as work and citizenship – then it may be very important to insist upon the difference between play and interpretation, the better to resist immersion (2004).

BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA

BAPRM III - 42686