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 reconceptualize the status of our own interpretations of the interactive text. From a theoretical point of view the traditional semiotic tools used for analysis of texts become the problem of the digital letter.
Both authors argue that we have always had an ‘interactive’ relationship with texts of all kinds because of our individual interpretative relationships with them and that therefore ‘interactivity’ is a redundant term. Aarseth observed in his seminal study of 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 or 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 or viewer or 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 (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 conclusion; this sense technologies ‘configure’ people, 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.
BY MWINYIJUMA REHEMA
BAPRM III - 42686
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