listening to repeating

Burroughs and Gysin wrote The Third Mind.  Sometimes, I wish I’d never read the thing. For one, that book—or perhaps the formulaic depression I endured after trekking through Pynchon’s generic Inherent Vice—is likely responsible for my recent inability to read a print novel.  Not because novels are long, or that I lack the requisite attention span, but because I want to see language do something other than construct a story, a character, a point of view . . .

Elsewhere, I’ve heard it.  The kids.  With their low attention spans, they don’t read books anymore.  Or, if they do, they consume vampirish texts destined for filmic adaptation.  So the last thing to advocate is a move away from the literary novel.  Because, if you do, then you are simply endorsing the abbreviating thumbs of  a multitasking generation.  Cursory thinking and micromedia (e.g., Twitter and Facebook) take over.

I’m not really interested in believing or pursuing that claim so much as I’m inclined to assert something else: micromedia is a narrative-making business.  Micromedia, of course, often being interpreted as antithetical to any literary endeavor.   After all, how much of a story can someone tell with 140 characters?  How deep can you get on Facebook?

One take on the depth of 140 characters is attending to hyper attention. N. Katherine Hayles spells out this angle in the 2007 edition of the MLA’s Profession.  There, she claims that “there is little doubt that hyper attention is on the rise and that it correlates with an increasing exposure to and desire for stimulation in general and stimulation by media in particular” (191).  Elsewhere in the same article, she writes: “Hyper attention excels at negotiating rapidly changing environments in which multiple foci compete for attention; its disadvantage is impatience with focusing for long periods on a noninteractive object such as a Victorian novel or complicated math problem” (188).  Hyper attention, then, is distinguished from deep attention, which is “the cognitive style traditionally associated with the humanities” and “is characterized by concentrating on a single object for long periods” (187).

Not only that.  Hyper attention is also the cognitive mode of an emerging “Generation M.”  Based upon findings from a study commissioned by the Kaiser Family Foundation and published in Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18-Year-Olds, Hayles suggests that “reading print books . . . is the media form to which our young people turn least often in their leisure time” (189).  Even though they spend roughly 8.5 hours with media per day, roughly 3.51 hours is with TV and DVD movies, while only .43 hours is classified as “reading” (189).  With these data and distinctions in mind, Hayles claims that rather than ignoring this generational shift toward hyper attention, or exacerbating the divide between the deep and hyper types, educators should instead integrate hyper-attentive practices into curricula and synthesize them with competences in deep attention.

I’ve always been persuaded by this move.  For one, Hayles doesn’t map the construction of narrative onto deep attention and its absence onto hyper attention. That would be too easy.  In fact, I’m currently entertaining the idea that narrative—and not hyper attention—might be the real challenge facing educators.

Ok, I know what you might be thinking: “This guy is about to make traditionalist claims for the value and force of language as an art form beyond the story.  Let us now commence a problem-fraught voyage into a universalist formalism, perhaps with some tricky digital twist.”

Not so.

This semester, at Cornish, I’m teaching “Introduction to Digital Humanities,” with the theme of “Designing Literature.” One thing I’m after in this course is to pressure the platforms through which people currently compose—platforms which tend to regulate, through their design, how people compile stories and the aesthetics of that compilation, including where it’s stored, how people interface with it, and how snippets become stories (and advertisements).  In short, stressing how digital aesthetics are naturalized and help render platforms for “global” or “democratic” communication.   The course material includes texts from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, all of which—in one way or another—lay bare their medium and make textual production, the book, the screen, the page, the word . . . all of them . . . curious things.

The argument subtending this line of inquiry?  Design—especially the popular design of micromedia platforms—is the mechanism whereby people construct narratives often without thinking about narrative construction.  (I’m doing my best here to avoid the word “unconscious.”  But it’s probably the best word, Jameson.)  Indeed, I’m hesitant to think that, when studying electronic literature and networked media, we’ve somehow abandoned and are free from the templated thought of the common print novel.  (Of note, this critique is not a critique of standards, including those for accessibility.   Curious design can still follow standards.)

Starting from this perspective, hyper attention is not the origin story for why teachers can’t get students to read novels anymore.  In fact, when studying the design of a text like Flight Paths, hyper attention is an asset.  It also just so happens to be the way through which many people currently compose networked narratives—a piling on of micromedia.

How is the networked narrative any different from, say, a print narrative?  In my opinion, the primary difference is that the networked narrative emerges without plot as a map.  Where there was plot, there is now design.

As such, in the course, we’ll be reading against narrative, at least in sense that it is associated with plot, character development, and the like.   In the texts we’re studying, we’ll instead be analyzing how media design shapes interpretation (without determining it) and interrogating the cultural demands for certain designs (print and electronic) in certain historical moments.

So, yes, I am not currently reading any print novels.  Obviously, since I, too, am quite hyper attentive myself, this is merely a phase.  I’ll be back to reading Gravity’s Rainbow in no time.  Like, in five minutes.