last week, i wasn't able to attend the ePed meeting, owing to my work finishing a grant proposal, but the group discussed Lev Manovich's Language of New Media. Somewhat interesting...I still need to delve into it more closely, but I like that his theory of new media seems more measured, less radicalized. Manovich deals a lot with cinema in his theory (perhaps owing to his Soviet background), and he draws direct connections between it and digital media, showing the continuity in media logics and aesthetics. It's sitting on my bookshelf right now, so maybe I'll pick it up again after I post this.
On a completely unrelated note, I've made the shift. I'm a pokerroom.com fan now. Simply got fed up with the action in the Yahoo! poker houses: too much bickering, too much pre-flop raising, no sense of consequence that might otherwise make people reluctant to call... Pokerroom's by far the better environ. . . and I'm up big after only a week's worth of play. :^)
For this semester, the Fellows are poring over a variety of foundational texts in technoculture, hypertext theory, media theory, and the like. Then, we meet periodically and hash out the intricacies of each text, or so the theory goes. More likely, we have an all-out bitchfest about flawed methodologies and outmoded theoretical approaches and technological jingoism. Fun times.
Espen J. Aarseth's Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature? Not so much...
Plotting works of literature on a graph full of admittedly arbitrary criteria in order to prove the existence of an ergodic form of literature (think: hypertext, only not confined to the screen) seems a bit...excessive, fetishistic, anal, scientistic,... I'm not entirely sold on the necessity of the project in the first place.
Maybe it's because I'm already on board with the premise (that "hypertextual writing" exists in printed form as well) that I don't feel the need to provide an objective study of literary forms. Kinda like pulling out a color spectrometer to prove the sky is blue. Or maybe I'm too fixated on those several pages, and I should give the rest of the book another chance.