Materiality, spatiality, and text
Forever I’ve been trying to include Kate Hayles’s notion of materiality with the new theories that I’ve been reading lately. My previous posts clearly reveal my obsession with Hayles’s theoretical approach. Here is what i came up with, it is a bit long winded, but here it is, to the truly theory-addicted:
The appropriation of texts and the production of meanings
also rely significantly on the materiality
of the medium, the spatiality that the medium affords, and the way in which the
reader interacts and navigates the textual space. Materiality, as defined by
Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines,
is an emergent property of the text which depends on how the work mobilizes its
resources as a physical artifact as well as on the user’s interactions with the
work and the interpretive strategies she develops during the reading process. Since this definition implies that materiality is a property of the text that
emerges as a result of the user’s interaction with and the interpretation of
the work’s resources, narrative must necessarily be finalized during the
reading process. Nonetheless, the materiality alone is inadequate to explain
narrativity if the concept of text is not defined, or even worse, is defined in
a way that limits its scope. Especially in the age of media convergence as
Malcolm McCullough notes in Digital
Ground, the text is no longer confined to the library and that “[l]ately it
has become possible to move the text between many scales and surfaces” (87).
Seeing it as ubiquitous information technology, McCullough claims that one is
rarely out of sight of several pieces of the text. This is particularly relevant
in terms of discussing how narratives are formulated in Second Life simply because the poaching of the world by hackers and
griefers spawn narratives in-world but these narratives also expand on
platforms outside the boundaries of the virtual world. While residents, mainly
griefers themselves, create performative narratives in-world by building spoof
objects and establishing mock groups to make fun of themselves and the
reactions of other residents, these in-world incidents result
in narratives outside of Second Life
in various blogs, forums, and chat channels where residents discuss and
describe the repercussions of these incidents. Interestingly, these platforms
flow into one another. Thus, residents stream IRC chat channels into the world
and are able to access the internet through the built-in Firefox browser.
