Printing Out and Slowing Down

Marie-Laure Ryan on reading Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce.

During my first pass through Twelve Blue I was so preoccupied with restoring a semblance of order in its informational chaos that I hardly took the time to slow down and properly savor a passage. The twelve lines on the left of each screen kept urging me to make use of my freedom to click, to move on and find out what lay beyond the screen. When I encountered passages that tempted me to take a deep breath and inhale the flavor of language. I cheated the electronic medium by printing them out. This allowed me to postpone their rereading and to move on in my elusive quest for narrative coherence. (Without printouts, and without a map of the network, who knows if I would ever get another look at a given screen?)

from Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media

And so for day 975
14.08.2009