Electronic Literacies

by Caitlin Fisher

My research and artistic practice is organized around the overarching theme of electronic literacies in the broadest sense and the research concerns of this emerging field: production by artists and writers of new kinds of texts, the way these cultural objects are encountered and understood, and the widespread implications of these new cultural artifacts. As a hypermedia theorist and storyteller – as both a reader and a writer of these arguably new kinds of texts, I believe that the way we tell stories matters in a profound way, that forms are never innocent, that storytelling has intimate connections to theory-making and that playing with ideas and forms is not only good for you, but can also result in some surprising, unanticipated discoveries. I would like to share some of these discoveries with you, here.

All of my work to date is invested in finding a common language between thinking and doing – to making electronic art and texts, as well as thinking about them and reading them. This is significant with respect to digital literacies because as McLuhan said, “we shape our tools and then our tools shape us,” (Lapham, xi) echoing Nietzsche who similarly observed that “our machines are working on our thoughts” (qtd. in Machine, n. pag..). An exploration of digital literacies necessarily, then, demands a consideration of both new ways and means of writing and new strategies and effects of reading.

The Living Literacies conference asked us to consider what it means to read and write now – and with respect to electronic literacies we need to consider specifically, I think, what it means to read and write nonlinearly, visually, and cinematically. Do these new cultural forms and digital grammars allow us to communicate differently? How? To what effect? How do digital technologies and new media tools modify the relationships between language, texts, and culture? How do we speak to one another, now? What are the benefits of reading digital text as a material mode of creating shaped by ideological concerns? What is the future of storytelling? In short, how will our encounters with new digital texts and possibilities challenge and change us?