He also insisted on the growing interaction between digital
literature and technology. "The future of cyber-literature,
techno-literature, digital literature or whatever you want to
call it, is set by the technology itself. It is now impossible
for an author to handle all by himself the words and their
movement and sound. A decade ago, you could know well each of
Director, Photoshop or Cubase (to cite just the better known
software), using the first version of each. That is not
possible any more. Now we have to know how to delegate, find
more solid financial partners than Gallimard, and look in the
direction of Hachette-Matra, Warner, the Pentagon and
Hollywood. At best, the status of multimedia director (?) will
be the one of video director, film director, manager of the
product. He is the one who receives the golden palms at Cannes,
but who would never have been able to earn them just on his
own. As twin sister (not a clone) of the cinematograph, cyber-
literature (video + the link) will be an industry, with a few
isolated craftsmen on the outer edge (and therefore with below-
zero copyright)."
Jean-Paul added in June 2004: "Surfing the web is like
radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I
click on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around
(from one click to another, as the links appear). You can do
this in the written media, of course. But the difference is
striking. So the internet changed how I write. You don't write
the same way for a website as you do for a script or a play.
(...)
In fact, it is not the internet which changed how I write, it
is the first Mac that I discovered through the self-learning of
HyperCard. I still remember how astonished I was during the
month when I was learning about buttons, links, surfing by
analogies, objects or images. The idea that a simple click on
one area of the screen allowed me to open a range of piles of
cards, and each card could offer new buttons and each button
opened on to a new range, etc. In brief, the learning of
everything on the web that today seems really banal, for me it
was a revelation (it seems Steve Jobs and his team had the same
shock when they discovered the ancestor of the Mac in the
laboratories of Rank Xerox). Since then I write directly on the
screen: I use the print medium only occasionally, to fix up a
text, or to give somebody who is allergic to the screen a kind
of photograph, something instantaneous, something approximate.
It is only an approximation, because print forces us to have a
linear relationship: the text is developing page after page
(most of the time), whereas the technique of links allows
another relationship to the time and space of imagination. And,
for me, it is above all the opportunity to put into practice
this reading/writing 'cycle', whereas leafing through a book
gives only an idea - which is vague because the book is not
conceived for that."
2005: GOOGLE GETS INTERESTED IN EBOOKS
= [Overview]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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