Technology’s Hideous Progeny

Mary Shelley famously referred to her book Frankenstein, as well as the monster she created, as her “hideous progeny” (25). The reference continues. Technology has replaced the author’s role in creating literature and has taken over; altering the way society approaches and reads literature creating its own hideous and illegitimate progeny. As our society experiences technological advances, we increasingly focus on the easy and efficient and we throw away our past and permanent ways of life. We are consumed by the internet and the electronic world, and consequently have forgotten about books and literature that you can actually touch and hold. Literature is defined as the body of writing, the profession of a writer, writing with universal and permanent interest. To me, literature is all of the above; it is something you can delve into and learn from, something you can experience. It is based on such ideals that I consider the hypertext Storyland to be an illegitimate and ineffective form of writing. Storyland and electronic writings like it are just additional distractions to our increasingly shallow society.

            When I first came across Storyland, the word “story” immediately caught my eye and I thought I finally found a real piece of literature. I was wrong. I was immediately met with circus music and the flashing letters that make up “Storyland” and I could no longer take this site seriously. I recognize that literature can be a fun hobby, but this was ridiculous. It was a game, not a story that I could delve into.

Storyland is a program that randomly creates disconnected stories according to a computer formula. The formula determines what sentence to add onto the growing story until it reaches ten sentences. Storyland, according to Katherine Hayles ─author of Writing Machines─, is “a new breed of second-generation electronic literature…experimenting with ways to incorporate narratives with sounds, motion, animation, and other software functionalities” (27). When the story ends, you can hit a button to start the process over again. This new breed of electronic literature has become so focused on the sounds and animation that people have lost sight of literature’s power to speak alone, without all the high technology accessories.

My first grievance against Storyland is that the finished product does not compile into one cohesive piece. It is a disjointed story that consequently does not make sense. In opposition, Hayles would argue that the mutability of it all makes the product entertaining and amusing and promotes “the free form of creative play” (16) and she is not wrong. I, too, think reading should be entertaining, but not in the form of a game. Literature is engaging because of the imaginative world that you can create from reading it, not the superficial sounds and flashes that distract from the actual story. Perhaps the fact that the story does not make sense would better engage the reader, forcing him or her to further think through the stories. I am all for thinking about and trying to further your reading experience, but when the writing is ten sentences long with little variation in sentence structure, it is impossible to develop a meaningful experience from that.  In other words, the stories may be arbitrarily composed, but they still lack the free and creative quality that Hayles glorifies. It may be randomly produced, which would seemingly make it interesting and surprising, but it is not playful in the way that a novel could be.

Novels are more creative and playful because they have an author ─ a person who knows how to appeal to other people. In Storyland, the author is not involved in the final product; rather the confined and limited computer is generating the disconnected story. Granted someone may have originally written or submitted the individual sentences, but when it comes to compiling the sentences into a story, it is all done through a computer formula. There is no author giving thought and effort to producing literature. Without an author, the writing loses definition and according to Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies, “the idea of individual authorship” (159) is being lost more and more in the electronic and hypertext format. Loss of definition of an individual is a key concern of Birkerts. He writes that “the decline of the prestige of authorship…has much to do with the climate of our current intellectual culture” (158-159). Birkerts argues that we, as writers and as people, are losing our individuality and soul when we give up our past ways for new technology. Hayles used the term “Creole” and defined it as a “language compounded from English and computer code” (50), which essentially describes how Storyland is compiling sentences through formulas. She also talked of “neologisms”, which she described as “coinages made from existing words that express new synthesis” basically meaning that arbitrary sentences are put together to form a story. You could make a technical argument and say that technically stories are being produced regardless of whether it is a person or computer developing them. It all depends on how you define story; if you define story as a group of sentences with characters, then Storyland makes stories. But if you define a story as a short narrative with connected events, developed characters, and a plot, then Storyland would not be producing stories.

I also define stories with the idea of permanence. The stories created are not permanent; as soon as the button for a new story is chosen, the story disappears and a new one is made. The same story is never repeated. Some may think of this unpredictability and mutability as a good thing. Hayles thinks that literature should be fun and entertaining and the random applications to the story would be appealing, but regardless is it literature? Birkerts emphasizes that permanence is an issue with technology because “words which appear and disappear…have a different status and affect us differently from words held immobile on the accessible space of a page” (154). Words that are permanent on a printed page have a sense of resonance and history to it because you know that an author carefully selected a word for that reason. Words that appear and disappear in an electronic program, in general, are fleeting and not as meaningful.

Consequently, there is no depth to the stories. The reader cannot truly delve into them and experience them in a meaningful way. As I have argued, you should be able to truly experience literature. You should be able to sit down for a couple hours and enter a whole new world where you can learn something new or just let your imagination run wild. In Storyland, the character relationships are not developed and there is no plot or climax to the story, so how are you supposed to get deeply involved in the story? The typical Storyland introductory sentence starts with a random character doing a random action. For example, when I opened Storyland, the first sentence to come up was, “Before things were written, a paranoid schizophrenic pretended to be free. The schizophrenic persevered.” The schizophrenic is given no introduction, previous history, or defined relationship to the orphan, the fatherly uncle, and the fortune teller who are later briefly introduced. Because these characters are not properly introduced, the reader does not form as intimate a relationship with the characters or the story, as they would with a more detailed novel. Literature should be a memorable experience and when you are introduced to a very vague and very short story, it would be hard to remember it. One could argue that this form of stories promotes imagination and creativity because it is forcing you to think and figure out the story. A legitimate statement, but given that each story is only ten sentences long, with little variation (yet ironically, randomly produced), it makes the possibility for a deep and meaningful creative experience impossible.

I might disagree with Birkerts in that he considers all technology to be the devil, but I think we do need to slow down from focusing on the future and look at what we are leaving behind. As Birkerts said, in order to embrace technology, we have to give up a “certain way of looking at the world… with a set of assumptions about history and distance, and difficulty and solitude and the slow work of self-making – all of which go against the premises of instantaneousness, interactivity, sensory stimulation and ease that make the world of Wired attractive to so many” (213). These technological advancements are severely altering the “modification of the relation between the writer and the language” (157). In other words, no more are the days where a person sits down with a pen and paper to write a story. We are losing that personal connection between the author and the story and we are therefore losing the personal connection forged between the story and the reader. Technology is not all bad, but when looking at Storyland specifically you see what technology has become ─ a distraction in an increasingly shallow society. Mary Shelley saw her book as a hideous progeny, something she was proud to send out into the world and call literature. The world of technology has made a similar attempt at such a masterpiece and has fallen short.

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