The readings this week were a lot of fun. Murray’s Charting the Literary Sphere introduced ideas of the twittersphere, hypertext and distant reading. I was especially interested in the author’s concern over interdisciplinary competitiveness in the digital literary sphere – under that umbrella term was the clash of print culture studies versus digital media studies versus digital literature studies… but why is everyone fighting?
I keep coming back to Bourdieu’s formulation of fields which, for me, reads as quite an aggressive culture battleground where social actors are competing for different positions. The whole concept of cultural prestige and intellectual property links back to my original thoughts on public scholarship, which you can find in my first post.
Watch out though, hyperlinks are cognitively loaded. Hayles talks about the information consumption that interacts with how we read, and argues that there should be a disciplinary shift to a broader sense of reading strategies and interpretations. Hypertext reading does not support an enriched reading, as scholars thought it might.
