chapter eleven
New media
travels
The most important change in writing in the late twentieth and early 21st
century is the rise of the new media. Writers are becoming cyborgs who are
half-human, half-machine: this is the era of the cyberwriter, digital writer
or technowriter. Many modes of communication, such as email and blogs,
are now screen- rather than page-based, and this changes how we write,
and how we think about literature. In this chapter we will explore some of
the creative possibilities of the new media, and how you can use these new
technologies to experiment with, and change, the way you write.
Text on the screen is organised and produced in different ways from
page writing. New technologies can transform textuality through hyper-
linking, animation of text and interactivity. The new media also presents
unique opportunities for intermedia work, as it gives the opportunity for
images, sound and language to be interwoven in the same environment.
New media writing allows us to take many of the ideas in this book even
further. It promotes plurality of meaning and style, is fundamentally non-
linear, and facilitates ways of writing that are not possible on the page, such
as the animation of words. Techniques fundamental to new media writing,
such as the use of split screens, animation and hyperlinking, tend to
promote a more fluid reading practice. They encourage scanning, reading
in directions other than from left to right, and the simultaneous absorption
of multiple and fragmented texts. New media writing sometimes exists at
the edges of readability, as words transform on the screen, or disappear
from view, before we have had a chance to digest them. It also creates dif-
ferent kinds of virtual spaces, distances and topographies where we can
‘travel’ from one part of the text to another at a single click of the mouse.
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