Stroupe.+Hacking+the+Cool

=Stroupe, Craig. "Hacking the Cool: The Shape of Writing Culture in The Space of New Media." =

Abstract
No abstract.

Argument
Stroupe begins by decoding his student's reactions to his assignment in a "New Media Writing" class, in which they regarded "new media" as passé. These responses enabled digital-writing, not as a mere process of translating print text onto the web, but as a means of creating new ways to write. Stroupe acknowledges the hostility new media has elicited, for the challenges technology presents to a print based literacy, but he contends that the literary community must broaden their ideas of expansion to include, not only the experiences of other genders, cultures, and classes, but the possibilities of examining these on the web. Whereas "writing culture" allows individuals to understand physical experiences through "textual elaboration" (424). New media must hack what is "cool", the supposed antagonist of aesthetics in favor of information, and present a space in which writers may participate in one another's experiences while exploring cultural and economic implications of such experiences. In order for new media to be regarded as a serious art form, Stroupe suggests a dedication to exposing the shape of a narrative, rather than the linear individual text. While declaring filtering must coexist with shaping, if we are to discover new ways to interpret narratives and data. Stroupe notes a student web project, which explored parody, and states that such endeavors reiterate the importance of critically analyzing past and current techniques to discover new ways of writing and visualizing. He defends new media cannot flourish if written shapes inform the fluid, adaptive, fluctuating web space.

Key Passages
"In this article, I want to argue, first, that efforts to develop digital continuities with traditional forms of writing, such as narrative, may result not simply in Murray's ideas of successes or failure, but in varieties or degrees of success which reveal the emergent relations between print and network cultures--between writerly shape and digital space" (424).

 On the way literary culture progresses in relation to broadening the canon, and regresses in regards to electracy:  "Thus, the very same progressive literary culture that places such a high value on canon-busting cosmopolitanism, textual experimentation, and the embrace of historical change finds itself painted into a defensive or even conservative corne by, of all things, global capital" (429).

 The importance of parody in electacy: "Indeed, literary history suggests that parody and appropriation are not a dead-end leading only to marginalization of the parody and the parodist to the dominant cultural modes being imitated, but can point the way to the invention of synthetic, emergent forms" (432).

 On the future of digital writing and new media: "History suggests, however, that writing culture in part bends and adapts available technologies and discursive logics if only because doing so is interesting to writers and eventually becomes so to readers. It is possible and reasonable to suggest, then, that today's writing culture will hack the digital network's genres of commodified information and the voices of the "attention economy" to make them, in one way or another, speak critical narrative" (436).

Selected Works Cited
Liu, Alan. "Transcendental data: Toward a cultural history and aesthetics of the new encoded discourse." //Critical Inquiry// 31 (2004), pp. 49–81. Print.

Manovich, Lev. //The Language of New Media//. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2001). Print.

Murray, Janet. //Hamlet on the holodeck: The future of narrative in cyberspace.// MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2000). Print.