Digital Media and the Problems of Agency and Interactivity

Last Thursday, the word “agency” came up in class around Hansen’s concept of “presencing.” Someone had been wondering what a working definition of digital media could possibly look like when another member of the class mentioned “interactivity” and “agency” as being fundamental to the digital. But, as I have been wondering since then, How much agency does interactivity really afford? As I tried to disentangle this problem further, it began to reveal problems with the term interactive. For the sake of this blog post, I’m going to be focussing on electronic literature (specifically interactive fiction) because I think it highlights some of these problems pretty well. Especially when we try to think about the mechanisms by which electronic literature reframes “reader” as “player.”

On first glance, it’s easy to claim that the mechanism by which “reader” becomes “player” is “interactivity.” (After all, it is called interactive fiction.) Videogames as a cultural form are pretty widely recognized now as archetypal of interactive media by means of their interactive nature, which is said to afford players with supposed pleasures of agency. However, there are other modes of interactivity that exist which are qualitatively different. For instance, more often than not, audience participation in improv shows and other immersive theater experiences can look a lot like the outsourcing of work to the consumer (a pernicious aspect of neoliberalism that feigns meaningful choices, but actually reproduces oppressive structures of power and control). Moreover, various scholars claim that “all classical, and even more so modern, art is ‘interactive’ in a number of ways” and thus, “interactivity should not be equated with physical action,” (Manovich, 2001). Similarly, Umberto Eco claims that every text is essentially a “lazy machine, asking the reader to do some of its work” (Eco, 1994). Further complicating the situation, “characteristics of play, interactivity and agency are not always used selectively” and “the sentiment remains that play and interactivity somehow belong together, while film and media are narrative, non-interactive and linear media” (Eichner, 2014).

The “interactive” of Interactive Fiction involves a direct structuring of the narrative—insofar as the player has at least some degree of influence over what lexias appear, at what time they appear, and in some instances, in what order they appear in—through their choice of commands. Yet what does this mean? It is dangerous territory to stress the hyperlink as “electronic literature’s distinguishing feature.” Certainly footnotes, endnotes, cross-reference, and so on, undermine the claim that the technology of the hyperlink was completely novel. Just think of how one reads works such as I Ching and House of Leaves, both of which are print literature.

But this does not detract from the significance that early hypertext theorists conceived of the hyperlink as a “liberatory mode that would dramatically transform reading and writing,” (Hayles & Monfort, 2012) from the player’s ability to choose which link to follow. Despite the analogous print structures that function hypertextually, many theorists still automatically associate “the hyperlink with the empowerment of the reader” (ibid) under the pretense that it is “emancipating” the audience from the “tyranny” of the author. However, of course, the problem is: how can you have a free, interactive world, and a narrative that is controlled by an author at the same time? (So brings up the necessity to distinguish the derivative author of one configuration of a narrative from the procedural author of the game's code).

To conclude, though there are surely problems with this, there has got to be something about digital media that continues to lend itself to theories of emancipation. Whether or not digital media is actually formally linked to liberation (**and note: I would argue it is probably not, and that any technological determinism we have should be coupled with a materialist critique of capitalism), in the case of interactive fiction at least, my gut keeps telling me that these feelings have to do with a heightened perception of affective potentials. For instance, when we are confronted with a hyperlink, we might feel we are involved in a transgressive movement. Perhaps such affective potentials are generated through the uncertainty that arises from the simultaneous perception of new possibilities and the moment-to-moment collapse of others.

In any case, I hope this blog post isn't too messy--These are just some preliminary thoughts that I've been trying to work through, and the theme of "ideology as a kind of programming" (for lack of a better term) is something that I want to continue to track throughout the quarter as we venture further into our working definition of the digital.

If anyone has any comments, I would love to hear them so that maybe we can work through these thoughts together.

India

Works Cited

Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1994.

Eichner, Susanne. Agency and Media Reception: Experiencing Video Games,

Film, and Television. Postdam, Germany: Springer, 2014.

Hayles, N. Katherine, and Nick Montfort. "Interactive Fiction." The Routledge

Companion to Experimental Literature (n.d.): n. pag. Web. 2012.

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001. 55–56.

Print.