Reading Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl has really opened my eyes to how enjoyable reading a digital work can be, however it is an interesting case at the same time, since it isn’t the most easily accessible (i.e.- you can’t simply download it online or access it from the internet.) In thinking about the question of ownership in regard to this particular work, I think it is especially interesting, since there is a lot of definite disconnect between Eastgate’s sense of ownership and Shelley Jackson’s. While Jackson states that she wants her readers to be “piratical readers, plagiarists, and opportunists in her article “Stitch Bitch,” Eastgate seems to prevent this in a lot of ways through the very way they limit reader access to her work. I feel as if making her text more easily accessible online and downloadable from the internet (even for a fee,) would really help foster the kind of transience that Jackson seems to call for in the reading of her work. I wonder how (and if) reader responses/the conversation centering around this work would develop if it weren’t for Eastgate exercising such authorial control over this text (even though they aren’t even the authors themselves.) We often think of digitalizing a work as a way in which the author can lose control over his or her own work, but considering the way in which Eastgate imposes limited access and ownership rules over PWG is another way in which the author can lose control over his or her own work. I wonder at what point can an author really own his or her own text when is published by an outside party (especially in Jackson’s case, where their rules actually seem to conflict with Jackson’s own creative intent?)

You also bring up a really interesting point about the possibility that reading a text online can lead us to lose or compromise a part of ourselves, since these texts often exist in a more communal, forum-based medium in which they can constantly be altered and/or debated on by multiple readers at once who can often see and respond to each other’s comments. Personally, I feel like this is one of the most compelling aspects of recent digital media. I am really receptive to the way in which reading texts online can alter and inform one’s reading, and I am definitely interested in seeing how this way of approaching texts develops in years to come. Thank you for sharing!

Pre-worldwideweb, in order for a person to obtain a book, s/he had to take themselves either to a library or a bookstore, or perhaps a friend. This action involved the movement of that person’s body from one place to another that had books, along with other people who managed/distributed those books. I realize the experience with books is much more varied than the summary account I’ve just given, but my point is that experiences with books seem to have always demanded greater engagement from the body, and involved direct in-person interaction with other individuals. With digital media, accessible without moving from one’s desk or needing even to speak with another individual, these tangential aspects around print books are gone.

Why point this out? Well, it would seem to suggest a conception of self that is more and more abstracted from the body, and an experience of the collective that is more and more isolated from other real bodies. And this is problematic because we do live in bodies, and to ignore them is to neglect a crucial aspect of our existence. It is also to flatten our experience of the world and literature, because more and more of it comes through the same rectangular dimensions of our backlit screens. Digital media gives the illusion that texts exist outside the physical (or only within the flat physicality of the computer screen), and so invite/encourage/demand the reader to conceive of him/herself in the same way. Interacting with digital media encourages the user to forget about/become unaware of all but one’s mind, (and possibly one’s hands and eyes). Additionally, it flattens the experience with others by reducing their bodily existence to their words on a screen. This is problematic because we exist in bodies that are more than minds hands and eyes. Digital media encourages us to reconceive of ourselves and others in a way that forgets about the bodies we inhabit. This kind of isolation (within oneself and from others) is not conducive to knowledge. We learn through our entire bodies, not only our minds and eyes, and digital media is unable to provide more than those stimuli.

Digital media seeks to transcend the limits of physical existence by, as Manon states, “guarantee[ing] interconnection, universal access” among other things like instant access, greater means to manipulate/pirate texts, etc. But, if these affordances cannot stick because they don’t acknowledge the limits of the bodies that use digital media, its “space of constant mobility and updating, [remains] a tool that escapes control and with which the individual can never keep up and can even [cause a person to] potentially lose him/herself” i.e. because these changes are not permitted to take root in a body. Not, of course, because there’s no body receiving the digital information, but because the digital media doesn’t provide the necessary conditions for that taking root to take place (i.e. time, space).

As a last side note: I think it’s interesting that the kind of abstraction that the form of digital media fosters seems antithetical to so many of the intellectual/ideological movements of the last several decades that seek evermore to contextualize, historicize and understand the embodied existence of persons, events and ideas under study. I wonder how digital media is seeking to respond to this problem, if it even sees it as such.