Writing Project #4
Throughout the year we have been focusing on intertextuality and how technology is quickly altering the world of reading and writing. In the “Gutenberg Elegies” by Sven Birkerts , the author shares his opinion on how he thinks technology is going to harm our society in more than one way. He believes that our society will forget about old-fashioned novels and begin to read all technological texts. In “Patchwork Girl” by Shelley Jackson, I have come to a conclusion that technological text’s can be very effective but can also have its flaws. It is effective in the way that it is very interesting but its flawed in the sense that it is confusing to read.
When I am at home reading a novel I always think of it as a very personal activity, but when I am reading Jackson’s “Patchwork Girl” I have a more interactive feeling. The novel requires clicking and navigating instead of just turning a page. Birkerts believes that because of the new technology like “Patchwork Girl”, writers like him will be forgotten due to the natural evolution of society. Although Birkerts is aware of the shift in nature he states “ to me it is more a question of how I want to position myself as history makes a swerve, not only ushering in new circumstances and alignments, but changing its own deeper nature as well”. Despite my frustration with Birkerts and his beliefs, I can understand where he is coming from as a writer. Due to the nature of society, writers like Birkerts may have to change their style of composition in order to keep up with the natural progression of the business.
In my time reading Birkerts I have discovered that not only does he dislike the way our society is going but he is also scared of it. At the beginning of the novel Birkerts talks about how new kinds of technology are harming our youth, and how people are going to forget about a normal book because they will read everything online or on a computer in the near future. In addition to Birkerts’ negative outlook, he later reveals that he is scared of the new age coming and that if the fast moving train stopped he would not board because “to plunge would be to change myself as a person”. Not only do I think Birkerts fear is absurd, it also seems very juvenile in the sense that he could be expanding his creativity and mind as a writer in the same way if not more ways than Shelley Jackson has with “Patchwork Girl”
My first impression of “Patchwork Girl” was that this was an awful way to read a novel, the more I read and navigated around the text, I came to the conclusion that it is not all bad. The way the story develops in the text is very interesting, by clicking on different topics on the home page your world is opened up to many options of where to go next. Instead of being like a regular sequential novel like “The Gutenberg Elegies”, “Patchwork Girl” lets the reader choose where and what they want to read next. Due to the fact that Jackson has accepted the new change in nature; she has been able to develop a very creative and out of the ordinary text. By accepting the change in society and our new technological world today, Jackson has been able to create a text that allows the reader to make it whatever they want it to be. For example, there are many places one could choose to start reading in “Patchwork Girl” one of which is titled Crazy Quilt. In this section of the text many different aspects of the story are brought into perspective, there are links that can be clicked on which lead to a piece of the story told by a number of different characters views. Some are from the view of the creator of the actual patchwork girl, and some are from the view of the patchwork girl herself. As I personally read link-by-link, row-by-row, I was able to gain an understanding of what the text meant to me and how I as a thinking individual felt about it. The more I read, the more I began to accept that fact that the non-sequential story was confusing and irritating to follow.
If Birkerts were able to accept the new era and embrace technology in the same way that Shelley Jackson did then he would also have to opportunity to create a text like “Patchwork Girl”, which allows the reader to navigate themselves around the text, and come up with their own conclusion as to what it means. Shelley Jackson has been able to achieve a higher level of production with her novel “Patchwork Girl”, through the use of technology and creativity; she has created a new kind of text that I have never seen before. Without her use of technology when writing this novel, Jackson would not have been able to create such an amusing and innovative text as she has today. I hope that in the future many writers including Mr. Sven Birkerts are able to understand the positive points that technology brings to our world today.
