Alex Saum-Pascual Publishes "Is Third Generation Literature Postweb Literature"
BCNM faculty ALex Saum-Pascual writes on electronic literature's relocation to platforms with massive user bases for Electronic Literature Organization (ELO)'s 2019 essay collection, Gathering. "Is Third Generation Literature Postweb Literature? And Why Should We Care?" explores how e-lit is responding to Web 2.0 and recent tech developments.
From the piece:
What I see as truly interesting third gen e-lit is that which maintains a hyperawareness of the capitalist commodification and datafication of human experience on the Web, but relates to it in a sort of ironic, shoulder-shrug-meh, as it oscillates between defiance and conformism. This position (the meh) has abandoned all desires of being "difficult" or politically disruptive in traditional terms ("Modernist," as Jessica Pressman would call it (2014)), in order to engage in a sort of cartoonish, yet not completely apolitical, disenchanted critique of corporate media.
Read the rest of the article here.
If you're curious about the work that went into creating ELO2019, learn more about the essay collection here.