Vol 7, No. 3
Software Reviews

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Columns:
Collaborative Software and Services for the Writing Class by Paul Daniels

'POST-DARWINIAN DYNAMICS²  by Steve Shucart

Quick Reviews
by Kevin Ryan

Soft Cover Reviews

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Reviews of Magazine articles on Computers and Language

Sex, Literacy, and Computers
by Kevin Ryan

This summer's Utne Reader has a very unusual article entitled, "The Curse of
Literacy." A vascular surgeon takes a holiday in Greece. He sees that
temples formerly concentrated to female dieties (gods) have one after the
other change the sex of their God to male. What event accompanied this
change? Literacy. What does have to do is computers? Read on.

Author Leonard Shlain operates on cartoid arteries that supply blood to the
brain. He intimately knows the physical differences in the right and left
hemispheres of the brain. He also likes to take great leaps of faith to
support a hypothesis that literacy promotes logical left brain activity
which is more masculine than the intuitive feminine right brain.

Utne Reader is an intellectual Reader's Digest for the left-leaning. I'm
talking politically here, not the way some of us look after too many beers.
The September-October issue has a theme of the blurring between genders. I
will just mention here two other articles related to computers in this
issue. Sherry Turkle of MIT and author of Life on the Screen: Identity in
the Age of the Internet, writes in an article entitled Drag Net about ASCII
ratings as the opposite sex on MUDs and MOOs. One other article is about
icons and how they are changing the way we communicate. Read Mercer
Schuhardt uses the Nike SWOOSH as a perfect icon.

Shlain writes that "According to my thesis, certain masculine
characteristics began to characterize a society after a critical mass of its
people had learned to read and write. What triggered this profound shift was
literacy's reliance on the analytic thought processes line to the brain's
left hemisphere" (p.71)

Although he professes to enjoy reading, recognizes the irony in using the
word to spread ideas about the cost involved. Using the left brain, adapted
to handle codified symbolization such as speech, we exercise this half at
the cost of the right, image-oriented feminist side. He goes on to show
through physiological results of evolutionary trends that females are
inherently more capable of communication between their hemispheres causes
women to become more sympathetic and globally oriented. He goes on to refer
to Marshall McLuhan about the medium determining the message.

When he begins to trace the historic changes in ancient Greece, I am
reminded of a book by Julian Jaynes of Princeton University. Originally
recommended in the autobiography of John Sculley, CEO of Apple before the
fall, this is one book that is an interesting take on how evolution is
speeding up because consciousness is involved. This book is one of my
all-time favorites and entirely plausible, but just can't be. The Origin of
Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind makes that case that
humans were not conscious until about the 10th century BC, when the corpus
collosum, that mass of fibers between the hemispheres, started conducting
electricity. He shows a plethora of archaeological evidence for his case,
which is very convincing.

Schlain's article seems to be in this vein, plausible but not possible, but
you should read it, as it gives an interesting c\slant on gender and
literacy, which is changing in the age of computers. After initial contact
with literacy on a mass level, there is usually a violent revolution
(Protestant Reformation, the Communist Revolution in Russia, and Mao's Great
Leap forward after romanizing the Chinese characters).

As we see a resurgence in nonverbal imagery (Television, computing) we also
see a more important role for women in today's society. Baseball is a linear
sport, while football and basketball more visual. Men learn a woman's skill
(typing) and use both hands instead of just one (the one attached to the
left brain usually). A warmer post-literate future awaits us, according to
Leonard Shlain.

References
Jaynes, Julian (1976) The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the
bicameral mind. Houghton Mifflin, Boston. ISBN 0-395-32932-9

Shlain, Leonard, The Curse of Literacy, Utne Reader, September/October 1998,
Page 71.

Book version of the article can be purchased at
http://www.amazon.com

The Future of CyberLiterature

Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray
Reviewed by Kevin Ryan

Conferences are great for finding new paths. At the recent CALL NSIG
Conference in Tokyo we finished with small discussion groups on sub-topics,
ours on writing with computers. Being nice sunny Sunday afternoon,
conversation wandered, and  Clark recommended a book on what I thought
was about writing theory. I announced it as such in my summary. I got
corrected a few days later by email, just as I was accessing Amazon. I was
curious about digital literature and even had written a piece or two about
it (see http://www.swu.ac.jp/~ryan).

As computers test the limits of books themselves, a new type of literature
is being born with the new generation of users. Murray has an outstanding
perch from which to view these changes, as she teaches interactive fiction
writing in MIT's Film and Media Studies Program. Her students, scientists
and engineers mostly, are eminently comfortable with computers. She has also
had a long history with computing, starting in the days of punch cards and
earning awards from Educom and a Gold CINDY. She works on interface design
and humanities computing. She also seems to be a Trekkie (Star Trek
fanatic), and uses many examples from that world and other popular media to
exemplify her quest for the new literature.

Indeed, the Holodeck is a Star Trek invention, first in Star Trek: The Next
Generation in the late 1980's is a super 3-dimensional projector that
creates force fields to simulate reality. Users interact with people,
furniture and surroundings in a drama with a branching story line, dependent
on the user's actions. If we had one of those minus-one recordings to
practice piano or violin (or karaoke), but it allowed for our improvisation,
we would have a musical equivalent.

Reacting to the archaic use of computers to study literature in the 60's
(running t-tests on Tolstoy), Murray moved to MIT. There her interests in
creating narrative microworlds (see Papert for a discussion of microworlds)
coincided with those of foreign language teachers wanting to create virtual
immersive environments.

Through examples of literature that foreshadow a holodeck, all the way from
Joyce's Ulysses to Borges' Garden of the Forking Paths to Capra's It's a
Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart, to Groundhog Day with Bill Murray, we
find the common elements of the multiform story. Hypertext is another
similar form of story-telling with cyberdramas like the web soap East
Village and literature created on StorySpace at Easgate Systems.
Role-playing games involve even more audience participation as do MUDs and
MOOs. In all of these, "to the postmodern writer, confusion is not a bug,
but a feature.: (Murray, 1997, p. 58)

Technologically we must recognize advances like the holography in Disney
attractions like the haunted house, 3D movies that make you duck in your
seat, movie rides like the Star Trek adventure, and the huge expanses
displayed in Sony IMAX theaters (go to the one in Tokyo where the ascent of
Everest is showing now).

The main points in the new literature are that we must move from Additive to
Expressive Forms. The main story lines in the web soaps mimic the current
available technology and do not take advantage of the multiple views and
archiving features computing allows. You should be able to attack each story
line from each character's viewpoint, and have enough background materials
to fill in all the gaps.

She postulates that there are four properties of digital environments, and
uses Weizenbaum's ELIZA (a psychoanalytic program built in the 60's) as an
example. Digital environments are procedural. Computers create a series of
rules that the programs follow. ELIZA's rules for responding (ie taking a
key word and asking more about about it) were particularly clever.

"The lesson of ELIZA is that the computer can be a compelling medium for
storytelling if we can write rules for it that are recognizable as an
interpretation of the world. The challenge for the future is how to make
such rule writing as available to writers as musical notation is to
composers." (Murray, 1997, p. 73)

Digital environments are participatory in that they require input from the
user. If a program is both procedural and participatory, it is said to be
interactive. Unfortunately, most "interactive" stories today follow a
branching structure, which is not truly procedural. Digital environments are
spatial, they have the feeling that movement is possible, from mazes to MUDs
that require navigation cues like Go North. Finally, digital environments
are encyclopedic, with huge amounts of quickly accessible memory. But
digital media need to develop formal conventions of organization so that the
user can navigate without being overwhelmed.

Vanevar Bush's memex, or universal memory is often thought of as the first
hypertext. It is massively associative, but not expressive. To make this
medium more expressive we need to include qualities of immersion. We must
nurture an active creation of belief, or at least suspension of disbelief,
along the lines of "reader response" school of thought. Participation can be
structured as a visit, a mask, a collective participation of roles, to
create conventions to deepen fantasy without disturbing the variegated plot.

Chapters continue on Agency, or how the user interacts with the environment,
to using the anxiety inherent in fictional mazes to forward the story.
Problem solving is inherently pleasurable when presented with just the right
amount of support (sounds like language teaching!). The chapter on
Transformation covers the malleability of texts in digital media.

By far the most significant and rewarding section of the book is on
Procedural Authorship, or how to go about creating the rules that run the
environment you wish other to interact within. She goes back to the oral
bard, a medieval entertainer that would take a set of plot outlines (Kipling
posits 69 basic plots, Borges a dozen), and a set of stock ways to exploit
these plot (such as cliché, repetition, comedic routines) and combine them
to make each performance unique yet similar to each other. A similar set of
action primitives needs to develop before digital storytelling can be
engrossing yet not exhaustive.

When these basic plots with standardized variations come into use by
artificial intelligence, we should see an exponential leap in the interest
in storytelling. One software agent had one human proposing all sorts of
liaisons over the period of 17 days. Instead of trying to develop one
central control for these chatterbots, developers are combining smaller
units controlling specific subfunctions (correlates to wants or needs) to
interact. When these subroutines come into conflict with another, we have
robotic neurosis, one the most interesting elements in storytelling.

Murray, J. (1997) Hamlet on the Holodeck : The Future of Narrative in
Cyberspace, Boston, MIT Press.
http://www.amazon.com/