Anja Rau has written a critique of Caitlin Fisher's ELO award winner These waves of girls. Bernstein and Jill comments on it too. Definitely Anja's review which has many good points raises important questions as to what the criteria with which we judge a piece of digital literature should be. Is the writer a bad writer, because he or she is a bad programmer or designer? And if she is a natural born bad programmer should the writer then one way or the other feel morally obliged to hire staff which can do the slick Flash graphics and the eloquent java scripts? Should we read the webs produced by writers with the same critic eyes as the webcritic which makes a living of improving and designing commercial websites?

I personally am not quite sure: I do not come to a book expecting it to have the same happy graphic aesthetics or mode of layout as the shop ads which were just delivered to my mailbox. Nor do I expect my book to look like an information leaflet nor my web literature to cater to the latest web design trends. Sometimes it appears to me that people falls in the trap of judging web fiction with the eyes of a Jacob Nielsen or other more recent webdesign critics. They want sites to be easy downloadable and naviagable, user friendly, bugless etc. And sure, I would like to see some consistency of navigation paradigms and correction of easy-correctable bugs like the missing title of the documents in Caitlin Fisher's work too - and definitely she should have fixed the sound-bites which doesn't work and the plug-ins needed should have been stated etc. But - and it is difficult not to - to make another comparison to print fiction, I quite often come across good novels which starts excruciatingly slowly and builds up their characters, the novel world, the plot etc in such a laidback pace that I am constantly on the verge of putting down the book for pure boredom. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't and I am awarded with what in the last end turns out to be a very good read. That is to say the overall experience of it's contents almost obliterates what I find faulty in the parts of its specific form (yes, you may well acuse me of being a good old-fashioned hermeneutic). Obviously the question is whether it is as easy to seperate form and content when you look at a webliterary work. If download is slow and the pages "doesn't look good", does it then disturb and distort my understanding of what the writer is trying to relate? Personally, and here we are perhaps stranded with a judgement based on taste rather than formal critism, minor bugs does not "bug" me, when I read for instance These waves of girls. I have not read that many lesbian biographies before and to me the stories she tells are interesting and seem to fit well with the media, she has chosen. Yes, she is still struggling with the materiality of the medium she has chosen and with trying to make it fit her needs, but I haven't actually seen that many webliteary works with near perfect technial perfection yet. Should they have waited with presenting the ELO award till the flawless work came into being? (yes, they could have chosen other more innovative works like Moultrup's for sure, but that is another issue...). One thing is not to like the subject and the style of presentation of Caitlin Fishers, but I do not think it is fair to attack her for not being a good programmer. What the web writers need are better tools, not necessarily more people to work with them or hard core programming courses. Give them web editing programs which can link text, sound and images together on the writer's behalf without forcing them to learn java programming in order to do anything which looks smooth.
# posted by Lisbeth at: 14:46