Network Writing

     I enjoyed Chapter 6's discussion of Network Writing. I had a minimal understanding of digital literature before taking this class, but I felt that Network Writing was the one area I was (vaguely) familiar with. It also feels more rooted in the "modern" area - although perhaps that is my Gen Z bias because Rettberg mentioned things like Twitter fiction and email novels, and Twitter as a platform for storytelling feels more contemporary than, say, Flash, which is no longer in use. 

     I liked how Network Writing can be a collaborative and collective work. I looked at the wiki novel A Million Penguins, which was launched by Penguin Books and De Montfort University, and was open to the public briefly. It's no longer live, and the novel never achieved a cohesive plot line or story structure, but there's a research report that was published by the university after the experiment, which is an interesting read. And perhaps the ephemeral and chaotic nature of the work is what makes this piece so compelling (people can't work together, apparently).

    The Unknown, which is another collaborative piece by Rettberg & co, is arguably a more successful collaborative work (however, it wasn't open to the public for contribution, so that could be the reason). Although, as I've talked about before in a different blog post, the piece is still messy, and you can easily get lost, so chaos is still a present theme. Occupy MLA, a piece by Mark Marino and Rob Wittig, feels like a mixture between the collaborative nature of A Million Penguins and the humorous, satirical themes of The Unknown. (Though I am a bit confused on how the archive of Occupy MLA differs from the original Twitter thread, if at all, so I definitely want to explore that more.)