the medium is the metaphor

Closure
<view Closure>

Cleaning house is a common metaphor for clearing your mind. In Closure, the character Faith is cleaning up after the end of a relationship. The physicality of the cleaning, which can also help clear the mind, is echoed in the intangibles suggested in the text. Also, although not explicit—is the metaphor of putting things away in boxes, neatly stacked in this case, which is represented by the tidy cubes of the hypertext. This story was initially written for print and, quite honestly, probably contained more than enough metaphor at that point. However, when bringing it into the multimodal format, it more fully contrasts the physical cleaning with the emotional cleaning up. Faith ’s closure of the relationship is echoed on these two other levels, the cleaning, which was present in the print text, and the boxes and visuals of the cleaning supplies.

Creative writing for print and writing for new media are very different processes. I have written metaphorical fiction in print, for example a story I wrote called “Drowning in Metaphor,” which used segmented structure, much like those Coover often uses, to create the feel of waves and the metaphor of swimming in the ocean to portray falling in love. In my master’s thesis project, Enlightenment Aisle 8, I composed 9 new media micro-fictions—many of which were metaphorical in their own way, but also created an overarching metaphor with a grocery store and add to cart buttons for each intangible concept in the stories to express how we shop for enlightenment in a consumer-driven society. The online medium of the collection added a further layer of technology and mediation, particularly in stories such as one about online dating.

With new media, not only is there technology involved, multiple modes to consider, demands of the medium on the reader, sometimes meaning can even become accidental (not in Virilio’s sense of the word). For instance, unintentional navigation or software problems can increase ambiguity and/or reader frustration—creating another layer of meaning, welcome or not. An example of this occurred as I was composing a new media micro-fiction that would become part of my thesis project. One of my committee members told me how he wasn’t sure if the painfully slow video and text and annoyingly repeated music were supposed to heighten reader frustration to echo that of the characters in the piece—adding to the meaning. It wasn’t. It was just annoying. But this is an example of how the interpretation of medium can sometimes be beyond the author’s control and result in various reader reactions.

There is a different compositional process that takes place when composing new media—more attention to interactivity and design, as seen in dear e.e., Cruising, and Lexia to Perplexia —however, in a print text there are also considerations of sentence form and overall structure, such in the work of Cortazar, Calvino and e.e. cummings discussed here. The medium is more than a container, more than a “middle,” as Mitchell suggests, and not just a simulacra, as Baudrillard discusses, and should not be as intimidating as Virilio warns, it is a means to express human emotion, meaning, message, metaphor.

				Closure <view Closure> Cleaning house is a common metaphor for clearing your mind. In Closure, the character Faith is cleaning up after the end of a relationship. The physicality of the cleaning, which can also help clear the mind, is echoed in the intangibles suggested in the text. Also, although not explicit—is the metaphor of putting things away in boxes, neatly stacked in this case, which is represented by the tidy cubes of the hypertext. This story was initially written for print and, quite honestly, probably contained more than enough metaphor at that point. However, when bringing it into the multimodal format, it more fully contrasts the physical cleaning with the emotional cleaning up. Faith ’s closure of the relationship is echoed on these two other levels, the cleaning, which was present in the print text, and the boxes and visuals of the cleaning supplies. Creative writing for print and writing for new media are very different processes. I have written metaphorical fiction in print, for example a story I wrote called “Drowning in Metaphor,” which used segmented structure, much like those Coover often uses, to create the feel of waves and the metaphor of swimming in the ocean to portray falling in love. In my master’s thesis project, Enlightenment Aisle 8, I composed 9 new media micro-fictions—many of which were metaphorical in their own way, but also created an overarching metaphor with a grocery store and add to cart buttons for each intangible concept in the stories to express how we shop for enlightenment in a consumer-driven society. The online medium of the collection added a further layer of technology and mediation, particularly in stories such as one about online dating. With new media, not only is there technology involved, multiple modes to consider, demands of the medium on the reader, sometimes meaning can even become accidental (not in Virilio’s sense of the word). For instance, unintentional navigation or software problems can increase ambiguity and/or reader frustration—creating another layer of meaning, welcome or not. An example of this occurred as I was composing a new media micro-fiction that would become part of my thesis project. One of my committee members told me how he wasn’t sure if the painfully slow video and text and annoyingly repeated music were supposed to heighten reader frustration to echo that of the characters in the piece—adding to the meaning. It wasn’t. It was just annoying. But this is an example of how the interpretation of medium can sometimes be beyond the author’s control and result in various reader reactions. There is a different compositional process that takes place when composing new media—more attention to interactivity and design, as seen in dear e.e., Cruising, and Lexia to Perplexia —however, in a print text there are also considerations of sentence form and overall structure, such in the work of Cortazar, Calvino and e.e. cummings discussed here. The medium is more than a container, more than a “middle,” as Mitchell suggests, and not just a simulacra, as Baudrillard discusses, and should not be as intimidating as Virilio warns, it is a means to express human emotion, meaning, message, metaphor. <introduction>