Imagining The New Media Encounter

From: A Companion to Digital literary studies
Imagining the new media Encounter
BY
Alan Liu


When I sat down to read Alan Liu’s article “Imagining the New Media Encounter” I did not expect what I was going to meet. Since it was just the introduction I figured how hard can it be, but I was wrong. Within the first few pages it felt foreign to me and made me feel as though I was out of my depth. The article is essentially about this ‘encounter’ between the literary and the digital age, though, Liu makes this very hard to figure out in the midst of his techno talk, and his numerous references and words that were alien to me. It took me about 3 or 4 attempts at reading it to fully understand some of his points and when you overcome all the obstacles that he puts in the way of the reader, Liu does make interesting points about this ‘Media encounter’. One point I found attention-grabbing was his explanation of the meeting of the digital world as an ‘encounter’. The encounter that he describes in the article is a “thick, unpredictable zone of contact-- more borderland then border line” This caught my eye when I was reading it and is an interesting way of explaining it. Liu explains that the border between literature and digital has now been “so breached by shared technological, communicational, and computational protocols that we might best think in terms of an encounter rather than a border”. In the article he takes us back to the depiction of someone first encountering the art of writing. This, today, is taken for granted in our society because we have always had it, but it is strange to think that this normal form of communicating was once a very strange and ‘pagan’ thing to people who had never seen such an advent, we take it for granted that there will always be a pen and paper somewhere. In his reference to Augustine’s account of coming upon Ambrose engaged in the new practice of silent reading, this too was an unusual event but today this is part of our society that we think nothing of. He uses these encounters as a way of showing the reader that at first we are weary about new media but eventually when we begin to trust it and then become accustomed to it, just like we done with reading and writing.
We thought we knew what ‘writing was but now “encoding” makes us wonder’ and the same apply to reading and now “browsing”. His perspective on this is very interesting. I never really thought about the contrast of our generation encountering a website for the first time in comparison with the past generation encountering silent reading or writing for the first time.
The article is by no means user friendly as Liu makes it hard for the reader to make since of his work without looking up a dictionary or in my case the internet. I found myself on the internet more than reading about his argument. I did learn about more things when looking them up on the internet. In short I did not think that Liu wrote this for a universal audience, in fact I felt that it was his own diary entry for his own use. It is a very heavy read for people who may not be well up in this techno talk.
If Liu explained what he meant with his references then maybe, and this is a big maybe, then the article might have been more accessible. I ploughed my way through it with a lot of help from Mr. Google. Though he did not get his point across in the best possible way, I did learn from it and it works relatively ok as an introduction to the companion even though he seems to squash everything into his conclusion at the end of the article.
I think this sums up the article:
‘Studying old media is to help us appreciate what it now means to encode, browse, simulate, etc’