ween reader and material/information technologies. A conclusion will address the future of electronic literature and its impact on the reader.
The notion that electronic technologies remove the human or material interaction from the literary process is more often a misguided cultural perception rather than a fact. Despite critics of virtual literature arguing that such forms of verbal transmission are ôrotting mindsö of youth, Hayles (1) maintains that virtuality is comparable to nature in its form, function and engagement of human beings but it is not actual nature: ôWhatever ænatureÆ may be, it is a holistic interactive environment, not a reenactment of the constructed bifurcations that humans impose in order to understand it better.ö
Virtual literature or virtuality is the outcome of the development of electronic technologies like personal computers and the World Wide Web (WWW). The transmission of words evolved from purely oral transfer to the written word. The evolution of one technology, mass printing, revolutionized literature, making it widely accessible to the masses in terms of copies available and cost. In the 1980s, the evolution of the personal computer, desktop publishing, and the Internet transformed publishing and literature once more. Today, everything from self-publishing to e-books has evolved from electronic technologies. In essence each of these ages or phases of evolution in literature represent an intersection of the material and the informational. As Hayles (1) defines it, virtuality is a concept that encompasses the ôcultured perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.ö
It is the dualistic nature of this definition of virtuality that often causes conflict between proponents and opponents of virtual literature. For within this definition both materiality and information co-exist. The bifurcation of these concepts, according to Hayles (1), represents ...