FIELD NOTES :: Tech Pending Revolution :: POWER ON, Part 3
Editor’s Note — This special 5-part, bi-weekly Field Notes mini-series from Ginger Ko invites our community / audience / future readers & users of the POWER ON book and app into the framework, influences, and socio-cultural context that inspired the poet to go on this particular journey into a project marrying speculative world building, poetics, and technology. Entries will be offered here on the OS’s online platform leading up to the project’s release — in the meantime, discounted preorders of the POWER ON book are available directly through our website, here. Stay tuned for more information about the book, app release dates (for both iPhone and Android), and event announcements! — Elæ Moss
Something that my project resists is the assumption that the reading experience necessitates for the reader’s individual concerns to recede to the background as they face the information and ideas of a text. Encountering a text risks the outcomes of affirmation or alienation, or another reaction that is along the spectrum between the two. While most writers are, of course, aware of this, I find that there is a lack of this same awareness when it comes to critiquing reader experience with digital poetry. Reading poetry on a smartphone often gets understood as the reader conscripting themselves into the ranks of mass-based conformity. In Rebecca Watts’ divisive article “The Cult of the Noble Amateur,” she notes that Rupi Kaur’s popularity stems from the fact that “artless poetry sells,” and that Instagram poetry’s popularity is a direct result of “social media’s dumbing effect.” Readers are seen to be headed down the road of expecting instant gratification and fleeting engagement with ideas when there is writing and poetry that is created with social media in mind. Kaur is an example of what Watts describes as an upstart internet entrepreneur whose success is driven by the mass-based arena of the internet. This figure of Kaur that Watts creates is a savvy pioneer in the Wild West of internet art and writing — much in the way technological innovators are cited as having brilliantly identified a need to which their innovative product has made itself indispensable — who has identified a literature format toward which we are all destined. While Watt’s future of reading allows the figure of the writer or poet the opportunity to catch up their artistry to the driving force of reading technology, there is no thought to the agency of readers. Readers, who have made Kaur a bestselling author (of either physical or e-books), are foremost identified by Watts as Instagram readers, encountering (by preference) poetry through phone screens.
The idea of the future of poetry as being constructed explicitly for Instagram does not understand how blind or vision-impaired individuals already use digital technology to manipulate the text that they encounter. While many blind or vision-impaired users prefer using audio support or voiceover technology for discerning text, many vision-impaired users, such as myself, still rely on contrast and magnification measures for reading assistance. I have some functional vision, so the ability to zoom and magnify text is vital for my reading experience. Magnification of poetry, if available, changes the poetry’s formal presentation, often rendering line breaks and spacing new and strange, and it is arrogant to deem readers as passive consumers of screens, as if handheld devices decide literature’s form because they have infiltrated lives that are compliant to capitalism. Disabled individuals have never been able to comply with capitalism. If I must study an electronic text’s line breaks and spacing across the page, it is often through a tedious process. Uploading the writing to a text-to-speech program is useless for the endeavor, and copying and pasting the text, with all the programming limitations of preserving digital spacing and breaks, is often impossible. Many digital venues limit the zooming capabilities of their text, and, anyway, magnification of text without an accompanying ratio preservation of page-size severely limits reading speed. Reading three or four words at a time within a tiny field is one of the most tiresome endeavors known to me. I often find myself resorting to reading my phone with a handheld magnifying glass, like an old-timey detective following the footprints of a burglar. It is not only writers who are hacking their work for the most profitable platform, a platform that has been upheld by a population’s tendency to embrace the platform and make it profitable. The bemoaning of Instagram poetry assumes that users of smartphones simply fall into line, making the smartphone itself the preeminent corner of the triangulation between reader, writer, and device. What is the case, rather, is that users of the platform must also hack their devices in order to access the writing that they wish to encounter.
Though individuals such as myself prove that the handheld device’s usage is not predetermined, I did choose to build a smartphone app for my project because of the smartphone’s ability to produce media of various kinds. The mobility of the hand-held device was also important for my thinking about the traveling of my poem into various media creations, and while I am interested in the mobility of my app, I am also aware of the potential for hand-held devices to provide a sense of security and location for their users. David Morley distinguishes between “conversation” and “chatter” styles of communication, in which conversation is “a discourse of the public realm,” whereas chatter is “the exchange of gossip principally designed to maintain solidarity between those involved in the exchange…a ‘discourse of the hearth.’” Mobile phones “fill the space of the public sphere with the chatter of the hearth,” providing users with “’some sense of security and location’ amidst a culture of flow and deterritorialization.” What does it really mean for the disseminating potential of text to travel with a person to each of their unique spaces and regions, to be uniquely molded by each reader’s daily travels? By co-creating digital multimedia poems, I hope that users will be conducting a kind of discourse of the hearth, manipulating the manuscript as a form of public discourse.
Ginger Ko is an Assistant Professor at Sam Houston State University’s MFA program in Creative Writing, Editing, and Publishing. She is the author of Motherlover (Bloof Books) and Inherit (Sidebrow), as well as several chapbooks. Her poetry and essays can be found in The Atlantic, American Poetry Review, The Offing, VIDA Review, and elsewhere. You can find her online at www.gingerko.com
