Conclusion
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The creation of non-linear and networked cultural production is a tradition that has roots that span back nearly a century, if one considers the literary sources from which spatial form is theorized. Humanity questioned the limits of mind, technology, and society during the 20th Century, and especially in the post-World War II era. After this time, visions of new media like those of Bush and Engelbart emerged concurrently with literary theory and would integrate at the end of the century as hypertext literature in works such as those of Joyce and Amerika. However, this expands the challenge to author and audience as both wrestle with indeterminacy of closure, first in reading hypernarrative, and then with authorship in dynamic, collective authoring environments like the Wiki. This indeterminacy of closure, and multiplicity of forms of social media, (one can consider a listserv a form of pre-Web 2.0 social media) causes us to ask not only what the narrative function of networked cultural production is, but also what its vector of transmission and receipt is. The one to one correlation, which was actually killed by Gutenberg with the invention of the printing press, is changed into a panoply of modes of communication, origins and termini. My example, contrasting the listserv with the blog, leaves out the narrative potential of forums, “friend-based” social media, and the Wiki as collective literary authoring sites. What appears evident is that dynamic, collectively and systematically created content sharply decreases the possibility of static narrative (even hypernarrative) and closure of any kind becomes non sequitur. What is left is the “surfer” or the cartographer who tries to discern the ever changing landscape that he navigates, or re-form that dynamic stuff into his own shape-shifting form. This is not to say that the progression of new forms of cultural production eliminate their predecessors — video did not kill cinema — but we can say that media do reconfigure discourse. This being said, contemporary society, of which networked culture is just a part, exhibits cultural production that reflects its technological challenges, as it is deluged with information which it tries to make sense of. Therefore, while we read, write, and share, at historically unprecedented levels — the word “unprecedented” is currently being used at unprecedented levels as well — the networked individual faces such an enormous information overload that he surfs, he indexes, he maps, he goes with the flow.
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