Adam Hammond - Literature in the Digital Age: an Introduction

Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: an Introduction. New York, NY: Cambridge U Press, 2016.

Adam Hammonds Literature in the Digital Age is, as the title of the work already states, an introduction to the topic of digital literature. Beginning with a discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s argument that the medium is the message as well as Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic cover story Is Google Making Us Stupid?, the book provides the reader with two arguments which provide a good basis for discussion. McLuhan argues that the way in which something is presented is more important than the actual information being delivered, indicating that an e-book carries a very different message to a print book. Carr uses this statement as a basis for his article, arguing that the digital medium is distracting us from reading itself. He indicates that text presented in a digital format can often be distracting and is influencing the concentration we have on texts, to a negative standard. This chapter is a great example of digital reading itself as Hammond presents a continuous string of information without ever fully analysing one thought. He moves from McLuhan, to Carr and then quickly moves onto Clay Shirky, a reader of the Atlantic who disagrees with Carr’s arguments. Through this the reader is subjected to a large range of initial arguments and thoughts while indirectly being presented with what Carr refers to as superficial reading. 

     The second part of the book, titled Digitalization, continues thoughts from Part I, talking about the shift from print medium to digital literature and the advantages as well as disadvantages that come with it. Hammond argues that while the transfer from print to digital makes the text lose all the physical properties of a book, such as the feel of the pages or the smell of paper, turning a book into a digital medium means greater availability, as the text can be spread more easily and more cheaply than it could be in a physical format. Adding to this he lists a big social issue that arises with the print medium, stating that the physical book or text is always limited to certain social groups. Where a digital text can be accessed by nearly anyone for free, a library will often be limited to certain groups of people such as university students or members.

     The reader is then introduced to one of the issues that come with the transfer of text to the digital medium with the discussion of the digital libraries Project Gutenberg, JSTOR and Google Books.  Legal issues arose due to the copyright laws in certain countries, as these often would not allow the digitalization and free publication of texts. Once again this allows the reader to see both arguments for and against the digital text. Hammond then gives further tools for analysis introducing elements such as the “Type-Token Ration” which is the number of unique words in a text divided by the total number of words. This is used in order to measure lexical diversity and is presented here as one of the tools used in order to better understand texts, the way they appeal to the reader and possibly even in order to indicate their complexity.

     The final part of the book, Born Digital, returns to social analysis as well as discussing the impact digital literature and hypertexts have on the print medium and the way literature is understood. This final chapter serves as a springboard for the reader as Hammond introduces the reader to a large amount of ideas or discussion points which are extremely useful when digital literature is analysed. For example, a large discussion on video games is featured, including presentations of The Stanley Parable or Gone Home and a discussion if video games can be considered as literature. While Hammond provides his own conclusion, stating that while carrying literary elements, video games still have large differences to other forms of literature, he is very brief, allowing the readers to form their own thoughts and come up with their own conclusion. In summary Literature in the Digital Age is essential when studying digital literature and hypertexts as it provides not only an introduction to the subject but presents the reader with food for thought, giving inspiration and asking important questions which are left partially open in order for the reader to be able to answer for themselves. 

J. Petri

Literature in the Digital Age

In Adam Hammond’s book Literature in the Digital Age, he examines a number of questions, which pertain to the survival of print literature in an era, where everything is becoming digital. Hammond begins by employing McLuhan’s famously confusing theory “the medium is the message”, which only began to “come into focus in 1993 with the birth of the internet” (3). The theory does not imply the content of the message to be the medium, but the new medium, which “creates a new situation for human associations and human perceptions” (3). 

      Hammond continues to discuss the intrinsic swing from literary reading, noting “No group is more sensitive to the changes inherent in the shift to digital forms than readers of literature” (4). In part one of Hammond’s text, he goes further to include Nicholas Carr’s 2008 Atlantic article, “Is Good Making Us Stupid”, in which Hammond examines changes in Carr’s “slackening in his ability to focus” (5). The digital era is causing an inevitable shift in literature as it has been known for centuries; Hammond notes “it is a specific type of reading – literary reading…is most threatened in the digital age” (5). 

     In response to Carr’s argument that the internet initiated the death of literary reading, Clay Shirky disagrees noting television initially casted the first stone, which led to literature’s downfall, however where television didn’t completely destroy literature, stating it “retained some cultural statues”, the digital era finished the job. This new era does, for better or for worse, “bring back literature as an activity”, it, nevertheless, failed to pull literary reading back into the scope of popularity (8). This new form of “digital textuality”, according to Shirky, delineates a new form of democracy, which “expands our ability to create and share written material” (8). 

     Overall, Hammond goes into the history of writing and literature to highlight the shift and popularity of literary reading and its downfall. Hammond demarcates different notions of digitalized writing, and eventually concludes that “the fate of print is by no means sealed” (20). Literature’s embracing of digitalization will call for a literary digital renaissance, according to Hammond, but of course, that remains to be seen.

T. E. Stroud