OCTOBER * NOVEMBER 1997

The ABCDE Minded in the

Electric Universe

Raven Notes

Matt Briggs

This issue's online topic is about the impact of the web and electronic documentation on the creation of original creative work. A few online magazines are experimenting with the new media, as are a couple of publishers. The first that comes to mind are The Blue Moon (a site), Eastgate systems (a hypertext publisher), and Voyager (A multimedia publisher). But by and large the traditional art world is still resistant to the rush online. A few cracks are beginning to spread. The 1997 Best American Short stories now considers fiction presented on line, recognizing the national (really global) nature of publishing online and that quality creative work appears online. And most art galleries have an online presence.

If you have anything off the cuff you'd like to say, or if you have a URL you think would fit in with the topic, please post in the RaVEN f o r u m. Or if you are a writer we would like to know how you are using the web or how writers should be using web, submit to Babette's Gift our monthly reader's column. 

Specifically, I'm presenting an annotated reading list about hypertext. Also, we have two articles considering the future of text on the computer, "Unbound Books: Death To Text! Long Live Text!, an email thread between the two authors, "Who Codes the Alphabet?", a Hypertext Alphabet book, an article by Andrew Dillon (a professor of Information Sciences at the University of Indiana), a review of the Web Del Sol site by Holly Yasui, and a discussion about Technology & Free Speech between Kathleen Alcalá, Phoebe Bosché, and myself.

While the current rush of on-line organizations seem to be focused on virtual subscription ad space, I believe that in the next couple of years many traditional arts organizations, like literary magazines, will begin to understand the nature of web space, how to provide rich material in the online format, and maintain electronic archives of both original electronic work and previous hardcopy creative work. A thorough understanding of how to go about this without succumbing to the commercial mantra of the software programmers and hardware salespeople is vital. While I'm a little evangelical about Marshal McLuhan and believe everyone has the potential of being the author online, so far this isn't the case, because even though it only takes a few hours to learn how to mount a web page and gain potential access to the WWW-- few writers and artists are actually making the online leap. But it is a technology that is not going to go away, and it is time that traditional writers and artists begin to look at the web and think how they can use it before the web begins to assimilate their work and use them on its terms.

© The Raven Chronicles 1997