The theme of technology consisting of a series of processes has come up with great frequency in the latter weeks. As Ian Bogost suggested that video games teach by process, technology is innately bound by process. Binary, the language of computers, is a process. 0’s and 1’s; on and off, it’s all a series of code, and the code is a process. In Nathan Brown’s The Function of Digital Poetry at the Present Time, he writes of how a poem in a book is like an event, that is it was printed on page once and will stay there for as long as the physical paper can stand to exist. When a poem is conjured online, however, its presentation is a process. A physical location in which the poem exists hardly exists at all. If a server is looked at from a distance, or from close up, no evidence is present that it could contain a poem. Upon looking at a hard drive’s disc, the case is similar, no poems visible.

It would be more accurate to call a digital text a process rather than an object.

The implications of this can be seen more clearly from Jonathan Jones’s The Body in Electronic Literature. Here, Jones draws an example of a virtual tour of a library. Here, text must meet image, and image must meet process. The three must exist in harmony should the experience to be immersive, which is after all its original intent. The three seldom do exist in harmony, however, which leads to a noticeable disconnect. On one hand I am sitting at a desk looking at a smattering of pixels, which seem to represent a library, yet I certainly do not feel that I am physically there. There are technological barriers that are preventing me from truly experiencing this library. Poorly placed links and perhaps a lacking interface for navigation could lead to a “disembodied state of being.” The tour will yield some benefit, as images and text cannot convey absolutely nothing, yet the experience was not completely enjoyable. This is just one example of a poorly executed virtual tour. Here is where art comes in. Making an online experience smooth and effortless is certainly an art form and one that is taken quite seriously. A computer programmer may know how to write code like he does his native language, yet his knowledge of computers far exceeds that of the average Internet user. The challenge lies in the programmer being able to see the world from a common civilian’s viewpoint, that is one of slight ignorance. Having a link in the middle of a line of text may not be troublesome to a computer veteran, but to some it removes their mind from the experience. Making these links incorporated seamlessly is a challenge to say the least.

Jones’s incorporation of My Body–a Wunderkammer shows the embodiment of online frustration. By clicking on individual parts of an illustrated body, the reader is taken to new pages, which describe further that body part and various other textual elements. The viewer cannot truly experience the whole body, however, a feature that is representative of digital processes, cool but incomplete in scope. The reader feels a sense of frustration for not being able to experience the whole thing at once. Take the ever-popular Kindle. This e-reader displays text much like paper and can only be read by available light around you. While I find kindles to be almost a perfect invention, as one can store thousands of books on the go, all weighing less than a notebook, there is one issue I find frustrating. Simply put, one cannot flip through the pages of a book or jump around very easily, let alone feel the physical weight of hundreds of pages stacked upon one another. Here, the old debate of the benefits of technology versus their pitfalls comes up again. On one hand, it is great to take as many books as you will ever need on the go, in something that can fit in any backpack or briefcase. On the other hand, we are limited to only seeing one page of text at a time, and lack the ability to feel a personal connection with the physical pages themselves.

To sum up endless years of debate, one could say, ‘Technology: can’t live with it, can’t live without it.’ Technology is not perfect. But technology can help us reach new heights and open doors never believed to be possible. Human beings are not perfect, we have flaws and drawbacks that make us who we are. So does technology. It is not perfect and will probably never be and that will just have to be acceptable for the time being.