Empowerment
Hayles and DeLosa know that hyperlinks and the "World Wide Web" is not democratic, and can often involve assassinations of sorts. The limits of empowerment on the internet are already delineated by the hidden elements of code. Code that belongs to corporations with hidden intentions and an ever expanding inventory of data.
"Furthermore, general belief in myths of digital democracy emblematized in Google and its search results means that users of Google give consent to the algorithms’ legitimacy through their continued use of the product, despite its ineffective inclusion of websites that are decontextualized from social meaning, and Google’s wholesale abandonment of responsibility for its search results" (Noble.)[1]
Noble suggests that the search and link are connected to stores of metadata and user preferences (and programmer's preferences). We'd like to imagine the internet as the mythic utopia it pretends to be, but it is often bogged down by the same hegemonic values of the offline. But I am not a techno-pessimist. So, I'd like to know, where can electronic literature > go.
"You can feel the rope coarse on your throat, and the knot heavy on the nape of your neck. On reflex, hands move up, but are caught by the manacles. There is no way out of here." (DeLosa.)
I couldn't finish the game. I eventually got stuck, never getting to Rome. Perhaps without the hyperlink to click and follow down the rabbit-hole, I did not know where to go.
See also
• freedom
