The passage from orality to literacy is difficult for many kids--not just kids who grow up in dominantly oral traditions but "digital" kids who zap, surf, chat over the phone, role-play with their netpals. In my talk, I explore new forms of literacy that emerge from kids' growing interest and fluency in digital technologies. Drawing from theoretical and empirical studies on the development of literacy, I discuss how written talk (in text-based narrative environments) fosters children's natural abilities to speak "a hundred languages," in a multiplicity of voices, and through dialog with others. Of particular relevance to the discussion is Walter Ong's concept of secondary orality. 

The concept of copyright developed to protect commercial interests. Commercial interests by their very nature are ephemeral, unstable and fleeting. In contrast, the expression of originality, in whatever medium, is valued above mere commerce. Originality embodies some aspect of the permanent, a strand of continuity that secures an element of longevity within high or popular culture. The prevailing ethos in art and design institutions, and in the industries they serve, places great value on creativity and originality. This paper will address concepts of originality, our understanding of the cognitive processes involved in visual creativity and their relationship to concepts of copyright. 

Interactivity has always been an elusive yet critical aspect of creation. At a time when interactivity becomes a defining feature of the new media, it is important to continue exploring its general properties. This presentation maps three basic features of an interactive perspective: pragmatism, play, and tolerance for multiple points of view. 

Presented from a developer's point of view and illustrated with examples from the Shoah Foundation's new CD-ROM, Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust, this paper discusses the impact that integrating multiple forms of traditional media has on the narrative, graphical, and cinematic structures of the emerging new media project. 

In the 1920s Elinor Glyn's expert use of the mass media helped her parlay her fame as a romance novelist into an extremely successful career in Hollywood. Eventually she became a hybrid of romance novelist, Hollywood celebrity, and elder spokeswoman for female sexuality; a sort of combination of Barbara Cartland, Sherry Lansing, and Helen Gurley Brown. This paper discusses the intertextual nature of Glyn's fame (or infamy) and explores the possibilities the Web provides for modern sex goddesses. 

While our contemporary understanding of the meanings, social force, and rhetorical dynamics of information come in multiple flavors and from multiple sources, one major impulse grew in the Nuclear Information Movement in the late 1950's. In the Greater St. Louis Citizens' Committee For Nuclear Information and its journal -- first called Nuclear Information, then Scientist and Citizen, and finally Environment -- we can see the development of politically-motivated, community-based, and citizen-directed information, set against information that is produced and controlled by government and corporations and motivated by institutional needs. 

Mass media were once viewed as dialogic, as open for engaging readers and political leaders in a common discussion, in sharp contrast to the "refeudalization of the public sphere" Habermas has written of, in which politics becomes a spectacle wholly outside the daily lives of citizens who have little possibility of entering into or shaping that discourse.

While such an outcome is far from certain, new media forms have the potential to facilitate democratic communications. The obstacles to expanding upon these models are not technological, rather they are political and economic. If we are to reinvigorate the public sphere, we must ultimately revive the intermediate publics through which people were once brought into political discourse and action. 

During the first decade of the nineteenth century, Americans embraced the creation of silhouettes by the "physiognotrace," a portable instrument that enabled sitters to trace and inexpensively reproduce their own profiles. This paper considers how these machine-produced portraits introduced changes in the aesthetics of "likeness," addressed concerns about the nature of truth in visual representation, and resonated with the democratic values of Jeffersonian America. 

This paper will discuss some of the methodological and theoretical challenges for media studies scholars provoked by contemporary technological changes in moving image delivery and display in the home. Analyzing a range of promotional texts and trade debates over the putative convergence of home computer and television set, the paper will consider the way in which such self-serving industry discourses resonate with long-running scholarly accounts of the moving-image screen and spectator. As many scholars have noted, the dominant pejorative scenarios of the living-room TV set and its passive viewer have provided a polemical antipode to the ubiquitous culturally-privileged figurations of Web surfer and home theatre connoisseur. The ongoing efforts of firms in the consumer electronics and computer hardware and software industries to promote competing versions of technological convergence have put such long-established, if often implicit, cultural assumptions and scenarios about media use into crisis and conflict. This essay will explore how the shifting cultural scenarios of moving-image media consumption in the home, in the form of the ephemera of TV commercials and industry press releases, in order to illuminate and challenge traditional scholarly accounts of the media audience. 

This paper will explore some of the crucial developments that have transformed the terrain of technology, education, art and culture. These changes will have a profound effect not only on the social and political structure of advanced industrial societies, but on the ways in which we see ourselves, act upon and within the communities of which we are a part and how we create meanings, messages and information for the proliferating networks that now surround us. 

This study explores the online embodied experiences of gay men which challenge societal notions of beauty, health, and eroticism. Examining discourses emerging from three distinct Internet Relay Chat channels -- gaymuscle (an online community sensualizing extreme images of male muscularity), gaychub (a community celebrating male obesity), and gaymusclebears (an erotic space formulated from the complex intersection of the obese and muscular male bodies) -- this study seeks to understand how individuals utilize computer-mediated communication for the exploration of non-normative sexualities. 

This presentation is a comparative analysis of the mediation of the first war exhibited on film to the U.S. public (the Spanish-American War), the first true TV war (the Persian Gulf War), and the first World Wide Web War (the ongoing war in Yugoslavia). I explore the possibilities for resistance and negotiation in and through different media within specific historical contexts. 

Right on! A German hacker's compression scheme topples the profiteering capitalists of the music recording industry, liberating forever the...

But wait a minute: is this really true? Will mp3 technology and the distributive power of the www "disintermediate" the powerful and resourceful recording industry? And even if the old Titans are outflanked, will Microsoft do its Microsoft number and metabolize mp3 music?

The issues -- musical, legal, sociological, and highly personal -- are still unfolding like a fractal whose source equation is unknown. Are there patterns to the emergence of the mp3 revolution? Drop by, listen in, and add your own thoughts to the discussion in Call Session 3, "Rethinking Intellectual property."

Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act in 1996 there has been much anxiety over the growing power of media conglomerates. At the forefront of this trend is the Walt Disney Company, whose merger with ABC/Cap Cities the year before seemed to usher in a new era of consolidation. Journalists and scholars, in works like "Disney Discourse" and "Team Rodent," have grappled with the implications of Disney's ever-widening shadow on the American cultural landscape. However, the recent expansion of this entertainment giant beyond Hollywood and Orlando into the realm of urban geography has been largely unscrutinzed. The extension of synergistic media practices from entertainment to urban spaces such as "DisneyQuest" represents a significant shift in the balance of power between the public and private sectors of American society.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in New York City, where Disney's Broadway and retail ventures stand as a shining example of corporate/government alliance in action. In this paper, I analyze coverage of the Disney-NYC project in the print media from 1992 to 1998, and examine the discursive labor that went into depicting Disney as a social benefactor while diminishing its corporateness. In particular I trace two major tropes: first, the symbolic resonance of both Times Square and Disney as metaphors (or metonyms) for America and its greatness. And second, the rewriting of public space as private, and the translation of public interest into corporate interest. My analysis of the discourses surrounding Disney's occupation of Times Square makes visible the process by which corporate power is naturalized and its material and social consequences are mystified and obscured.

This work is a prototype for a DVD that explores the ways we picture cultures and cultural events through linear and non-linear visual media. The project bridges the disciplines of cultural and media studies, visual anthropology, philosophy of art and information technologies. The project incorporates photos, video clips, music and other material recorded in Ghana and France and integrates work developed on Media100, Eastgate StorySpace and MacroMedia Director.

The paper examines the transition from the popular broadside and chapbook presses of the early nineteenth century to the mass-circulation newspaper press of the late nineteenth century. It demonstrates the importance of violence to the success of old and new medias. It suggests that the development of the mass press and its spread of the practice of reading resulted from its adaptation to, and not in its break with long-standing popular traditions. 

Why should there not be a patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world? -- Abraham Lincoln

Beauty and truth have two poles: documentary and fiction. You can start with either one. My starting point is documentary to which I try to give the truth of fiction. -- Jean Luc Godard

A multi-media presentation, Elective Documentary Fictions focuses on technology and popular journalism; subjective reporting and fictional documentary; public art in electronic space; and participatory democracy. It explores these issues in the context of the most recent project of our art and technology collaboration, Democracy-The Last Campaign (D-TLC). The discussion situates D-TLC within an overview of mainstream media's coverage of American electoral politics.

This is the fifth consecutive presidential election in which our collaboration has explored the national election process. D-TLC is a yearlong, national inter-media project focusing on the 2000 elections. It includes on-line and physical exhibitions, public programs and forums and publications. The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis will exhibit D-TLC's web site as part of their Gallery 9 on-line exhibition program.

D-TLC is, in part, a product of research conducted at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) from 1994-1998. As part of the PAIR (PARC Artist-In-Residence) program, we collaborated with PARC researchers Dale MacDonald and Scott Minneman.

Elective Documentary Fictions focuses primarily on the digital components of D-TLC. It positions the web site as one example of the participatory hybrid documents that are appearing in electronic space. Like our 1996 web-based election project Conventional Wisdom, D-TLC is an Internet-based salon functioning as both a forum for a national discussion of issues, and a virtual space for the presentation of work. The site combines photography, real time reporting, analysis and critical fiction and memoir. It accommodates a changing series of contributions by both invited artists and writers and unsolicited viewers.

The phenomenon of interactive narrative on websites devoted to celebrities is very widespread. The Internet is enabling fans from all over the world to form cultic comunities around celebrities such as Antoio Banderas, Arnold Scwarzenegger, and Salma Hayek, and around such television shows such as Xena, Warrior Princess, "Days of Our Lives, and Buffy, Vampire Slayer. This paper will explore the implications of collaborative fan fiction being written on fansites, especially those devoted to communal erotic fantasies. How does the permissiveness of cyberspace enable women to express desire toward their cultic figure, and in what way does this differ from non-electronic uses of celebrity? In what way does the "privacy" of cyberspace enable electronic "behaviors" that would not otherwise be possible without the paradox of distance and intmacy that cyberspace provides? 

The Learning Curve is a work of hypertext fan fiction, the most complex yet attempted. Written around the events of the fourth and fifth Star Trek films, it extrapolates the effects on Kirk, Spock and McCoy of apparently innocuous choices with life-altering consequences. This paper looks at The Learning Curve as an example of the science-like quality of fan fiction. The restrictions of fan fiction are like the restrictions of experimental science: they make it a more powerful tool, not less. Fan fiction may even be the most powerful literary technique for the exploration of character, emotion and choice: it is the calculus of human nature.

At a time when new technologies like satellite and cable television have dramatically expanded transnational flows of information, the regulatory power and ideological presumptions of the nation state are being challenged as never before. In post-apartheid South Africa, however, significant steps have been taken to establish democratic access to a rapidly reconfiguring public sphere. South Africa therefore offers a particularly indicative case study in the tension between trends towards globalization and local autonomy. This project situates initiatives to expand access to contemporary communications technologies within the broader problematic of democratic development in contemporary South Africa. By analyzing the role played by broadcast media such as film and video as the principal sites for the formation of national identity, new insights can be gained concerning the complex interactions of contemporary local and global forms of communication and identity.  

This study examined the extent to which U.S. daily newspapers are using available technologies, including multimedia and interactivity, for development of World Wide Web sites. It also looks at how the three content types (local, regional, and national online newspapers) vary in their use of features commonly found in the design of a Web site. The study employed content analysis of the online newspapers at two different ten-day time periods --- during fall 1998 and during summer 1999 -- to evaluate usage of Web technologies. The study found that most online newspapers have adopted innovations -- for example, links to related information and consumer services such as searchable classifieds. But most sites have not deployed other features, such as the use of Java, and plug-in based technologies. Significant differences were found between the two time periods.

This paper investigates the techniques and technologies deployed by the computer and Internet industries to track and profile users. The paper questions the manner in which the computer and Internet industries set the default settings in their software and hardware to forcibly customize on-line content for individual users, allowing their every click on the world wide web to be tracked. The paper also critiques the promotional strategies used by Intel, Microsoft, Netscape-America Online and others to promote (and legitimize) their on-line profiling technologies to computer users and the general public. In so doing, I discuss the increasingly public (and political) role that individual programmers have come to play in exposing the secretive nature of such profiling technologies.

While the phenomenon of profiling continues to foster popular interest and political debate -- from best selling FBI novels and television programming such as Profiler, Millennium and Law and Order to the current debate over racial profiling on US highways -- it has also, within the space of two years, come to embody the commercialization of the Internet and the world wide web (in essence producing an on-line consumer). Given the difficulties involved in rating web sites for potential advertisers, the search for more effective tracking and profiling techniques has spawned initiatives by leading corporations. This first section of the paper broadly recounts the problems involved in fostering e-commerce.

The second part of the paper discusses the public debates surrounding computer and Internet profiling technologies. I begin with an account of the first persistent cookie programs integrated into Netscape and Microsoft Internet browsers. In short, cookies are ID files that are saved onto users' hard drives by web sites. The cookie.txt file can customize content and services to the user while it also tracks on-line behavior. Similar techniques encoded in computer processors (Intel's Pentium III chips) and in Microsoft's Windows software have generated a public debate among users, corporations and such government agencies as the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission.

The paper concludes that political and legislative responses to on-line privacy issues must also take into account the automation, forced customization and default settings of computer and Internet profiling technologies.

This paper will center on the representation of three subsidiary characters in The X-Files, Melvin Frohike, John Fitzgerald Byers, and Ringo Langly, the Lone Gunmen, conspiracy consultants. I will look at how narrative structures dramatize or create epistemological problems and I'll discuss the role of The Lone Gunmen in relation to the interpretive fan communities of the Internet. 

The field of the history of the book, an area of steadily increasing scholarly activity, has often sought in recent years to apply the lessons learned from the study of new printed media to the emergence of new electronic media. This paper will argue that, in many ways, these lessons may not be as useful as we historians of the book hope. Differentiating between revolutions in media and revolutions in distribution, using the "publishing revolution" in 19th century America as an example, I hope to examine the ways in which the history of the book can help us understand the ways people use new electronic media, as well as the ways in which the field hinders such understanding. 

The Mythography of the 'New Frontier' explores the political and social consequences of conceptualizing cyberspace as a frontier--a metaphorization than implies a very particular set of symbols and icons centering on notions of conquest, flexibility, individualism, democracy, and profit. My goal in this paper is to make the hidden assumptions of this metaphor apparent by unearthing both historical and present-day conditions of our mythic and geographic frontiers.

The advent of the digital revolution--specifically the Internet--apparently confirms both Jean Luc Godard's belief in the "end of cinema" and other critics' claims that we have entered a "post-television age" owing to the VCR, cable and satellite technologies. Moreover, the recent arrival of the laser disk, CD-ROM, DVD and virtual reality imagining systems present even more formidable challenges not only to traditional media industries, but to film studies' pedagogical methodologies. To keep pace with this unprecedented paradigm shift in media production and consumption, the field of cinema and TV studies must reinvent itself and confront some of its primary assumptions. This paper will explore my concept of "digitextuality" as one means of theorizing, analyzing and teaching this transformed media landscape currently being described as the "convergence industries." 

This case study explores the impact of newer technologies on newspaper coverage, specifically looking at the introduction of television into the media mix in the 1952 presidential nominating conventions and the introduction of the Internet into the mix in the 1998 Starr report. The research indicates change does occur in the older medium's coverage, both suddenly and over a period of time, though it does not indicate this change has a negative effect on newspapers.

How can the juxtaposing of fiction and critical essays change the way we consider gender and technology issues? This presentation will utilize works of critical study and fiction that deal with the ways in which conceptions of gender are embodied in technologies and the ways in which technologies shape our notions of gender. I will explore the consequences for women living in cyberculture and suggest alternate possibilities.

This paper probes the activities of the nineteenth century American government as a prolific publisher of reports, surveys, exploration accounts and even books. The publication and dissemination of official documents became part of the performative dimension of the governing process. By creating serial publications and by establishing institutions for the accumulation of knowledge Congress and the administration partook in the making of what Geoffrey Nunberg recently termed the "phenomenology of information" -- the set of material conditions as well as surrounding discourses of knowledge and authority that allowed for the normalization of discursive material as "facts." Employing a few case studies the paper demonstrates that some of the problematics featured in the contemporary debate on the future of information (whose context often is the ungoverned nature of cyberspace) were evident in that early stage -- namely questions of authority, authorship, access and ownership.

This paper explores our changing relation to the screen itself-- the physically embodied and subjectively disembodied object relation to 1) the distant and large cinema screen with projected images, 2) the closer and light emanating television screen and, 3) the even closer computer screen, one that we put our faces very close to, often touch, one that sits on our laps or in our beds. The screen is considered here as a piece of architecture, rendering a wall permeable to ventilation in new ways; a "virtual window" which changes the materiality of built space by adding new apertures that dramatically explode the previous conception of space and also (even more radically) of time.

This presentation focuses on motion capture technology, particularly in terms of entertainment and fine art applications. It addresses questions of artistry, overviews the most common types of motion capture equipment being used, and looks at future directions for development in this field.

Television fandom can be described as a phenomenon whose specific conditions and rules aren't as established in Europe as they are in the United States. There may be cultural aspects involved in the difference, but there are institutional and organizational reasons too. In Europe -- and especially in the German-speaking countries -- the specific characteristics of "fans" as a highly competent, highly self-conscious audience forming a (virtual) community, are only emerging now, thanks to new series-oriented channels and distributing strategies - and thanks to the Internet. Of course, it's Star Trek that started it all, and it's The X-Files, which is currently establishing itself as one of the most discussed television series in German fan discourse (apart from those Usenet groups devoted to an immensely successful homegrown soap opera called "indenstrasse).

When I started to compare American and German Usenet fan discourse, it occurred to me that fans debate in different manners and linguistic styles. Men seemed to argue in a slightly different manner from women, and Germans definitely chose a different style for their arguments than Americans. I started to ask myself questions such as:

• What are the main communicative aims in fan discourse?
• What are the main politics in the exchange (or transfer) of fan-oriented knowledge?
• With regards to content and style, are there differences to be found between "traditional" media discourse and fan discourse in newer media?
• How is knowledge transfer organized in different language and media cultures -- with specific emphasis on the German / the American model?

This paper asks why new technologies for self-treating mental health maladies have been appearing on cable television and on the Internet since the mid-nineties, particularly those recommending the self-management of mental illnesses. New therapeutic media are symptoms, the author argues, of cultural health discourses that pivot on normal health ideals promoting citizen productivity. These health discourses promote prevention as new diagnostic form, and tie diagnosis to recovery options. New media technologies respond to the demand, seeking to seduce a new market of the diagnosed into consuming their media products. More importantly, new technologies offer therapetuic choices that reify the diagnostic/recovery process and cultural health norms. The paper diagnostic/recovery process and cultural health norms. The paper investigates the different niche markets of new therapeutic technologies, particularly why some promote self-mangement.

The phonograph is one of those rare, Jekyll-and-Hyde devices that was invented for one thing and ended up doing something completely different. The purpose of the present paper is to account as "thickly" as possible for the appropriation of the phonograph as a home entertainment device in the mid-1890s. I begin by drawing a comparison between the phonograph and another contemporary medium, the mass circulation monthly magazine; I will then address the definition of the phonograph within and against existing discourses surrounding Woman, music, and home in American life; and I conclude by alluding to the ways in which the norms and habits of shopping helped to define the home phonograph.

This paper will explore the ways in which the discourse surrounding the emergence of radio linked childhood with the utopian promise of a new technology. Drawing on a variety of sources from the period 1918-1925, including boy scout manuals, "how to" books for building wireless sets, and articles in the popular press, I study how children became messengers for communicating the potentials of radio and also how radio offered confirmation of the value of childhood. Just as children today are said to understand computers far more easily than their elders, children of the wireless age were often seen to have a unique affinity toward radio. "Radio play" -- the literal tinkering with and making of radio sets -- became a significant emblem for children's participation in a technical age, one which identified children as valued participants in America's future. Children's ease with the technology and their inclination for "hands on" learning may be understood as contributing to the cultivation of a new professional engineering class, a group which would be valued for its technical prowess, ingenuity and public service.

This proposed paper will trace the roots of current museological debates over the adoption of electronic exhibition technologies to efforts a century ago to make museums more accessible to the general public through the re-design of exhibits and the adoption of the then-new media technologies of the phonograph, magic lantern slide, and motion picture. Clues for understanding contemporary museum attitudes toward new media technologies can be found in a number of experimental exhibits proposed (if not always installed) in American and European museums at the beginning of the twentieth century. Responding to what they saw as the narrowing attention span of the urban museum-goer, late nineteenth century curators charged with the task of making exhibits more user-friendly turned to novel technologies in search of suitable prototypes for the modern museum. This paper considers the manner in which a new set of contemporary advanced display technologies are engendering anxieties similar in some respects to those provoked by their technological predecessors a hundred years earlier.

While the dominant metaphors for computer networking seem to be dying out, both physiological and urban metaphors retain a small but growing following. These metaphors are in no way unique to the most recent "new media." They are appealing because of their capacity to describe and perhaps model the increasingly complex patterns associated with communications networks in a parsimonious way.

John Locke's theory of appropriation is a standard starting-point for theories of individual property rights. In this paper, I argue that his theory, properly understood, ends up lending some credibility to a communal theory of intellectual property.

Locke argues that one may legitimately appropriate things by mixing one's labor with them, and most commentators take him to mean that, since one owns one's labor, mixing it with a thing attaches to that thing something that already belongs to one. I argue that we can and should understand Locke to be saying that one's labor is an intrinsic property of oneself (as solubility is an intrinsic property of salt), by means of which one makes other things into parts of oneself.

The appropriation of intellectual property is actually a clearer case of mixing labor with that which becomes one's property than those which Locke describes, since one creates the products with which it is "mixed." However, there are three problems with this theory. First, it fails to distinguish one person's intellectual labor from another's; second, intellectual creation is often a collaborative, rather than an individual endeavor; and, third, intellectual labor is most often mixed with media of communication which can never belong to any individual.

It looks, then, as though Locke's theory might help those who argue for communal intellectual property rights. The only apparent way out of this impasse would be to invoke a highly-controversial principle of entitlement to one's products via individual genius.

Modes of public communication, ranging from journalism to architecture, can be understood not only in relation to space (their geographical setting) but also in relation to time. 'Public address' of different kinds has a frequency, from the (high-frequency) instant to the (low-frequency) millennium. This paper explores some of the implications of analysing public 'writing' in terms of its frequency, and considers how changes in frequency, in journalism especially, may affect the cultural form and public understanding of the medium in question. The relations between spatial and temporal aspects of public communication are discussed, and comparisons made between 'writing' of different frequencies, including journalism (high frequency), academic and scholarly writing (mid frequency) and public architecture (low frequency).

This paper is interested in how "media" operated as technologies instrumental to the emergence of "neo-liberal" modes of governing in the U.S. during the 1980s. The paper is particularly concerned with how the convergence of media and other technologies during the 1980s contributed to the formation of a new social arrangement that depended upon a particular model of domesticity. My focus on the domestic sphere as a space of "self-governing" is, in part, intended to amplify the spatial problematic that is central to Foucaultian critiques of neo-liberalism, i.e., how the domestic sphere was integral to a broader social arrangement and for governing at a distance. The paper also considers how media, in their relation to other household technologies (particularly "programmable appliances"), came to support and to rely upon a particular model of the domestic sphere during the 1980s--one that I refer to as a "(neo-) liberalized" domestic sphere. Although this is a model that had been taking shape for some time, it became crucial to neo-liberal forms of governing over the 80s. Its endurance and strengthening over the 90s affirms that neo-liberalism has less to do with political philosophy than with the emergence of new social spheres and new techniques of managing them in the last part of the twentieth century.

Anyone who has been involved with an electronic media project in an academic environment knows that many complex issues surround a project's development. This presentation will describe an ongoing project to systematically document and compare how academic media projects are conceptualized, created and managed. The main focus of this work is on determining relationships among the financial, legal, technical, and human factors within projects. The long term goal is to illuminate characteristics and choices that result in sustained successes, and ideally, identify and disseminate self-sustaining approaches. 

The advent of new communication technologies has generated a robust and provocative research literature examining the implications of hypertext on the conventions of writing. The nature of online narratives are summarized to be, among other things, nonlinear, fragmented, participatory, in flux, impermanent, and designed to change. On the whole, these characteristics challenge accepted notions of "good writing" and of narrative conventions across genres. For the genre of print journalism, these challenges to textual norms also have implications for reporting practices. This paper reports on a study of the viability of the hypertext form for journalism. The study asked readers to compare a conventional, online news article with a redesigned, hypertext version of it. Following basic hypertext design principles, a team of researchers reformatted linear news features published by the Los Angeles Times. A group of 20 volunteers was then asked to read one of the articles, comparing the original version to the hypertext. Following the reading exercise, qualitative interviews were conducted to explore responses to the competing narrative forms. This paper is based on an analysis of the transcripts of these 20 interviews. The findings reinforce some traditional values and routines of the press, but also suggest an expansion of the roles, functions, and practices of journalists. Readers were split evenly among those who voiced a strong preference for hypertext or for linear narratives. A large number of readers noted that each form had advantages and disadvantages, and that preference for one form over the other depended on reading context and purpose. Finally, some of the reasons given for disliking hypertexts cited features that have been described as their inherent characteristics (fragmentation, absence of authorial voice). 

The mediated world of contemporary adolescence began taking a definitive shape the first time that a Space Invaders arcade was installed in a fast food stand. Lots of kids lived in order to feed the machine: with coins, feelings, desires and the machine gave them an excitement they lacked in real life. The two player mode made this virtual experience into a social event. In a few years, videogames would be inside everyone's television, creating problems with siblings and school. How could the defender of the galaxy be such an unpopular nerd at school?

For centuries, media informed, told stories, and helped transmit moral structures and tradition. Now, television and audiovisual media seem to function as a replacement for real life experience: the colors become brighter everyday while the urban landscape becomes more gray and video games use graphics and sound to create a greater impression of reality.

As a writer and filmmaker, I am interested in how fiction affects human life. Videogames seem even more addictive than television ever was. Television gives us psychic experiences, while video games are more physical. How long before all of these media merge within the space of teenagers' bedrooms? How will the audience endure the new demands these media are placing upon them? Will it want to interact with the media? Will interactive cinema maintain the three part dramatic structure of more traditional media? How will these new forms of interactive media affect teenage life in suburbia? How will network media react to this situation? How will networks combine the violence, adrenaline rush, and extreme realism of a video game with the passivity of television? How will television's structure and content change in response to the new media?

My presentation explores and dramatizes such questions.