I have caught myself several times already, over the course of this semester, both in blog posts and in our in-class discussions, using the word “text” in reference to digital media. This is partially due to my own ignorance, not with the digital medium(s) in particular, but with the scholarly, investigatory “lens” being applied to them. I absentmindedly use the word “text” because it is a word I am comfortable with. It is a part of a discourse of literature I have claimed to be in conversation with for several years, to shift and mold to my liking; it is a term I believe I have mastered. “Text,” in a way, is my own literal understanding of how “literature” is defined, but in many ways is a tiny word that so emphatically portrays my own limitations of perspective.

And through this week’s readings, I have come to understand that referring to digital media as “text” is not a fair assessment. As Cayles asserts, there are exclusions to this rule. But generally speaking, electronic media, and its investigation as a work, like Wardrip-Fruin’s exercise in understanding Strachey’s “Love Letter Generator,” must include the system as a means of interpretation.

The strategies of combinatorial literature, the domination of fixed terms in finite spaces, of cut-up literature: to look at them simply as an end result is prosaic, and I mean that in both the ways the term is used. Prosaic: because looking at a Love Letter Generator as a computer gargling out words in and of itself is nothing to look at. The beauty of it all is in its process. That Strachey and Turing compiled a computer program that took words from a Roget’s Thesaurus shows how vapid the cultural mindset of mid-20th Century England was. They laughed at the computer’s failures of evoking a “human-like” letter, but this failure, argued similarly by Wardrip-Fruin, is what distinctly marks the Love Letter Generator as an evocative process and not simply something to be examined as its end result.

So while I latch onto the term “text” as a mental guidepost through these readings, I, like the toddler on training wheels, must come to accept that such conveniences are temporary – that it is impossible to truly grapple with and understand the digital media as digital so long as I continue to define it by print terms. And though I have previously argued that these two mediums both openly imitate and influence one another, it is paramount to remember that the stages of representation at work are never going to be the same.