Abstract
This chapter pays attention to Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby’s The Silent History (mobile app 2012, print novel 2014), which is the first accredited literary work that incorporates locative media in fictional writing practice through location-based user-generated content presented in e-book form. The Silent History combines conventional print-centric reading practices pertaining to e-book technologies with the embodied interaction between the audience, the text, and the physical environment. Drawing on Brian Greenspan’s theories on locative narrative, the chapter argues that The Silent History suggests different locative reading practices from the ones adopted in the locative narrative experiments of the 2000s, pointing to a more dynamic and experiential locative media narrativity that borrows elements from the literary genre of the novel.
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Notes
- 1.
While analyzing one of the locative narratives featuring in the locative project entitled [murmur], Ryan et al. write that “[i]t could just as well have been told in a studio for a remote audience or be part of a written story” (131). This point can also be applied to The Silent History as well with emphasis placed on the fact that location information is considered redundant.
- 2.
However, it needs to be stated at this point that what constitutes an effective immersive strategy in The Silent History has been regarded as a drawback in the discussion of other locative projects. For example, as Greenspan has noticed, making too difficult to locate the clues in real space may have the opposite effect, that is, de-immerse readers from the experience.
- 3.
Commenting on The Silent History, Amy Hungerford observes that mobile devices, e-books included, make us unsociable by isolating us from our immediate surroundings, absorbed as we are in the virtual space of our mobile screens (110). Exploring “the effects of digital reading and writing on brain function,” N. Katherine Hayles extends this argument, viewing the silents in the novel as a metaphor for “the spread of digitally mediated asemiosis,” that is “a deficiency in our ability to read signs” as we “are [gradually] moving … into hyperattention and away from the deep attention necessary, for example, to read long print novels” (Postprint Books 134, 135, 140).
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N. Delioglanis, V. (2023). Rethinking the E-Book: The Silent History. In: Narrating Locative Media . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27473-2_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27473-2_5
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