18.02.16, "The Riderly Text," Heckman
To be completely honest, I was very confused by the opening metaphor that Heckman used when describing the readerly and writerly relationship, mostly because it was comparing the two to different kinds of pleasure. I think it worked, though, in explaining what they mean, because now I think I understand the idea that readerly text is something that is pleasurable but not consuming, while writerly is something that takes you out of your own life and places you in something different or new. That’s a really neat way to see electronic literature, I think, even though the comparison to eroticism was momentarily confusing.
I love the discussion about the SpeidiShow, though, because it sounds like the kind of craziness that would actually exist in the world. I’m almost a little sad that I wasn’t aware of it while it was still ongoing. He talks about what a riderly text would mean, which is where the user takes their vessel of communication, their “ride,” and takes that, as well as its ever changing atmosphere, into context when they are helping create their content. I really like the idea of riderly texts, even though I’m not sure I would have used that particular term. I don’t have a term I would substitute it for, but the idea of having the medium of the text change how you approach something as well as giving said medium the chance to change parts of the text’s path is really intriguing.
Would riderly be considered the type of text that fills the gap between writerly and readerly texts? I feel like there might be more that fills the gap, if only because sometimes readerly texts require more work from the other sources of information, rather than just whatever you’re writing yourself. Like if something provides you with a different prompt to write about each and it takes what you write and gives you a new prompt based on that, but is not actively a part of your writing process like Twitter was a part of the author’s, does it still count as riderly? Or is it something else?
