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Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary US Novel a Dissertat UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Chelsea Alexandra Kern 2021 © Copyright by Chelsea Alexandra Kern 2021 ii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel by Chelsea Alexandra Kern Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Los Angeles, 2021 Professor Allison Carruth, Co-Chair Professor Daniel Scott Snelson, Co-Chair “Reading the Machine: Digital Reading Practices and the Contemporary U.S. Novel,” investigates how emerging information technologies—networked devices, software programs, and algorithmic protocols—redefine cultural forms of textual production and reception. Focusing on the longstanding literary form of the novel as a point of entry, “Reading the Machine” develops a new account of the social, material, and aesthetic processes that constitute reading in concert with smart machines and social networks. At stake is an examination of how reading in the digital age has evolved within the larger political and technological systems of digital society. The project thus attends to pressing issues ranging from democratic participation to the racialiZed and unequal structure of cyberculture itself. ii “Reading the Machine” demonstrates how contemporary fictions build pathways for creative, dynamic digital reading on the part of human and nonhuman readers, even as the economic and political infrastructures of digital technologies seek to limit that potential. The four body chapters of the dissertation juxtapose fictional narratives with case studies on hardware engineering, social networks, digital campaign analytics, and artificial intelligence. Central to the argument are novels and short stories about these technologies by prominent U.S. writers: among them, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010) and “Black Box” (2012), Ruth OZeki’s A Tale for the Time Being (2013), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), and Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne (2017). iii The dissertation of Chelsea Alexandra Kern is approved. Louise E.J. Hornby Rachel C. Lee Allison Carruth, Committee Co-Chair Daniel Scott Snelson, Committee Co-Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2021 iv TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF FIGURES vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii VITA viii Introduction 1 Works Cited 21 1. Reading Screens: Haptic Narratives on Touchscreen 25 Works Cited 73 2. Reading and Remembering: The Internet Novel as Memory Narrative 81 Works Cited 113 3. Reading Data: Surveillance and Social Media 117 Works Cited 172 4. Artificial Imaginations: Nonhuman Readers and the New Weird 181 Works Cited 229 Conclusion 238 Works Cited 246 v LIST OF FIGURES FIGURE 1: A GIANT HAND APPEARS TO TAP THE IPHONE'S SCREEN (33:18) 26 FIGURE 2: “THIS IS THE SIZE OF IT. IT FITS BEAUTIFULLY IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND” (40:28). 28 FIGURE 3 SKEUOMORPHIC VS. FLAT DESIGN IN IOS (GRAPHÉINE). 41 FIGURE 4: SLIDE, "BUT IT WASN'T YOUR FAULT, RIGHT?" 65 FIGURE 5: SHANNON'S COMMUNICATION SYSTEM 195 FIGURE 6: AUTO-COMPLETE ON GBOARD 207 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to the members of my committee for their invaluable guidance and support. Allison, thank you for making me a better writer and thinker, and providing a model for everything this project could be. Danny, without your endless suggestions of new internet content, incredible memory for sources, and bank of PDFs, this project would not have been possible. Louise, thank you for asking the right questions, keeping me human, and a healthy dose of tech skepticism. And thank you to Rachel for the conversation that began this project, and many more ideas since. I owe many more thanks to many more people. Namely: To Kristen Cardon, for reading every part of this dissertation almost as many times as I have. To EliZabeth Crawford, for tea at all the right times. To Comfort Udah, for sanity. To the Finnegans Wake group, for reminding me each week that reading is supposed to be fun. And to Nicholas, for everything else. A version of Chapter 3 appears in Arizona Quarterly, vol 76 (2020). vii VITA EDUCATION 2018 C.Phil., University of California, Los Angeles, English 2017 M.A., University of California, Los Angeles, English 2013 B.A. summa cum laude, Whitman College, English PUBLICATIONS “My Mother’s Bones: The Photographic Bodies of Camera Lucida and Halving the Bones,” forthcoming in Postmodern Culture, 2021. “Big Data and the Practice of Reading in Super Sad True Love Story,” Arizona Quarterly, vol 76, no. 3, 2020, 81-105. FELLOWSHIPS, AWARDS, AND HONORS 2021 ACLS Leading Edge Fellowship 2020 Graduate Division Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA 2019 Digital Humanities Summer Institute Scholarship, University of Victoria 2019 English Department Dissertation Research Fellowship, UCLA 2014/ Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Distinction, UCLA/Mellon Foundation 2017 2012 Paul J. Jackson Award for Excellence in Literary Study, Whitman College SELECTED PRESENTATIONS 2020 Respondent to panel “Multimedia Spectacles: The Politics and Ethics of Journalism and Popular Culture,” Southland Conference 2020, UCLA, 5-6 August viii “One Made Organism: Artificial Intelligence and Jeff VanderMeer’s Hybrid Monsters,” Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Boston University, 5-8 March 2019 “Read Me: Big Data and the Insecure Reader,” Insecurity, Center for 21st Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2-4 May “I Saw It Online: Literary Approaches to New Reading Technologies,” What is Technology?, University of Oregon, 11-13 April “Reading Data: Human Textual Practices in the Digital Age,” Literature and Technology, Boston University, 27 April 2018 “Reading Online: Super Sad True Love Story and the Future of Public Reading,” British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies: What Happens Now, Loughborough University, 10-12 July ix Introduction In October 1969, just three months after a human being first stepped onto the surface of the moon, a graduate student at UCLA pressed a series of keys on his Sigma 7 mainframe computer, sending the cryptic message, “LO,” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute nearly 400 miles away. The message technically represented a failure: Charley Kline had intended to send “LOGIN,” but the system crashed after the first two letters were transmitted. On another level, however, it was a breakthrough: the first message sent via the ARPANET, the early precursor to the now-ubiquitous internet. This first message is a technological marvel, an origin point that marks the beginning of a radical transformation in how humans communicate, conduct business, learn, teach, and think. It is also significant because of the failure that is concurrent with this great success. Because of the specific limitations and parameters of the technology that Kline used to send his message, that message became distorted. The word that the researchers at Stanford read was not the same word that Kline wanted to send. But we might ask, who really sent this message, and what was its content? Was it Kline, for whom the transmission represented an incomplete version of his text? Was it the Sigma 7 computer, which received, as far as it could know, a complete message before shutting off? Was it the cables that carried a 01001100 (L) and a 01001111 (O) faithfully for 400 miles in the form of rapid electrical pulses? And who read this message? Was it, again, Kline’s terminal, which interpreted the keystrokes and transformed them into binary code? Was it the Stanford computer, which received a signal representing that binary code, and translated it into letters? Or was it, finally, the human researchers who received an “L” and an “O,” either aware or unaware of the message’s incompleteness? We can think of each of these nodes as instances of digital reading and writing—the subject of this dissertation. Decades before the internet and digital technologies 1 became commonplace features of daily life in the United States, the first network message involved many of the ambiguities and contradictions that attend to producing and reading text today, when texts arise out of complex relationships between humans, nonhuman technologies, and the symbiotic configurations that they form together. The rise of fully networked, always-on computing in the first decades of the twenty-first century has initiated massive changes in the way that humans within these systems interact with each other and our environment. In many places in the world, digital network infrastructures now underpin the workings of telecommunications, entertainment, transportation, business, and other crucial fields. The widespread use of mobile devices embeds everyday human life within a digital, networked environment of social media, entertainment, news, etc., and the “Internet of Things,” in which everyday objects such as thermostats, doorbells, and water bottles use “smart” technology to provide extra services, multiplies our access points to this global digital network and introduces new, nonhuman actors into everyday spaces. Encounters with text in this post-digital world happen more quickly, more frequently, from more sources, and in more diverse forms than ever before.1 Although the emergence of network computing and machine reading over the last half century is not the first such revolution in textual and reading technologies, it represents a crisis point—or, alternatively, a quantum leap—for reading practices and their sociocultural, cognitive, and affective functions. In 2008, Roger Bohn and James Short estimated that an individual in the United States consumed roughly 100,000 words per day, excluding words encountered for work or school—a 140% increase from 1980 (12). Although consumption of print media declined from 26% of daily words encountered 1 I use post-digital here and throughout as a temporal marker to indicate, with Florian Cramer “the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics” (13).
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