@chrisdtc101
Donna Leishman’s interactive work “Redridinghood” is an electronic medium like the type that Marshall McLuhan talks about his his book “The Medium Is the Massage”. Lieshman’s work gives us more ways to interact with the story than the original printed text that became a popular children’s story over the years. We are given visual and audio interaction with the story in a way that we haven’t before. We were once limited to seeing the words on text and having to imagine it in our heads or maybe hearing someone else read the story to us when we were younger. Now, Lieshman helps us visualize what is happening in the story and lets us watch it like a movie. We hear music playing as the story progresses and eventually we are even allowed to make a decision about how the story ends. The music sets the mood for the electronic literature that we are interacting with and affects how we look at and interpret the story.
The immediacy and ability to interact with the story make Lieshman’s “Redridinghood” an electronic medium. McLuhan says in his book that, “The method of our time is to use not a single but multiple models for exploration.” This is certainly true for “Redridinghood” where we explore Lieshman’s electronic literature not just as a text but as something to look at and listen to and interact with. We get to make choices that change how the story ends and that draws us in and makes us more involved in the story.