@brandonluc01
Many people know of the childhood story Little Red Riding Hood where a girl is going to her grandmother’s house and along the way she meets a wolf who eventually attempts to eat her but Red Riding Hood is saved from the wolf. Leishman’s electronic literature version of the story adds many new elements to the story. Leishman’s interactive story contains very little text, and uses images and music to tell the story. The lack of text forces the reader to interpret the story themselves; the reader could interpret the dark and scary music as foreshadow for the outcome of Little Red Riding Hood or the red images to symbolize blood or death.
Taking older pieces of literature and altering their medium to make the story the author’s own has become more and more popular. The purpose is to stimulate senses that plain text cannot stimulate and create different a message. Marshall McLuhan’s book title “Medium is the Massage” is a manipulation of words to explain that the new mediums massage our senses tand expand the viewers interpretation of the story’s message. McLuhan speaks of the technique used by Donna Leishman, to make Red Riding Hood her own story. On page 41 he says,”Media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratio of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world.”This quote explains that newer mediums and technologies influence the readers perception of the story or message.