@MyDtcAccount – Jonathan Crabtree
Donna Leishman’s work “Redridinghood” puts a twist on the familiar story of the sweet little girl who goes to Grandma’s, and encounters a wolf along the way. What I found intriguing was a thought that occured to me halfway through. In print literature, there is a set series of events and happenings. You don’t control what happens, nor do you control when it happens. But, when you read a print edition of a book, you’re mind is opened up to a plethora of possibilites in regards to visualization of the characters, creating a certain “voice” in your head of what the characters must sound like, and imagining the setting and all the colors of the environment. When viewing an electronic piece such as Redridinghood, however, it is backwards. Sure, you may have control over several factors like when the story progresses, choosing what the character does in a certain event, or anything else that comes from the increased interactivity that electronic media offers the user. But the author provides the visuals, provides the voices (though there were no words in this specific example), and provides the colors that make up the environment. Personally, I feel like this detracts from the overall sense of satisfaction that I get from reading a book.
One way that the affordances of having a story told in an electronic medium does enhance the work is the ability to play a set type of music for each situation in the story. Music evokes a certain mood, which changes our perception of the story and how we read it. McLuhan touched on this, saying that “media, by altering the environment, evoke in us unique ratios of sense perceptions. The extension of any one sense alters the way we think and act – the way we perceive the world” (41).