Digital literacy refers to familiarity with the issues listed above as well as to competence in the use of digital technology. However, it also entails an understanding of the language of digital media: letters, links, colors, shapes, sound, processing, and interaction—and behind all of these, code. With respect to digital media, “reading competence” means understanding the interplay of these elements. This requires us to decode technical effects and understand the meaning behind their interaction.
For scholars of literature, art, or any hermeneutic discipline, two principal strategies exist to analyze digital media. In the spirit of cultural studies, one approach focuses on the social context and consequences relating to how a work of digital art is produced and consumed: technology, authorship, copyright, distribution, and the digital divide, among other issues. Alternatively, and more in the spirit of a semiotic reading, the analysis is more formal and internally driven: attention is drawn to characteristics of digital language and to codes of meaning—of individual artifacts, and the technical effects within them—with the goal of learning how to read a digitally produced sign and how to understand a specific performance within a piece of digital literature. In this strategy, the codes of literature and the codes of technology converge toward a highly interesting nexus of relations, resulting in multiple, layered domains of signification that have rarely been fully explored simultaneously.
In their 2006 book At the Edge of Art, Joline Blais and Jon Ippolito distinguish between investigative art (that is, research), which is “typically understood only by subcultures dedicated to its creation and study,” and established art (that is, genre), which is “accountable to the art-viewing public.” They hold that “if research rewards expansive or associative thinking, genre rewards close reading. Successful research is interesting; successful genre is good” (241). In the last years, publications about digital art forms have made them known beyond an inner circle and have brought them into classrooms and exhibitions. Digital art, and its turn from research into genre, has long been valued as an attractive title for books, and it has its own entry in reference books, as in a Routledge reader on key concepts of cyberculture: “At its most basic, the term ‘digital art’ refers to the use of digital technology, such as computers, to produce or exhibit art forms, whether written, visual, aural—or, as is increasingly the case, in multimedial hybrid forms” (Bell et al. 2004, 59). To advance the field, it is important to move from highly generalized perspectives on new media art and literature into detailed and specific readings that can account, in media-specific ways, for the practices, effects, and interpretations of important works.
There are three reasons why it is still not easy to find assessments of aesthetic value in relation to concrete examples of digital arts. First is the preference for terminological and theoretical debate over close reading. This predisposition may originate in the fact that a highly generalized theoretical discussion enclosing well-known authors, texts, and perspectives entails less risk than undertaking close reading. A theory is a theory, and one may subscribe to it or not. In contrast, the interpretation of a concrete work may either be convincing or simply absurd. The real challenge and adventure of close reading is to undertake it without the safety net of prior assessment by other readers or more theoretically constrained readers. Second is a lack of faith in the significance of the subject. With regard to digital literature, and especially hyperfiction, Jan van Looy and Jan Baetens (2003) explain the lack of close reading by the absence of interesting works that would justify such critical attention. But such an explanation does not hold if we consider other genres of digital art that have generated fascinating and highly successful works.