Dorothy Butchard (University of Birmingham) will be presenting her paper, ‘Haunted Screens: Digital Texts and Unplanned Obsolescence’, at 5.30pm on Tuesday, 27 November 2018. The talk will take place in the Cardiff University’s John Percival Building, Room 0.31, and will be followed by a wine reception.
Abstract
This paper examines how accelerating technological change can swiftly render ‘old’ formats obsolete, compressing perceptions of age onscreen: many born-digital texts from the 1990s and 2000s already look and feel archaic. Although apps and software are often designed to be seamlessly incorporated into daily life, the combined pressures of profit and innovation mean that familiar digital interfaces are at constant risk of becoming dated or non-functional. Arguing that software lifecycles have serious ramifications for our capacity to read and appreciate born-digital texts as they age, this talk will approach obsolescence in digital materiality by exploring three facets of encountering texts onscreen: aesthetics, interactivity and malfunction.
About the speaker
Dorothy Butchard is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Digital Cultures and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures at the University of Birmingham, where her research focuses on creative responses to technological change. Dorothy’s first monograph explores imagery of frontiers, speed, magic, contagion and haunting in late twentieth and early twenty-first century representations of the internet, and she is now working on complicity and digital surveillance in contemporary literature and culture.
