The Impact Of Computer-based Technology On Literary Reception

The impact of computer-based technology on literature is the indispensable research thesis of the literary domain in 21 century.The dialectic relationship exists between the development of literature and the great progress steps of computer science. On the one hand, new media has been offered to the diffusion of literature by computer-based digital storage technology and internet which is the significant technology as the symbol of communication in the information age. On the other hand, in the context of high-tech society, the future of the literature becomes the research project of great importance attracting more scholar researchers' attention. Coming from the reader's perspective, this dissertation attempts to analysis the multi-faceted impact of computer-based technology on literature with the theory of literary reception.The perspective of reader's literary reception is the creative point of this paper. Literary reception is one of the aspects in the whole literary progress from the text creation to the interpretation of the content. Besides the writer's work on literary creation, literary progress also includes reader's reception and exploration on text. Although these two aspects possess relative independence, in the process of which an integrated meaning of a whole text have been accomplished, they relates even restricts to each other. In short, literary reception is the indispensable step to make the social function of literature text come true. Literary creation and reception are interactive that the former is premises of the later and on the contrary the later impose the counteractive influence on the former through the market economy system facilitating the literary creation. According to Marx, consumption produces new demand, thus the conception of produce and the inner-motivation. Among the creation, text and reception, reader's acceptation bridges the text and social context. In the 21 century characterized by high-technology, the various transformations that literary reception experienced in the historical transitions are the significant representations of the in-depth influence and infiltration on literature.This dissertation interprets the impact of computer-based technology on literary reception from two aspects. Firstly, the transformations of reader's sense organs in the process of textual reception, which changing from visual-dominated to receptioncharacterized by the combination of multi-ply sense organs under the reading on electronic hypertext. Besides the original forms of reception, the continuing advancement of computer technology provides hyper-link, streaming media, pictures and new mode of reading conjoined with vision and aural. This transformation is not only the change taking place in the media of literary diffusion, but to deeper extent, the percentage of reader's sense organs when accepting the text is different from that of the visual-dominated form of reception in the print age essentially. Secondly, Marshall Mcluhan proposed the definition of tribalization in his book Understanding the Message which is the concept describing human collective consciousness. He explained that specialized technology led to the deconstruction of tribalization on human consciousness and then new unspecialized technology cause the rise of re-tirbalization. In the theoretical system of Mcluhan, tribalization means the interactive situation of the tribes of human consciousness. He also pointed out that the western cultural experienced three media transitions including character, print technology and electronic media, accordingly after the process of construction and deconstruction of tribalization of human consciousness, the human society is entering into the third period of re-tribalization. Character is the stretch of human vision leading to the western culture which is linear, logic, rational and specialized. Printed technology brought up the specialized people with visual-dominated and unbalanced form of sense. In the information age, it is the process of re-tribalization that computer-based technology simulates human integrated consciousness surpassing the barriers of time and space, which offers the human with a platform to sense interactivity.