28. LITwebERATURE: Master’s thesis: Influence of the World Wide Web on literature

Master’s Thesis of whatshisname

Masters thesis: Influence of the World Wide Web on literature
School of Literary and Communication Studies
Deakin University
Geelong Victoria Australia
Supervisor: Dr Lyn McCredden, Research and Graduate Studies Convenor
November 25, 1997

So excited – damn! I used the term ‘litweberature’ for my thesis back in 1997. Twenty-eight years later, 28 August 2025, I put the term into Google and it is #1. #1 and only. Holy Guacamole - no one else has ever used the term. It's mine.

My master’s thesis had quite a simple layout, it has been on several servers over the years, and as of 2004, it resides on the indiko.com site135F . Indiko is no longer there. Now aday you can groove on it over at https://neuage.us/masters1.html and or @ https://neuage.org/litweberature.html

LITWEBERATURE ~ in the spirit of every academic I made up lots of words for my research including,
“LITwebERATURE which may be defined as literature which is developed and formed in webs as it is found on the World Wide Web; with multiple links, levels and dimensions and without centre, beginning or end”. And like all academics making up words mine were as obvious and stupid as anyone else’s – and to my surprise I have been quoted for this numerous times in others’ research.

PAST https://neuage.org/masters3.html
“In the beginning was the word and the word was with God”, The Christian Bible proclaims. From the time of that first word, which we could date back to a particle of a nanosecond before the Big Bang, the word has been formulating itself in clearer and clearer forms. Literature is the concreteness, the word made text, of that first great word that has brought creation to its present state. On our particular particle of dust in this remote area of just another universe we have spent the past few thousand years on a quest, the quest of constantly improving communication through story telling of who we are and why we believe we are here.
The World Wide Web, like every particle in the universe is a linking mechanism…

GUTENBERG  http://neuage.org/Indiko/masters4.html
In Plato's Phaedrus Theuth shows his invention of writing to King Thamus, claiming that it will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians. But the King replies,
Your pupils will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality; they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.

The founder of the Internet browser, Netscape, James Barksdale points out that
“The Internet is the printing press of the technology era. How often have you seen technology adopt a rate similar to the Internet's Forty million Netscape users in its first two years...” (the page this was on – like so much of the Internet is no longer anywhere to be seen – this is part of the best of the Internet – that what we have to share today disappears whether we want it to or not - the Internet will never replace the printing media because what is on the Web vanishes when a server goes bust or the user forgets to pay their bill or for any one of many reasons whereas printed material will always exist as long as the planet has matter left in place.) Just as formats for saving shit changes all the time from floppy disks to cassette disks and CD and DVDs and cloud storage and thumb drives and USB 2 or three or whatever the next saving device is. Nothing of today will exist in the future. This era will be a black-hole of knowledge in the future because everything will be deleted by some form or another or hacker or government.

MEANING http://neuage.org/Indiko/masters5.html
The medium used to distribute narrative affects the evolution of the narrative. As narrative is valuable and grows by an evolutionary process the rate by which the use of the Internet is growing should make literature evolve at a rate never conceived of before. The meaning within a narrative on the World Wide Web can change instantly. On the Internet Meaning no longer has meaning of any determinable value.  (I am not quite sure how my thesis got a passing grade but it did – I rambled on like this for hundreds of pages.)

POETRY http://neuage.org/Indiko/masters6.html
What the World Wide Web does for poetry is to make reading an experience. Reading becomes a performance taking in both creator and witness. There are millions of examples of how present and past poets present their poetry on the Internet, some are more dramatic than others. One search engine stated, “About 607760 documents match your query,” under the keyword 'poetry', showing how many people are willing to share their verses for free with the world. And each author hoping to be discovered and loved and understood by the tens of millions of Internet viewers we are constantly told are wandering the web.

MULTIPLICITY – It is a bit too embarrassing quoting from this section – I did not realize what an airhead I was until I just went back and read what I wrote eight years ago. http://neuage.org/Indiko/masters7.html
CONCERNS  - I will give this a miss too
FUTURES  - and this

CONCLUSION http://neuage.org/Indiko/masters10.html
Though it is beyond the scope of this thesis (I wonder what I could have meant by that as I had written only a couple of hundred words for each section. However, I had nicely coloured pages and some graphics, but my supervisor was sort of missing during my degree getting days. I heard from her at the beginning and again when it was all over, but I was happy that I was passed. She may not have even read my shit) I could relate the pattern defining abilities of the brain to adapt, change and as mentioned earlier to link, to the rise of the World Wide Web. Everyday thinking is equivalent to the narrative which will be redefined because of the use of the Internet. The thought processes that we are always encountering within ourselves are one of transferring from node to node. For example as a parent, student, artist, photographer, body builder, astrologer, writer and all the other things one does to be part of society, I may be one moment entertaining thoughts about my children's activities, then jump to thinking about my girlfriend, my studies, body building or which time is the correct birth time for Princess Diana (2.15 PM or 7.45 PM?) or any one of a thousand and one things. Society is a linking process, and a society's narrative, to be true, is one of linked nodes.

The narrative that we experience within ourselves and within our reading or communications is now part of a global syntax. Literature can no longer continue only as a story produced in dead tree printing methods. Literature will now become reader driven as the witness-consumer-creator will produce and consume a new type of narrative. The narrative of the 21st century will be the narrative of all the world's voices weaving in and out and linking within and without providing continuous new structures and new literature unknown before this time.

The Internet provides us with the first time in recorded history of a world literature… (This is what my thesis should have been on. I think my thinking was that by doing linked pages there would appear to be a lot of work whereas if it was glued together as a thesis, it would have been quite short – in actual fact there were ten-thousand words total including the bibliography. It does not seem like much for a Master’s degree but now I realize that was only one part of the coursework that had four subjects. I think it seems light as I sent off three days ago my PhD thesis to my supervisor [there will be heaps said about this one before this story is told that is for sure] and the exact word count of that bit of writing was 170,743 words and it printed out to exactly 500 pages)

Each section of my thesis had a few thousand words, and it was my largest undertaking to date. I suppose the sum total of it all was to say that with this type of writing i did not have to reveal that I did not have a clue how to write a thesis. It seemed like a strangely luck-enhanced accomplishment, if not an outright fluke that I had gotten this far in the world of academia. I was still basically illiterate in some sense of the term – I had read a lot and I had written about 36 essays each in the 2,500 – 3,500 word length plus my honours thesis – but I still struggled with sentence structure, logic, syntax and coherency – much like I do in this short story of what I have gone through from the time I was adopted in 1950 at the age of three to this moment in May of 2004.

At the end of the day, I wanted to be a university graduate and whether I did it when I was in my forties or I did it like most people do, in my late teens – does not matter. It is where we are at now in this particular moment that is the sum total of every thought and action we have had since we were born. There is even the possibility that where we are at now is the result of many lifetimes. To go even further we can say this is how far we have gotten since the Big Bang – all those billions of years ago. Just to think how much has happened since our galaxy was formed then our solar system and then conditions for life as we know it then perhaps millions of years of evolution just to get to caveman/cavewoman (just to show how far we have gone – we can even say there is sexist language – let alone that we actually have a language) and then these past few thousands of years and now typing this on a laptop – what had to occur in the past fifteen-billion years to bring this moment with these set of conditions is enough to exhaust me. Perhaps there is a plan – but what is it and are we supposed to be aware of it? All religions champion a plan and a hero that is the alleged mouthpiece of the significant planner and who has come into life to save us. Of course, it is always a male, and these heroes came long ago.

Perhaps it is because this God that all heroes talk about has not come up with anything new for some 1500 or so years or else we would have a new religion. The Baha'i fancy that they are a new world religion, but I think it is just another bogus setup for a few to take advantage of the mindless many who yearn for someone to save them and to tell them what to do. The Baha'i also champion a male which leads me to consider that one of the primary purposes of religion is to control women. I have no idea about anything – I am a witness of my own life and sometimes it seems there is something meaningful happening and at all times my life is a crock of shit. I have had many plans but they never work out so obviously I would not make a good world savoir or a God because I just do not really have a plan. Though I did plan to finish my Master's Degree and to help Leigh become a professional baseball player and to assist Sacha with his work to become something to do with hip hop or graffiti or something that I could not really define.

I showed my picture-poems at the 1992 and the 1994 Adelaide Festival of Arts and neither time had I had much success. I was no longer setting up my picture-poems outside and I had accumulated a lot of them. There were more than 2000 eight by ten-inch picture-poems in boxes. I always had a few hundred when I set up in the park, but I always made many more than I had sold. It was a combination of my obsession with making picture-poems, which I suppose could be considered a sort of hobby and my hope that one day there would be a rush on the picture-poems by Terrell fad and I wanted to be prepared for just such an eventuality. I signed on to setup at the 1996 Adelaide Festival of Arts and for this one I decided to be a loner. I have always been on my own in my mind but when it comes to art festivals I am there with the others. This time I wrote the Adelaide City Council and got permission to set up in my old “Artists in the Park” place in Rymill Park. The bulk of the festival was set up in another part of Rymill Park across the street from me. This meant the people going to the festival, (the part of the park it was in was surrounded by a fence as there was a charge to get into the festival), would see my display easily and my large banner, “Artists in the park”.

I advertised as intensely as I could, putting posters all over town; telephone poles, walls, doors, and writing radio stations and newspapers. My overall message was that after a career spanning four decades I was going to retire. I wrote that I had begun selling my picture-poems in the 1960s in New York art boutiques and then became a street artist in Jackson Square, New Orleans in 1973 showing in art festivals throughout the 1970s in the States and that I had sold picture-poems in the 1980s and throughout the '90s and after selling thousands worldwide I was going to call it a day. My posters said I was displaying more than 2000 works of art strung throughout Rymill Park and all works were for sale.

And as if that was not enough to make a person weep with embarrassment, I had photocopied my posters – and yes it was exactly as it reads above though in different fonts – with several wooden clothes pegs on it. And to further the insanity I had signed many of the clothes pegs “Terrell 96”. I look at this now and I cannot believe myself – perhaps if I had been twenty but I was forty-nine years old at the time, surely I should have had a little bit more self-respect. All the sponsors of course were made up titles except that my single-parent friend from Victor Harbor did give me several hundred clothes pegs to hang my picture-poems on the lines that went from tree to tree through the park from: “CYBERPARK ARTISTS”, “AUSTRALIASIAN POETS FORM”, “JUPITER PUBLICATION”, blimey, I suppose at the time

I thought I was being clever.

Kris and I with our four children were at the park before sunrise. The kids hated the whole idea, from waking up early on a Sunday to hanging my hundreds and hundreds of picture-poems from the lines. They were afraid one of their friends would come along and see them, which made them work fast. We had it all set up by morning warm light (obviously lost the poetics in the writing of this instance) and the kids wandered off for the day, stopping in every few hours asking if I had made any money with great hopes of cash being shared.

I had contacted every media that I could and several radio stations mentioned my show amongst the many things happening at the Adelaide Fringe Festival. The Advertiser was going to stop by and interview me and put a story in the newspaper but it would be the next day. In my world attention is attention and I was not very fussed that it would be after the fact, after all a story about the end of my outdoor arts career after twenty-five years was surely a momentous news making event.
Sometime after noon a reporter came along and interviewed me and took some photos; I only had to wait until the next day to finally be written up for my life-long achievements. I did not sell as much as I had anticipated. There were large crowds just across the street going to the Fringe Festival with few diverting themselves to behold the wonders that were hanging just meters away in the park. I think I sold less than one dozen picture-poems. I would have lost a few hundred dollars for all the work I had done; framing new pictures as well as the material to make the bloody stupid things and for my printing and posters and god knows what else I spent money on for my last hurrah.

I am so continually disappointed by how things turn out in my life that I did not let it stress me and I had a good evening with the love of my life and our children and we put the disastrous “WORLD’S LARGEST ONE-MAN OUTDOOR ART SHOW ”behind us. After all there was the story about me coming out in the Advertiser the next day. However, to my shock and horror (and what else should I expect) there was no mention of me in the paper the next day.

I even rang the person who interviewed me who said because there were so many events occurring at the fringe that they could not write everyone up and it came down to only enough space for one of two stories that were reported the day before amongst all the other stories reported in the paper. A woman who masturbates on stage superseded the story of my final show. That is the truth and I could not believe it. Some woman who had once been a prostitute and was now a lesbian (I surely have no problems with either of those except when they replace my story) did a show with various monologues about sex and other things – though from what I read and from what a friend that went to see her said – there was no other topic covered but sex.  The climax of the show was to have the audience ring bells as she masturbated and the harder they rang them the more she got into it. She said it was art and it was one of the big attractions at the fringe. According to my friend who went to see her, the audience was heavily populated with middle-age men. To this day, eight years later, I am still pissed off by all that. But within a few days, back then, I had laid out my new business idea - to sell my picture-poems in packs of a dozen to shops, mainly florists and I made up a series of cardettes with about ten poems in each.

Dear Dad
Sorry haven't written - I turn around and it is already another month gone by. I will have to stop turning around so much.
Have to leave in fifteen minutes for basketball for Sacha - so just a hello.

Hello

And a bit more...my thing in the park went well sold hundreds of dollars of stuff. Now I'm just selling to shops. Sold my first dozen ($7 each) yesterday - so at $84 a batch - and I hope to have them in a few hundred shops - one group of shops have 41 across the country and they may put them in all of them. Of course I hope they will reorder batches every few weeks.

School...doing my Masters and I have yet to start - two months behind already - but I spaced it over two years and now I will hop into essay writing for the next few months and try to get caught up.

We still hope to move to the States Feb. 1997 - I can finish my Masters there as I do it off campus anyway and much of it is done through computers anyway. I hope to have a large number of stores stocking my picture-poems (they're different now - I'll send some or at least one - I don't write on them anymore - do it all on computer and use different letterings (fonts) - much more professional. So if I have a lot of shops here I would send stock from the States.
Do you know any elderly person who has a large house where we could live and care take and all until I get money rolling in next year?
We sadly no longer have puppy. Last week I went out and told the children not to let the dog out as there was a dog in heat down the street - but did they listen? Of course not. So puppy ran off with another dog. The other dog returned two days later ours never did. I looked for a week - but to no avail. So we've had no television on for a couple of weeks in hopes that the children will learn to listen next time I say something. March 29, 1996

29. Australia's newest and grooviest citizen says OK

Terrell Neuage, (dual citizen USA/Australia) is a South Australian/New York poet, writer, and digital artist known for his evocative poetry and extensive research on conversational analysis in on-line communciations (including communication in the AI era; from sharing information to making sense of it). His best-selling autobiographies;Leaving America (Before the After) & Leaving Australia (after) – exploring life as a hippie, brother in a California Cult (Holy Order of MANS) as Brother Terrell Adsit, Astrolger (40-years) to non-believer, and adventures in Australia, single parent, tofu manufacturer/street artist, China, the USA & fifty+ other ountries. From high school drop out, Shenendehowa Central School, Clifton Park, New York at age 16, back to school at age 44 (BA & Masters from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia) to PhD from the University of South Australia at age 58 to knocking on your door at age 77.