Ten Mobile Texts

"Several of our writers speak of being drawn to digital media writing because of the opportunities it affords to challenge and explore the implications of electronic communication forms. None is more explicit in this purpose than Nick Montfort.

As Montfort says in his contributor’s note, 'New media writing allows for different sorts of investigation than do other types of writing. Whether we write in forms given to us by digital systems and industries (Web pages, email messages, SMS messages, and so on) or make special use of the computer's capabilities as an interactive, multimedia machine capable of processing, we also have a unique ability in this type of writing to address the transformations that our society is undergoing due to computing and the network.'

Montfort’s 'Ten Mobile Texts' confronts the inherent limitations of SMS texts. Mature literary forms like the sestina, epic, and ballad morph into radically different forms when filtered through SMS compression. Constrained to employ a maximum of 160 characters, communication itself fundamentally changes. Far from being a dry, academic text, Montfort’s piece is suffused with humor. As he writes, things 'have just become spaces and words.'" -- From The New River Journal