Newswise — Once upon a time, the internet could be defined by the most technical of definitions — a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to link several billion devices worldwide.

Today, and arguably always, it’s a living and breathing organism that can’t be so succinctly limited by the parameters of its technical definition.

In his new book, “The Internet Unconscious,” Sandy Baldwin unwraps the layers of the artistry that comprise the emerging field of electronic literature and explores what falls into the literary category in a digital age.

Baldwin, associate professor of English and director of the Center for Literary Computing, proposes electronic literature be analyzed as an understanding of the net as loosely linked collocation writing practices and materials ranging from fundamental TCP/IP protocols to CAPTCHA and Facebook; as a broad field that organizes these practices and materials into text (and into textual practices of reading, archiving, etc.), and into an aesthetic institution of 'electronic literature'; and as a project engaged by a subject, a commitment of the writers' body to the work of the net.

“The internet is with us all the time: it is where we communicate, work, and play,” he said.

“I'm constantly amazed by its presence in my life and also how much I forget it or don't notice it. This is the "unconscious" in the book's title, and I hope readers will share in this amazement and gain new ways of understanding the net.”

“The Internet Unconscious” was published by Bloomsbury Publishing.

As coordinator of the WVU Center for Literary Computing, Baldwin facilitates interdisciplinary research projects in the poetics of new media and the media ecology of literary institutions, using web-technologies, multimedia, hypertext, audio/video, and virtual environments.

Baldwin’s scholarly work explores media technologies as rhetorical and aesthetic objects, asking how media structure our thought and experience. His particular focus is on continuities and borrowings between literary theory and theories of digital multimedia.

His current research areas include: net art as a literary genre, avant-garde writing as a precursor of multimedia, the narrativity of computer games, and the cultural implications of nanotechnology.

For more information, please contact Sandy Baldwin at [email protected] or at (304) 293-9703.