Spime: an agency text & digital rhetoric

 What is a Spime text?

https://www.technorhetoric.net/28.2/memoriam/johnson-eilola-2012/poly-act.html

Johndan Johnson-Eilola (2010) - among text-  traces the development of text from artifact to product to gizmo to (the as-yet not completely realized) “spime.” The key developments in this broader use of “text” that Johnson-Eilola sees for digital rhetoric occur in the articulation of text as “gizmo” and as “spime.” Johnson-Eilola argues that “text in the gizmo format represents a dramatic departure from text as product . . . as gizmos, texts are highly unstable and user-alterable in ways that printed texts are not: They can be moved around, recombined, and transformed” (43). The “spime” takes on the qualities of the text-as-gizmo but is also semiautonomous and networked (Johnson-Eilola 2010, 44). Cory Doctorow (2005) sums up Sterling’s definition of “spime” as:

 

a location-aware, environment-aware, self-logging, self-documenting, uniquely identified object that flings off data about itself and its environment in great quantities. A universe of Spimes is an informational universe, and it is the use of this information that informs the most exciting part of Sterling’s argument (n.p.).

Exemple:

User trackers on blogweb pages are good examples of agentive texts.In these images, we can see a visitor tracker located on a blog called The Innovative Educator. On these weblog pages, we can see that the author/writer of the site has a lot of information about his audience, such as: the number of daily visits, the number of pages each visitor accesses, which pages are most accessed, the most read texts, the flag, country, state and city where the people who visit him/her live, how people get to his/her site, whether through a search engine, links on other sites, what is the operating system, browser, screen size and other information about the visitors' machines. Not to mention that there is a direct message box for the author. 

See the article by Professor Giselda Costa - Spimes texts: creating new trails in the route of textual linguistics

We are similarly disturbed by texts that act (react, act, or interact). On one hand, the stable text is something we have mastery over. On the other hand, the stable text has mastery over us. As I've mentioned elsewhere, we spend significant parts of our education learning how to appreciate texts, our "mastery" of them something akin to a priest's knowledge of Latin. Or a rabbi in Prague writing "truth" on the golem's forehead. (Johndan Johnson-Eilola, 2011).