The Heaviness of Light

Abstract

This text explores the material implications of electronic reading and writing in the Anthropocene. It does so by briefly examining the consequences that the production and usage of electronic devices has on ecosystems and social contexts. Different perspectives on how a reader or writer may deal with the negative effects of sociotechnical systems are offered: restraint, pharmacological awareness and togetherness. Such perspectives can be transformed into reading and writing tools for the Anthropocene that may allow readers and writers of electronic literature to integrate the notion of an extended community, that is, an intimate and paradoxical complicity with nearby and remote humans and non-humans, and invite them into the digital text.