Interactivity and Its Effects on Iconicity in Digital Environments: The Case of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in Gregory Weir’s Reading Game Silent Conversation

Abstract

Interactivity is the hallmark of new so-called 'reading games', in which the reader can play around with digital text in ways that would have been impossible in printed text. These digital environments provide unprecedented possibilities for iconic forms (signs being linked non-arbitrarily to their semantic referents) to flourish: enhanced spatial dimensions and dynamism allow for text to be represented in a multitude of iconic ways. It is, however, interactivity that is truly interesting from an iconicist view: through interaction with experientially iconic text, the reader can retrace text-internal characters’ steps and, in doing so, share the consciousness of those characters that is non-arbitrarily linked to signs in the digital text. This draws the reader into the text, as it were, in a way hitherto unthinkable, and offers great potential for already existing iconic forms to be emphasized and made more tangible. With some technical adjustments, the reader’s state of mind could be iconically reflected directly in digital text of the successors to the reading game under analysis in this thesis: Gregory Weir’s (2009) Silent Conversation. The opportunities this opens up for both writers and readers alike are potentially limitless and should provide for fascinating discussion and research in the field of iconicity for years to come.

Keywords: iconicity, icon, interactivity, experiential iconicity, digital text, sign, silent conversation, diagrammatic, imagic, carroll, alice, wonderland