Maria Engberg reviews Funkhouser and Drucker
Maria Engberg wrote an interesting review of two books relevant to digital poetry: Chris Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetry--An Archeology of Forms (1959-1995) and Johanna Drucker's Speclab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Engberg says:

I have a different take on this subject, I think, than Engberg's. Digital/literary work that deals with Twitter, say, is not simply somebody tweeting. Instead, we see work like The Longest Poem in the World. This is a programmerly work that creates rhyming couplets out of a Twitter feed of thousands of people tweeting. When I just visited, it had written 1,353,298 verses. It's constantly adding more verses.
Similarly, digital/literary art that deals with Facebook won't simply be someone writing status updates or links or notes or whatever other functionality Facebook provides. It will, like The Longest Poem in the World, operate not simply within the social media app's system, but will take it and its contents as 'feed'.
Say, thanks for mentioning this, it reminded me to pick up “Speclab…” at the local research library.
Interesting book so far. I think of a counterexample or objection for pretty much every paragraph, (Drucker seems to be unaware of AI research in user modeling and agent-centered theories of communication, to begin with) but I agree with its basic points about the importance of “partial, situated, and subjective knowledge.”
Thanks for your comments on my review. I was not aware of the Twitter example “The Longest Poem in the World” so that was really useful for my continued thinking about the relationship of literature and social media. I hope that we can continue the discussion somehow.
Hi Maria. You say “The modernist poetics of digital poetry that Funkhouser describes…”
Why “modernist”? I would have thought that the digital poetry that Chris Funkhouser writes about is usually better described as ‘postmodern’ or whatever is past that.