The field of New Media writing is one that, despite the attention of its practitioners, critics, and audience, seems yet to have benefited from the establishment of specific conceptual criteria. Although now, more than ever, it seems crucial to be able to make such determinations -- and to do so with frank integrity -- there is a pervasive lack of articulation of such aesthetic values. How can this be? Certain specific historic events might have contributed to this general lack of discrimination. These events include modes of presentation of e-literature, the context of poetry awards, and certain specific conferences (with the problematic of the general keynote). Further complicating these factors is the attraction to conservative artistic frames that seem an inevitable reaction to the volatility that attends a new medium. Further inhibiting the development of articulated aesthetic criteria is the general tendency of the literary community to reach for those works that, though at times somewhat illusive: (1) in form, tend to be remediations of familiar literary idioms (the "analog online"), and; (2) in content, tend to present material that is easily consumable and inherently graspable. The latter tendency towards ultimately graspable works is one that has characterized most arenas of contemporary art, poetry, narrative, film, music, and print and broadcast media production, as well as software design. However, the concussive effect of such a lack of criteria has potentially more devastating implications in a medium that, in its nascent period, looks to its critics and practitioners for discrimination, direction, and critical frame.
How do we establish an aesthetics of new media literature? This chapter suggests that distinctions might be drawn from shifting our frame of reference away from those produced by the historic events above. Such a shift of frame might be effected by: (1) examining our predisposition to book technology as an enduring and inviolable paradigm; (2) drawing a distinction between an interface-assembled literary construction and an independent information object, and; (3) exploring the concept of programmability as a defining criterion for digital media literature. Though we have unambiguously made similar classes of distinctions in the codex medium, we seem frozen in the headlights of digital interfaces, blinded to the materiality of code that works. At this juncture, making such aesthetic distinctions is not only appropriate to our roles as artists and critics but crucial to the emergence of a definition of the necessary paradigm of an independent, programmable digital literary object. Drawing such a definition can give the discipline a sense of itself that allows it, for once and for all, to move beyond frames of the codex medium. It is time to begin to delimit such aesthetic parameters.