https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i4.032
Electronic Poetry as a Disseminative Tool for Environmental Awareness and Calamity: Re-placement, Reader Interaction, and Accessibility in Lost Water! Remainscape?
MALLIGA N
Ph.D in English
Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts and Science (Autonomous)
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, India
Email: malliganeshan@gmail.com
ORCID: 0009-0006-4631-6475
DR BALAMAYURANATHAN B
Associate Professor
Department of English
Sri Ramakrishna College of Arts and Science (Autonomous)
Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu
Email: balamayuranathan@srcas.ac.in
ORCID: 0000-0002-7588-4862
Abstract: Lost Water! Remainscape? (2021) is a bilingual digital poem by Shanmugapriya T that reconstructs the vanishing waterscape of Coimbatore, South India, a region enduring four decades of acute water stress. While born-digital works are frequently described as disseminative tools for environmental awareness, existing criticism rarely examines how such dissemination is accomplished through form or who is positioned to receive it. This study addresses these questions through a media-specific reading of the work as it executes in a browser. The analysis demonstrates that the poem disseminates awareness via “re-placement”, rebuilding the lost environment in three dimensions and gating its text behind embodied interactions performed by the reader. This process produces awareness through immersion, cultivated nostalgia, and the remediation of archives into participatory experiences. However, findings reveal that the same interaction-gated design binds the work’s reach to the bodily, technical, and infrastructural capacities of the reader, leading to structurally uneven dissemination. For instance, mobility impairments or platform instability can effectively block access to the poem’s meaning. This article concludes that reading electronic poetry as environmental communication requires attending not only to what a work makes perceptible but to how its form distributes or withholds that perception. Consequently, accessibility must be treated as a primary critical category for evaluating environmental dissemination rather than a technical afterthought.
Keywords: Electronic Poetry, Digital Ecocriticism, Water Scarcity, Dissemination Tool, Accessibility
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