Once upon a time there was a bloke by the name of Aristotle. He was born into the 300’s BC. He  revolutionised an excessive number of concepts through his philosophical writing on logic, knowledge, as well as biology. It was this historically significant figure who kickstarted the narrative convention of beginning, middle, end.

Beginning… middle… end…

While the beginning and end can be as simple as “hello” and “goodbye”, it was the content which Adrian Miles discussed in the middle of yesterday’s Networked Media Symposium which really got me thinking. That is, films have an opening frame and closing frame, songs have an opening and closing line, beat, or verse. But in terms of the internet, do these conventions still apply?

It should be obvious, at least to me it is, that stories are required to have beginnings and ends, because the mediums or devices telling them have a beginning and end. A book has a last page. The story must finish. Those books who don’t finish are famous for not finishing.  Still, the plot may not end, however the physicality of the text does.  Now with the internet, does this still apply? There is no first page and there is no last frame. The audience chooses their own beginning and end. I , like many others, set Google as my homepage – does that count as my beginning? If I quickly check Facebook before I log off and go consume an alternate form of lazy couch-based media, is that my end?

The way I see it is like one of those wickedly cool ‘choose your own adventure’ books. The point is you have to start somewhere, and there has to be a final moment in time when you are consuming the content of your choice before you call it a night. To try and simplify it a bit, because even I’m a little confused by this; the internet itself is limitless. It has no end. It has no beginning. The content within it however, does. A website has a maximum amount of material you can view at any one time. A blog has a first post, and a last post, and each individual post has a first word and a last word. So yes, even though the internet’s boundaries have not yet been found, without the consumer, without our involvement, it is useless. The consumer creates there own narrative, determined by what material we as the audience want to delve into.

Fin.

(or is it?)