Network Media Final Essay

How will changes in medias form and content affect how stories are consumed, distributed and understood?

Lev Manovich states ‘After the novel and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer introduces it correlate; Database’. (Database as symbolic form, 2007).

Many new media objects do not tell stories in the way we are accustomed to consuming them. They do not have a beginning or end, in fact; they don’t have any development thematically, formally or otherwise to be organized into a linear sequence. They appear as a collection of items of which the user can perform various operations; view, navigate, contribute, search. This gives us a sense that the database is destined to become a cultural form of it’s own. A new way to structure our experience of ourselves and the world. ‘text blocks, images, digital video clips, and links to other pages and information- the web offered fertile ground to already-existing database genres’ (Manovich, L. 2007) for instance, bibliography; Wikipedia is our go-to for fundamental information. The open nature of the web as a medium (always able to be edited/updated) means that these stories are never complete- they are always developing, new links are being added to what is already there. This further contributes to the anti-narrative nature of the web, and over time, the result is a collection, not a story. ‘Indeed, how can one keep a coherent narrative or any other development trajectory through the material if it keeps changing? (Manovich, L. 2007)

I think one of the purposes driving interactive narrative and the trend of networked media is the desire for the inexhaustible story. Closure would be something you determined by authorial control, equipped with the network literacy skills to interact, demonstrated by the quote, ‘…trust networks and having access to skills that let you collate and build with these varieties of content and knowledge’ (Adrian Miles, 2007). Developments in network understanding and trusting the validity of connectors allow the coexistence and resolution of many viewpoints, access to social networks and online education, and we can exercise control over content online to a point where producing and consuming lines are blurred. These systems allow choice to the consumer, as to how information is read and shared, links to further information, ideas, ‘rather than observe the narrative, you enter the narrative’ (Douglas, J. 2000). I find this can be problematic, how does the reader become immersed on a narrative journey when they have the responsibility of multiple pathways, choices that lead to disturbances, demise and terror or otherwise wonderful relationships, ever after and nirvana? It would altercate the veracity of imaginative ‘epic’ plots and storytelling thereafter affecting the imaginary role models and characters of pop culture, heroes and villains, and the accolades and agency of author and creator. As Roland Barthes writes, ‘is it universal wisdom? Romantic psychology? We shall never know, for the good reason that writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin…that neutral composite, oblique space where a subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (Death Of The Author, 1967).

Computer games are an interesting example, experienced by their players as narratives; ‘narratives and games are similar in that their user, while proceeding through them, must uncover their underlying logic- their algorithm.’ The reader essentially reconstructs this algorithm, and all the elements the author used to create the settings, characters and events. This formulation of a ‘narrative shell’ employs characteristics of traditional stories and plots but develops differently as it has layered plots; many interfaces- you keep progressing through the levels and have unforeseen consequences. This is one of the ways in which the principle of variability of new media manifests itself. Another example of this is the Sims, Will Wright says ‘playing the game is a continuous loop between the user (viewing the outcome and inputting decisions) and the computer (calculating outcomes and displaying them back to the user). The user endeavors to build a mental model of the computer model’.

THE SIMS 4- MATT GETS LAID (an example of interactive narrative and hypermedia)

 

An interactive narrative or hyper-narrative can then be understood as the sum of multiple trajectories through a database. A traditional linear narrative can be seen as a particular choice made within a hyper-narrative. This change in definition from; ‘a series of connected events’ to ‘a number of database records linked together so that there is more than one trajectory possible’ means that much like the real world, the author has to ‘control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connection so the result will meet the criteria of a narrative’ (Manovich, L. 2007). Roland Barthes writes, ‘Proust himself gave modern writing its epic, by making of the narrator not he who has seen and felt nor even he who is writing, but he who is going to write’. This predisposition for consumers to experience a narrative, to perform in authorial agency and ultimately be consumed by action and emotion defines the gateways to interactive media, new narrative, hyper narrative, blogging, game forums and fan fiction. Barthes writes, ‘ the removal of the Author (a veritable ‘distancing’; the Author diminishing like a figurine at the far end of the literary stage) is not merely an historical fact or an act of writing; it utterly transforms the modern text’. The temporality is different, the secular possession and existence of characters and timely cause-and-effect chains and signifiers would ostensibly change the experience and the epistemological relationship to the moral identity of the characters and the real philosophical ‘story’ behind the narrative.

Our identity exists in the intersection between cultures, social relations, genders, sexuality, networks, discourse and political, geographical and intellectual context among others. These influences are always in a state of flux; of being and becoming. So I can understand Bruno Latour’s argument, ‘To be a realistic whole is not an undisputed starting point but the provisional achievement of a composite assemblage’. And in assembling a ‘plot’, you are essentially conditioning these factors of starting points and endings, but I do not think this influences so much how we consider the world holistically, but rather provides an insight to the parallels of ourselves and exposes this predisposition to consider ourselves and the world in interconnected ties when relationships, connections, emotions, time and place exist in plots for us to ‘try on’ and see for ourselves.

How the Narrative enriches your identity and perspective: 

Indeed, our presentation of this knowledge and narration are different from the way the world really is and exists as seen by society, but they serve to present us with the knowledge and experience of ‘what if’. New media and networked media supersedes these ideas because it serves to develop new ways of narrating information and telling stories by acknowledging real links and examples with specific nonfiction and fiction relationships to support and correlate with information. More in line with our virtual reality of how the world really is can be acknowledged in digital media. We can link to films (like I have done so in this essay) to interrelate ideas and essentially perform what is being narrated. Adrian Miles says that when you step across to stories in networked media, similar things can happen. We can make stories that are collections of pieces that keep changing. They are still stories. The thing we keep coming back to is how, and what sort, they are.

Although new media, the rise of network literacy and interactive media are influential in the way we can consume data, we still thrive on the ‘narrative’, a web of connections, the need to compartmentalize ideas, cause and effect, reach closure and ‘follow’ structure. It is so inherent we don’t even know we are doing it. The idea of narrative embedded within a database such as YouTube- weaving connections between videos, illustrating cause and effect, the passage of time, scandal, history and relationships between ‘characters’ or the relationships of the videos themselves, which are connected at the commencement of the video in a grid-like structure. As an audience conditioned to read narrative structure, it is easy to point this out and follow video after video, weaving a ‘narrative’ of the video subject. Even non-fiction narrative structure is read innately in a narrative tone, we inherently see the beginning, middle and end and cause and effect. For example; Cooking shows; (ingredients, preparation, enjoyment), Biographies; (early life, events and challenges, maturation, reflection). Hypertext, Hypermedia and print are set apart in a kind of binary opposition which emphasize linear vs. non-linear, and sequential vs. non-sequential, but the future in media making and my current understanding from evidence leans toward a system of ‘new’ sequence, not particularly non sequential but rather ‘multi sequential’, or ‘non-traditional sequence’, as Ted Nelson observed in Literary Machines.

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The alleged ‘narrative’ structure of the Youtube vortex: links, connections, relationships between character/form/content. 

This does affect how I will consume and create new media, and will change how we shape and deliver written arguments and how readers will develop new ways of verifying information. Adrian Miles writes, ‘Network literacy means recognizing that there are no longer canonical sources and having the skills to find what it is you think you want…’ Stories and narration will adhere to the cultural pressures of new media; they will ostensibly become collections of links and information, a series of cause-and-effect experiences supported by interconnected relationships, and perhaps will engage with and interact more so on a deeper intellectual level, representing the relationships of existence, as we understand it. But I hope we will still enjoy the irreverent oblivion of a fundamental plot, hopelessly romantic, adventurous and holistically absent from the way the world really is.

 

 

 

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