Douglas

The extract from J. Douglas’ ‘The End of Books – Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives’ looks at interactive narratives. I likened these to ‘choose you own adventure’ narratives in a previous post and Adrian corrected me – “hypertext is multilinear, whereas choose your own adventure is linear, with different linear options.” Interactive narratives still don’t appeal to me but apparently there are many people who “desire for the inexhaustible story, the mystery that unspools with a fresh cast of suspects instead of gliding quickly through its denouncement to a limited conclusion.” “The book that changes every time you read it” simply doesn’t appeal to me like it does to Douglas. Like Adrian, Douglas makes a clear distinction – “Yet this is no simple ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ scenario where readers can see for themselves that they have exhausted whatever possibilities the narrative held.” Does this mean that the possibilities/endings are endless? Adrian addressed this in a post (thankfully).

Despite the appeal of reading digital hypertext, Douglas says “it is hardly likely that digital media like hypertext are going to supersede books.” I appreciate this stance. I am so sick of people saying things like books are dead or journalists are a dying breed. Humans, like technologies, will adapt and evolve depending on society’s needs. Someone will always be needed to report the news. Douglas used the example of television looking for a niche with the advent of cinema. They found it in video tapes, taking the cinema and putting it on the small screen. Similarly “books as a technology have evolved over the course of hundreds of years through innovations life spacing between words, tables of contents and indices, standardized spelling and grammar etc.” “If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology.”

For the full extract: The End of Books — Or Books Without End?: Reading Interactive Narratives

2 thoughts on “Douglas

  1. Please End It Nicely | Networked Media

  2. Week 6 Symposium | luce.

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