Wil New Media Produce New Narratives ?
This essay takes a critical look at the claim, voiced by many prominent theorists of digital textuality, especially by George Landow and Janet Murray, that the new digital media will deeply transform, or "reconfigure" narrative. This claim can be understood in two ways: (1) digital media transform narrative on the level of story-they create new types of narrative in the semantic sense of the term; (2) digital media affect discourse, but leave story intact. If one adheres to a universalist theory of narrative, by which narrativity is a cognitive pattern that transcends cultures and history, the first interpretation is untenable; it is therefore on the level of the presentation and experience of story, if indeed they convey one, that digital media affect narrativity. But even if "narrative" is regarded as a universal cognitive structure, this structure is flexible enough to encompass a wide variety of forms. The question of the impact of digital media on narrativity thus breaks down into two issues: (1) What types of plot and what narrative themes are compatible with the properties of the medium ? (2) How are these plots and themes presented and experienced ? In this paper I survey the properties of digital media, singling out interactivity as the most distinctive and classifying this feature into distinct types: internal, external, exploratory, ontological, selective, and productive. Each of these types is shown to favor different narrative themes and different variations of the universal narrative structure. Rather than assuming, as the first generation of hypertext theorists has done, that interactivity necessarily works in support of narrative meaning, I regard their compatibility as problematic. The production of new forms of narrative discourse through digital media is therefore the result of a compromise between the properties of the medium and the demands of narrativity: new media must adapt themselves to narrative, as much as they affect the way we experience it. The specific forms of this compromise, as well as the mode of narrativity particular to each case (diegetic vs. dramatic), are discussed separately for the three main entertainment-oriented genres of digital textuality: literary hypertext, computer games, and real-time interaction in a virtual world, such as MOOs and VR installations.
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