The Use Values of Narrativity in Digital Cultures

This article investigates the changing use values of narrativity in the early twenty-first century by focusing on the frenetic expansion of narrative universes. Popular narratives continue to have the power to mesmerize, but now they also serve another function—they exist to be made use of, to be taken up and extended by professionals and amateurs alike. This article looks at two parallel dimensions of this expansion--narrative “world building” and quality serial television. How do we develop a better understanding of how narrativity moves across media when books, films, and television programs are all MP3 files which “play” on the same screens on our personal digital devices?

How does it change the way we tell stories? How does it change how we encounter culture and make it our own? Those questions must be pursued in tandem, because if “narrative theory” is to become relevant again in the twenty-first century, it has to account for how narrative texts—whether they be novels, films, television programs, or web series—are shaped by how we acquire, curate, and “play” them across ever more diversified formats within the devices which are the repositories of all our cultural stuff.