New Narratives: Stories and Storytelling in the Digital Age

Introduction

Introduction ruth page and bronwen thomas In recent years developments in digital technology have played a significant role in the transformation of narrative theory and practice. Stories that exploit the capacity of digital media (that is, those that necessitate the computer for their production and display) have provided vital new territory against which the tools of narrative analysis could be tested and refined. As such, technological innovations from the 1980s onward have been pivotal in providing an alternative to the conventions of print media narrative, allowing those working in narrative theory to scrutinize the nature of narrative production and reception from a fresh perspective. By the 1990s a wealth of criticism was available that made radical claims for a narrative revolution in the light of hypertext, gaming, muds, and moos (Douglas 1992; Aarseth 1997; Landow 1997; Murray 1997; Hayles 2001). This criticism engaged with a range of narrative concepts, including questions about plot, event structures, and temporality, as well as questions about how stories are produced and experienced, debated in relation to matters such as interactivity, immersion, and agency. At the start of the twenty-first century, much has changed both in the kinds of narratives that are now available in digital media and in the approaches taken to analyze them. The hypertexts of the 1980s published on cd-rom by Eastgate have acquired almost canonical status, and have since been supplemented by “born digital” hypertext narratives, that is, digital fictions that were created to use Internet applications to link to sites beyond themselves. Meanwhile, the development of multimedia software such as Adobe’s Flash in the mid-1990s enabled creators to integrate an increasingly sophisticated multimodal range of resources into digital texts. While visual and verbal elements have always been present in digital fiction—for example, in the use of icons, illustration, and layout—in early hyperfiction the textual content remained central. Typically, narra1 2 Introduction tive was carried primarily in the verbal elements of the text, and navigation was enabled through hyperlinked words (illustrative examples are found in Deena Larsen’s Disappearing Rain [2001] and Geoff Ryman’s 253 [1997]). What Kate Hayles (2003) describes as the second wave of digital fiction enriches the multimodal capacity of electronic literature. No longer are words so prominent, but graphics and animation are just as likely to communicate story content or be used as part of the interactive interface . Contemporary examples include the quasi-cinematic qualities like Pullinger and Joseph’s ongoing work Inanimate Alice, or the visual richness of Fisher’s These Waves of Girls (2001). Increased access to and usage of the Internet has also influenced the creation and reception of narratives in new media.1 Where once the ability to create online text would have entailed specialist knowledge of programming techniques, the advent of what are popularly known as Web 2.0 technologies in the late 1990s has enabled users with relatively low technical skills to upload and manipulate text with unprecedented ease. The ability to harness the textual resources and networking capacities of the World Wide Web has been exploited by a proliferation of storytelling communities. Such communities may explicitly foreground the act of storytelling, as does the Center for Digital Storytelling, or archives like Bubbe’s Back Porch. Other communities have emerged within the wider context of social networking sites, creating new and hybrid stories across modes and genres. The photo-sharing application Flickr has been used to push forward visual storytelling as its users are invited to “Tell a story in five frames” (“Visual Story Telling” ongoing) or document their life story in pictures in the “365 Project.” YouTube, the video-sharing website, is fertile territory not just for audiovisual microclips but for fan-videos and mashing movie trailers—examples that not only demonstrate the creative endeavors of web users but contentious debates over intellectual property and copyright. Alongside this, sites like MySpace have provided platforms for individuals to narrate their life experiences on blogs, journals, and discussion boards. Perhaps the most dominant social network site to emerge in recent years is Facebook, which in 2010 boasted 500 million users worldwide. Facebook is a multifaceted environment for collaborative storytelling ventures and for microblogging as its users narrate episodes of their life histories in status updates, wall posts, and comments. Ruth Page and Bronwen Thomas 3 The development of new narrative forms continues to expand as fast as technological innovation, and faster than can...