Storyworlds on the Move: Mobile Media and Their Implications for Narrative

"And yet there was something very San Jose about the lynching," and at that moment my ears and eyes perked up. The midday sun beating down on me in St. James Park was sapping my interest in exploring San Jose and making the screen of my mobile phone nearly impossible to see. But now the heat, the bright sun, and the mild irritation of earlier technical difficulties melted away as my attention shifted to finding the two "lynching trees" described by the voice emanating from my mobile phone. Who was lynched? Why were they lynched? And why was this done in a typically "San Jose" manner? I was intrigued.

As I stood in the middle of the park and listened to Scott Herhold of the San Jose Mercury News tell the story of the lynching of a local scion's abductors, I was part-way through an afternoon-long exploration of central San Jose by way of the mobile media art project [murmur] (Shawn Micallef, James Roussel, Gabe Sawhney, 2003–). First produced in Toronto, Canada, and now with additional versions running in San Jose, Vancouver, Montreal, and other locations worldwide, [murmur] collects personal anecdotes linked to specific locations in a subject city that are submitted by local residents and then makes these audio vignettes available to a participant or passerby via mobile phone. As such, [murmur] is in the vanguard of a growing number of art and entertainment projects that capitalize on the ubiquity, portability, and interactivity of the mobile phone and at the same time attempt to incorporate the practice of storytelling.

What follows is a discussion that attempts to categorize some of the genres of this nascent media form. Drawing on my experience as a participant in as well as a creator and theorist of new mobile-media practices, I also raise some questions about how storytelling both shapes and is shaped by mobile media; hence I am concerned with how the intricacies of mobile projects might inform our understanding of narrative—and vice versa. As our twenty-first-century, always-on/always-connected lifestyle becomes increasingly mobile, participatory, and location-aware, it necessitates that communicative and artistic practices be conducted in a format that embodies those characteristics. Therefore, I think it critically important to explore reciprocal, two-way influences between narrative viewed as a structure for communication and understanding and the mobile media that are altering how we engage with one another and the world.

In characterizing the mobile-media projects discussed below as narrative projects, I draw on a conception of narrative outlined by Marie-Laure Ryan (2006). For Ryan, narrativity can be defined "as a scalar property, rather than a rigidly binary property," meaning that practices that are recognizably narrative in nature will still have degrees of "storiness" (7). This account allows me to consider projects like [murmur], which consists of numerous brief anecdotes that are not organized in any kind of overarching narrative trajectory, by focusing on what they show about the functions and uses of narrative in a mobile and locative application. Facilitating everything from collections of more or less discrete micro-narratives to more comprehensive and linear narrative trajectories, mobile projects display the same variation in degrees of narrativity that we find in other storytelling media. Furthermore, as an interactive narrative form, mobile media narratives are subject to the same dilemma that Ryan (2009) noted in her article for the inaugural issue of this journal: granting the participant full autonomy of authorial choices satisfies desires for agency but sacrifices a meaningful arc; conversely, limiting the user's choices, as in some hypertext fiction, maintains a more focused narrative trajectory, but the choice mechanisms are horribly intrusive and limiting (44–45). As I have argued elsewhere (Ruston 2006), however, the kinds of interactivity afforded by mobile media can be more flexible and seamless than those made possible by a hypertext or console game. Indeed, given the close association between mobile media and location, mobile-media projects can provide a bridge between real world and storyworld that features both intense interactivity and robust...