Modern literacy has always meant being able to both read and write narrative in the media forms of the day, whatever they may be. Just being able to read is not sufficient. According to Jason Ohler, author of several publications on new media and digital storytelling, being able to read and write multiple forms of media and integrate them into a meaningful whole is the new hallmark of literacy.
Explaining narrative and new media
For a better understanding of writing narratives with new media, some explication on both concepts, „narrative“ and „new media“, is essential. A simplistic definition describes narrative as a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious; or a book, literary work, etc, containing such a story. Narrative can also be seen as the art, technique, or process of narrating. /8/ Marie-Laure Ryan (2004, p. 337) gives a more sophisticated definition characterizing a narrative text as „one that brings a world to the mind (setting) and populates it with intelligent agents (characters). These agents participate in actions and happenings (events, plot), which cause global changes in the narrative world. Narrative is thus a mental representation of causally connected states and events that captures a segment in the history of a world and of its members.“ In media terms, narrative is the coherence or organisation given to a series of facts. The human mind needs narrative to make sense of things – we connect events and make interpretations based on those connections. In everything we seek a beginning, a middle and an end. We understand and construct meaning using our experience of reality and of previous texts. /9/ Therefore, narratives play an essential role in our lives.
New media, the second fundamental concept, is a rather broad term that emerged in the later part of the 20th century to encompass the amalgamation of traditional media, such as film, images, music, spoken and written word, with the interactive power of computer and communications technology, computer-enabled consumer devices and most importantly the Internet. /10/ The initially expensive and difficult world of new media has quickly become so inexpensive and easy to use that anyone with an average computer and a small budget is able to actively create rather than just passively consume media. The rise of new media has increased communication between people all over the world and the Internet. It has allowed people to express themselves through blogs, websites, pictures, and other user-generated media. We live in the Digital Age. What does it mean? Quoting Ohler, on a technical level: we are bathed in bits; on an emotional, humanistic level: we are immersed in stories. In other words, the Digital Age has unleashed the Storytelling Age. /13/ We all get to tell our stories in our own way on the great stage of the Internet. This is our time; quite literally as Time Magazine named „us” as the person of the year on the cover of the December 25, 2006 issue. /17/
Do new media produce new narratives?
Knowing the definitions, we can go on to pose a question whether new (digital) media also produce new narratives. Ryan (2004, p. 337) starts Chapter 12 in her book Narratives across Media: the Languages of Storytelling with the following question: „Who should we follow: George Landow, who claims that hypertext will reconfigure the narrative experience by turning readers into coauthors; Janet Murray, who regards digital media as a new stage on which old narratives will be replayed in new dimensions (as the title of her book Hamlet on the Holodeck suggests); Espen Aarseth, who thinks that the future of cybertexts lies not in storytelling but in computer games; or Katherine Hayles, who equates digital meaning with complexity, fragmentation, fluidity, resistance to totalization, aporia, paradox, emergence, or self-organizing capabilities – features more likely to bring in a post-narrative, post-human literature than to transform the basic conditions of narrativity?“
When we think of traditional narratives, we usually rely on a sequence of events. Most old media objects such as print fiction, newspapers, television shows, and cinema, normally tell stories, which have a beginning and an end. But how is it with the sequence in new media? Lev Manovich (2001, p. 194-195) argues that „after the death of God (Nietzsche), the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, text, and other data records.“ According to Manovich, the fundamental forms of new media are therefore the database and the algorithm, a sequence of simple operations a computer can execute to perform a given task. In computer function, the algorithm plays process „yang“ to the database’s content „yin“; they are both necessary to the working computer. Video games present an example of the use of algorithm in new media. In pursuing the goal associated with winning a game, the player usually follows a simple implied instruction set, an algorithm. The pursuit of this goal through the algorithmic set of instructions is what gives the player the experience of a narrative.
Jenny Vogel, an artist whose work explores the world as viewed through new media technology using web cameras, blogs and Google searches as source material, introduced her 2010 exhibition in New York, The Narrative Arc: Methods of Storytelling in Visual Art, saying that „narratives are based on a sequence of events, no matter how improbable, as long as it sets off an emotional tick, to which subsequent episode can provide an answering tock.“ /20/ According to Vogel, the moving image, the graphic novel, or digital art might be the most obvious media where both text and image collide, providing a bridge between the two disciplines. The two distinct examples of new media narratives, video games and visual art, indicate the existence of a variety of different ways in which a story can be unfolded in new media environments, yet they still rely on some form of sequence and relationship, connecting the „yin“ with its „yang“ or the „tick“ with its „tock“.
But let us come back to the more ubiquitous meaning of storytelling and narratives. In everyday situations, we usually do not think in terms of algorithms, and not all of us are gifted to convery images into meaningul stories, yet we all create narratives and we all leave an imprint. Storytelling has been with us for thousands of years, but during the age of new media it has taken on new expression and new meaning. It is with the variety of digital tools that ordinary people can finally tell their own real-life stories. Within half of a century, we have shifted from the consumption based storytelling culture (the traditional mass media) to a culture that listens and tells stories. According to Ohler, the lag time between new media evolving from read-only to write-possible is shrinking dramatically. He describes the current era as the beginning of Web 3.0 – an intelligent, semantic ecosystem that inevitably we will all „write“ by virtue of how we create content. It is a read-write web within everyone’s grasp and it promises to change anything we do that is web-based – in other words, absolutely everything. /11/
Today, with just a little training, the least technical among us can create a basic weblog in minutes. With a little experience, we can turn our blogs into media-rich information sources thanks to YouTube, SlideShare and other services that make it easy for the non-technicians to produce their own media. The new media diaries substitute the traditional paper diaries. Books still exsist, but they are often read on digital devices such as Kindle or most recently the iPad, which means they must also be produced for these new formats. A recently posted YouTube video, A Magazine Is An iPad That Does Not Work, shows how magazines are now useless and impossible to understand, for digital natives. It shows real life clip of a 1-year old, growing among touch screens and print. And how the latter becomes irrelevant. /19/ Writing letters in ink can no longer compete with e-mails. School work is not scribbled in sketchbooks, instead it is posted on blogs. Essays are no longer plain text, instead students are encouraged to create digital stories integrating multiple forms of media. The idea of merging traditional storytelling with today’s digital tools is spreading worldwide and across different fields, most commonly in education.
What are new standards for writing narratives with new media?
Ryan (2004, p. 338) singles out five properties of digital media as the most fundamental that affect narrativity: reactive and interactive nature, multiple sensory and semiotic channels (multimedia capabilities), networking capabilities, volatile signs, and modularity.
These properties are used to create new media narratives, such as distributed narratives, spread across time, space and the network; sequential fragmented narratives, segmented and ordered into small chapters or tweets and made available to a broad audience; aggregated narratives, which use algorithm or search to draw the narrative together; spatial narratives, embedded into real geographical locations with itineraries for exploring the novels parallel in real and virtual world. New media offer a wide range of new ways to present stories as well as new modes of user involvement: exchanging stories in real time, impersonating a character, and participating in the collective creation of a story. Narrating in new media environments is liberating and demanding at the same time. „We increasingly have affordable and ubiquitous tools to help us communicate and enrich engaging narratives. We now need a new generation of leaders to put these tools to good use,” says John Hagel, co-chairman at Center for the Edge. /4/
A lot of discussion on new media narratives has been around its non-linearity. Various authors have questioned whether some of the new media narratives can be called narratives at all. I had a great chance to listen to Pedro Monteiro, a Portuguese graphic designer, on the INMA European Conference 2011 in Lisbon. Discussing narratives for digital distribution, he confronts these critics by bringing examples of traditional (print) narratives that are non-linear, because of physical space constraints that pages impose and the way graphic design copes with it. Pictures, text, captions, etc, all relate to the story being told, but the way the bits of the story are laid out reinforces its non-linearity. Monteiro does not focus on the timeline, but on interruptions of the narrative itself. He explains how we can prevent it on digital publishing. In a good storytelling experience, a linear one, each item that exists to aid the main story is placed in an exact location. In a digital narrative, storytellers are not obligated to choose text over audio, or pictures over video. They must choose the best way to communicate each bit, each episode. The choice should flow from the content itself. Added material for a story must be presented in a way that can either be fully explored by a reader, or moved forward, without loss for the narrative experience. The final linear narrative will be a flow of content, presented using every digital tool available. Monteiro believes that with the advent of digital devices and rich new ways of shaping content, it is time to rethink how we produce and present our stories. /7/
An interesting form of new media storytelling is transmedia storytelling, also known as multiplatform storytelling. It is the technique of telling stories across multiple platforms and formats using current digital technologies. From a production standpoint, it involves creating content that engages an audience using various techniques to permeate their daily lives. In order to achieve this engagement, a transmedia production will develop stories across multiple forms of media in order to deliver unique pieces of content over multiple channels. Importantly, these pieces of content are not only linked together, but are in narrative sync with each other. /18/ As of 2011, both traditional and dedicated transmedia entertainment studios are beginning to embrace transmedia storytelling techniques in search of a new storytelling form. Developing technologies have enabled projects to now begin to include single-player experiences in addition to real-time multiplayer experiences such as alternate reality games.
Some notable examples of transmedia storytelling include: Cathy's Book, a transmedia novel by Sean Stewart; Slide, a native transmedia experience for Fox8 TV in Australia; ReGenesis, a Canadian television series with a real-time transmedia (alternate reality game) extension that took place in sync with the episodes as they aired. To further explain this, let us take Slide. The Australian teen drama series follows the lives and exploits of five teenagers making their way into adulthood in the city of Brisbane, Queensland. The series is multi-platform and encourages the viewer to view extra content online via apps and social networking such as Facebook and Twitter. Webisodes of events that take place before and after episodes are also available on YouTube. /16/
Another form of writing narratives with new media is microblogging. I consider it quite an opposite practice. While transmedia storytelling uses multiple forms and platforms to permeate our daily lives, microblogs consist of small elements of content such as short sentences, individual images, or video links. /6/ For example, the 140 Novel, a Twitter-based novel by three people writing a single sentence each time in a single account. That is where the name 140 comes from, the character limit on Twitter. /1/ Similarly, Facebook Timeline will soon offer the social network users to tell their life story in a short but telling way, with a new kind of profile composed of the most memorable posts, images, and a new class of social apps that let the users express who they are through the things they do. /3/
These are only a few possibilities offered by new media to produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience. And it remains the storyteller’s choice to decide on the best technique to communicate the story.
Why do we need narratives so bad?
Hagel discusses narratives and their place in this post-modern era. According to Hagel, narratives provide stability and continuity in our lives. When confronted with a growing barrage of demands on our attention, they help us to filter, select and prioritize what should receive our attention. By inviting people to take initiative, narratives encourage people to lead. They also help participants construct meaning, purpose and identity for themselves, to situate participants in a broader context and to build relationships across participants. At their most profound level, narratives help to ignite and nurture passion within us. /4/
Ohler adds from the educational perspective, that being able to actively create rather than just passively consume new media is important for the obvious reason that it teaches literacy and job skills that are highly valued in a digital society. Hands-on media creation plays an important role in the development of media literacy – the ability to recognize, evaluate, and apply the techniques of media persuasion. Writing media compels reflection about reading media, which is crucial in an era in which professional media makers view young people largely in terms of market share. Thus, a new dimension of literacy is now in play – namely, the ability to adapt to new media forms and fit them into the overall media collage quickly and effectively. „Committing a bad story to digital media is like giving a bad guitar player a bigger amplifier,“ he says. /12/
Center for Digital Storytelling, an international nonprofit training, project development, and research organization, assists youth and adults around the world in using digital media tools to craft and record meaningful stories from their lives and share these stories in ways that enable learning, build community, and inspire justice. /2/ At the core of their work is a commitment to narrative, an enduring respect for the power of individual voices and a deep set of values and principles that recognize how sharing and bearing witness to stories can lead to learning, action, and positive change. Storytelling has a history rich in timeless skills, perspective and sense of audience. Good teaching is often a matter of good storytelling.
In conlusion
To conclude, I would say that new media do produce new narratives. To me the biggest and perhaps the most important difference that comes with this change is that now everyone is able to tell stories, rather than only read or listen. This fact by itself creates a variety of different narrative forms.
What does not change is the reason why we produce narratives. That is to make sense of things around us, to understand and construct meaning. Therefore, I also agree with Ryan (2004, p. 354) when she says that „digital media have no more impact on the cognitive model through which we filter texts and make sense of human action than the experiments of postmodern fiction. The texts supported by digital media may satisfy to various degrees the universal cognitive model, or they may produce creative alternatives to a narrative experience, but they do not and cannot change the basic conditions of narrativity.” No matter how high tech we become, telling stories to each other orally will endure as one of our primary and most powerful forms of communication. It will always be an important skill to have in the workplace, in our communities and in our schools. „Bottom line: No matter how sophisticated our technology becomes, the future of digital storytelling will involve writing and conventional forms of literacy,“ says Ohler. /12/ A short YouTube video, Change Your Words, Change Your World, beautifully empasizes this powerful role of words. /15/
However, digital media affect narratives. They offer new modes of user involvement and new things to do with narrative: exchange stories in real time, impersonate a character, and participate in the collective creation of a story. They also produce new ways to present stories, which necessitate new interpretive strategies on the part of users. However, the impact of digitality on narrative is not a matter of developing a new logic but, rather, a matter of finding the right fit between the medium and the form and substance of the narrative content. Technological innovations liberate new narrative energies and exploit new possibilities, but „the survival of narrative does not depend on its ability to adapt itself to new media. Rather, it is the future of new media as a form of entertainment that depends on their ability to develop their new forms of narrativity,” concludes Ryan (2004, p. 356).
