Representations of New Media Fiction: Google, Parisians, and User as Character!

The first stories I can remember hearing were those from my grandfather. He said, “Hey kiddo, go grab me a beer, and I’ll tell you a story about Lon Koontz.” I was stunned. My name was Lon Koontz. Who could exist but me? So, I ran through their mobile home to the fridge in desert-hot Arizona and grabbed the man his beer. After a few stories about my great grandfather, he said, “Hey kiddo, go grab me a beer.” Despite the fact that the story had ended and I had already paid for his story by agreeing to grab him the first beer, I went running. I was sold on the product my grandfather was selling. That product was, of course, my grandfather. The dude kicked ass. Here’s a picture:

Before we look too deeply into my psyche and the associations I make (person as product) know that one of the reasons I loved my grandfather was because of the stories he told. I also loved him because he gave me the keys to his car when I was 13 years old and he was a cowboy!

I suspect this paradigm, stories for goods and services, has been true for some time; perhaps it goes back as far as the first words man used to barter goods. “I kill calf two hour ago. Fresh. Guarantee.” What came first the story or the pitch? What came first the story as entertainment or the story as advertisement? I’m not sure what came first advertising or fiction, but I assume they were born at the same moment or were born close enough together to earn the distinction as twins.

I bring this up only because I wish to suggest that advertising is as much a story telling driven line of work as is the labor required of traditional narrative fiction.

Making Users Out of Readers: or Taking Advantage of Web Tools for the Creation of New Literary Forms

In 1996, The Atlantic Online sent Ralph Lombreglia a “Cyber Lit Quiz.” He passed.

Wen Stephenson started the email exchange (something perhaps novel at the time) with this question: “Do you sense that there’s a crisis in our literary culture? And if so, or if there’s just the perception of a crisis, how much of it has to do with new digital, interactive media? Have the Web and other digital media become scapegoats?”

It’s easy enough to peel away the layers of history here. The term “Web 2.0” shows up in 2004, when Tim O’Reilly organized the “Web 2.0 Conference.” The new name didn’t imply a change in the structure of the Web, rather it marked the moment when the Web had grown up. Web applications were born and allowed for diverse new methods of interactivity, including information sharing, interoperability, design, and collaboration. The hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, and blogs that grew in this new space have effectively changed the way we communicate forever. Although the Web may not have changed, the uses we discovered for it had suddenly, and irrevocably changed us. The epistemological shift that occurred as a result has affected every aspect of our society and how we integrate ourselves into it because the Web became another interactive space, something closer to our “real” lives, and, therefore, infinitely richer than any other medium to come before it. This interactivity produces for us a second life, another space to explore what it means to be human, even if the circumstances of that life are conceptually and practically new.

A Defense for Image Based Media in the Novel and Short Story

The novel and the short story are made beautiful for myriad reasons. Not least of which are the self-imposed restrictions each utilizes to provide what we’ve come to expect from “traditional narrative text.” That is, because the novel is essentially letters that form words that form sentences that form even greater structures, it must depend on the wit, skill, and craftsmanship of the writer to evoke an emotional or thought provoking responses in the reader while relying only, in the case of English, on 26 letters. It’s extremely hard to do. It’s why there are so few good books. However, because of developing technologies (developing mediums) and yet another epistemological shift (thanks Internet), the novel and the short story find themselves at a crossroad of sorts, hesitant to continue their journey because neither can see the road or has, at least, forgotten its GPS endowed cell phone with Google Maps.

I joke here about technology because older forms of fiction (again, specifically the novel and short story) have ignored the power and tools new media offers to create new levels of interactivity. That is, because media has changed fiction must also change.

Defining New Media Fiction

Neil Postman, in his wonderful if not dated book Amusing Ourselves to Death, suggests the reading experience is far more powerful than the experience offered by visual mediums. He states, “Whenever language is the principal medium of communication – especially language controlled by the rigors of print – an idea, a fact, a claim is the inevitable result” (51).

The behavior print encourages in the reader versus the behavior encouraged on the part of a viewer is undeniably different. That is, print based mediums are “better” because they allow the reader time to ponder. A sentence can be read and then reread. Television or film, on the other hand, do not allow for such moments. Rather, film and TV are set up to function more like a ticking clock. The movie starts and it doesn’t stop until it ends or the viewer has walked out and moved on. The ability to pause, to reflect, to move backward through a text, as the story unfolds (no doubt we think about films after the credits have rolled and while we watch, but repeat viewings are required to examine finer, salient details that print encourages in the midst of the reading experience) is made simpler because the medium (print) makes such moves easy. In a movie theatre, the audience has no influence, save for angry patrons who might visit the box office to demand the picture or sound be adjusted, over the pace of the story. This creates a different, captive experience, one that discourages interactivity. For now, ignoring that viewer behavior may change in front of TV sets, computers, or mobile devices, we will assume that, for the most part, video makes the same demands as film, no more no less.