Digital technology easily remediates the narrative arts of all other media (radio, movies, tv, fiction), but it also introduces new possibilities that may challenge our very notions of narrative – that a story needs a beginning, middle and end, for example. Which of the above digital texts engage you most and why? Discuss how we can approach new digital works that present stories in unfamiliar and challenging ways. What are your thoughts/experiences of how the digital, hyperlinks and the web are changing the art of storytelling.
The My Boyfriend Came Back From War by Olia Lialina digital text was most engaging to me due to its interactive nature. This digital text forced you to click in certain areas to expand the story, encouraging participation among the audience. You could almost engineer the story yourself depending on how many times you clicked or where you clicked. Zit allows the viewer to make the story instead of just follow a linear path that the author may have intended. What makes this interesting is the purposeful nature form the author, they knew that they gave this many options and that the story did not follow a path, but instead the path of what the reader picked.
(Olia Lialina)
These types of works can be challenging due to the lack of structure. It can be challenging to follow, but I think to approach this there needs to be more creativity within the mind, and more openness to the wide path a story can take. We need to have an open mind to these experiences, because if we do not we cannot expand our understanding of the stories of the future. This reminds me a lot of just the networks within the internet. There are infinite amounts of paths to take, but each one opens a new door, and I believe this is what Lialina is getting after in this piece.
The art of storytelling is for sure changed by this new medium and experience. We began with oral tradition and words passed down, then to written traditions and finally this visual writing that tells the story in a completely new way. The art of storytelling becomes bigger than ever due to the many ways in which something can be told, and now interpreted. In Lialina’s piece you get fragments of one story but due to the structure it is up to you to decide the chronology and what makes most sense. I felt like I could choose which way to take the story almost like a “choose your own adventure” type of game. The digital changes a lot of this process for story telling just due to the technology that is not present in a novel or just oral tradition.
(Pocket Gamer)