narrative

A concept that has been reguarly used in this paper is the idea of 'narrative'. Now narrative theory is too big of a topic to go into for this post, so I am going to focus on how hypertext narration differs from the conventional in one way; interaction. Kevin told us in his lecture that narrative is a mediated experience, and in terms of the narrative interaction of the web, this is very true.

Per Persson notices that a key element to any narative is the strive for coherence by the reader/watcher/listener etc; a complete story. However, it can be said that a surfer of the internet is usually web browsing, jumping from topic to topic, being inconsistant in how narrative is constructed. Stephanie Gibson says that the internet "values relevant connections between pieces of information". And so the navigational skills that web surfers have to use to work their way around the internet, needs to be supported by websites and their designers. This is easy to spot. Think of names like internet explorer, the use of links at the end of online articles, and the search abilities that google has placed on many sites, myspace being a big one. They are paths, not to better pages or sites, but to comparable material. The style of the web's narrative is multiple, via associations, links, and choices. Jim Bizzochi sums it up well by saying that "story is not just developed in the telling, or the showing, but also in the doing".