Linda Aukett

Characteristics:

• => production and distribution of information rather than goods;
• => electronic rather than physical transport of the product (information);
• => workplace defined as an electronic network rather than a physical location.

  Values:

• => thinking outside the box--or rejecting the notion of boxes altogether
• => cooperative problem solving
• => tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty,open-endedness
• => associative rather than linear (logical)thinking

  What does this have to do with storytelling?

• To some extent, the medium is the message -- or at least the medium affects the message.
• The media available for storytelling depend the state of technological development.
• The prevailing world view privileges some media over others.

  Stories and Media: The Oral Storyteller

• Mnemonic devices (repeated phrases, choruses, etc.) help the storyteller keep track of where he is.
• The storyteller has the flexibility to adapt the story to the given audience and situation.
• Audience participation, especially in the form of singing choruses, cheering or hissing, etc, are an expected part of the storytelling.
• Oral storytelling is often a ritualized community occasion.

  Stories and Media: The Print Text

• Writing and reading are essentially solitary activities.
• Unlike the audience during oral storytelling, the reader does not actively participate in creating the story.
• Writers and readers may be separated by thousands of miles and hundreds of years.
• The text is unchanging and thus seems unchangeable, giving it a kind of authority.

  Stories and Media: Non-print Texts

• Generally, non-print texts don't have the physical and thus the psychological permanence of print texts.
• Non-print texts such as recorded music and films are produced by a number of specialists working together; there is no single "author."
• Hypermedia texts
  1. => have no physical permanence;
  2. => may incorporate graphics, sound and motion;
  3. => may be interactive, making the reader a co-author.

  Mutable Texts

• Stories told through electronic media tend to aim at creating a complex, variable, open-ended experience rather than a fixed, author-controlled, plot-driven sequence of events with a specific ending.
• Because an electronic text has no physical permanence, it can be altered and manipulated by both the author and the reader.
• Hyperfiction usually offers choices for the reader to determine what they will read next, what characters will do, etc. The reader, in effect, co-authors the story.
• Films re-released on DVDs often contain additional background and supplemental material that then becomes part of the text.

  Conventional Story Structure

  Characteristics of Conventional Plot

• Conflict creates suspense, which drives the plot toward a resolution.
• The structure is linear and time driven.
• The resolution essentially closes down the story by resolving the climax and thus releasing the suspense.
• In a print text, the plot is fixed--like it or not, that's the way the story ends.
• Irrelevant details are omitted.

  "Realistic" Fiction and Real Life

  So-called realistic print fiction is highly unrealistic:
  1. => details the author deems irrelevant to the plot, character development, setting, etc. are omitted;
  2. => resolution of conflict creates tidy package;
  3. => reader always knows when it will all be over (how many more pages to be read).

  Metafiction

• Does not pretend to duplicate reality;
• Calls attention to itself as constructed or mediated reality.

  Characteristics of "new" electronic storytelling:

  1. => Web-based hypertext can create very rich stories with links to related background material on any aspect of the story or related stories;
  2. => links between incidents can be based on association or chance rather than cause and effect;
  3. => readers can often make plot choices, thus, in effect, co-authoring the story.;

  The Post-modern Age--Again

  Values:

• => thinking outside the box--or rejecting the notion of boxes altogether;
• => associative rather than linear (logical)thinking;
• => cooperative problem solving;
• => tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty,open-endedness.
  

  Can you see how hypertext stories embody these values?

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