10.13125/2039-6597/1341
Nell’ambito della cosiddetta rivoluzione digitale ci si impone l’obiettivo di definire come i media cambieranno la nostra vita e le modalita` attraverso cui comunichiamo. L’arte del racconto, uno degli strumenti di comunicazione piu` antichi, sta  anch’essa attraversando una fase di grandi cambiamenti. Quest’articolo analizza l’impatto di tali cambiamenti sui processi di scrittura e di lettura cercando di rispondere alle seguenti domande: la stessa storia raccontata attraverso canali mediatici differenti cambia di significato? In altre parole, in che cosa si differenza una storia presentata su stampa da una su medium digitale? I lettori elettronici hanno cambiato il modo in cui le storie sono create e narrate? Ed infine, in che modo i network digitali stanno cambiando il modo in cui il racconto stesso e’ narrato?
application/pdf
2039-6597
1341
8
en
Anna Notaro
Between
E-readers
How Networked Communication Has Changed the Ways We Tell Stories
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
4
Metamorphoses of Narration
2014-12-18
2014-11-23
2014-11-30
2015-01-13
1
Anna Notaro
2014/12/18
10.13125/2039-6597/1341
University of Dundee (UK)
2039-6597
8
E-readers
en
How Networked Communication Has Changed the Ways We Tell Stories
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1341/1175
4
How Networked Communication has
  changed the ways we tell stories

                              Anna Notaro


                                    Men standing in opposite hemispheres
                                    will converse and deride each other and
                                    embrace each other, and understand each
                                    other's language.
                                                           Leonardo Da Vinci



                                    Storytelling reveals meaning without
                                    committing the error of defining it.
                                                              Hannah Arendt



       In the midst of the digital revolution, we are confronted with the task
of defining how media will change our lives and how we communicate
with each other in the years to come. Narrative, as one of the most ancient
communication tools, has undergone substantial structural changes. This
paper addresses how these changes impact the way we read and write.
Does the same story conveyed through different media channels signify in
the same manner? In other words, what are the differences between a print-
ed story and a digitally presented one? Have electronic reader devices al-
tered the way stories are told and created? And how is networked commu-
nication changing the ways we tell stories? Empowered by technological
advancements, any reader now has the ability to become an author, pub-
lishing her ideas in blogs, revising encyclopaedia entries in Wikipedia, cre-
ating her own fictional world in virtual communities. Can we talk about the


Between, vol. IV, n.8 (Novembre/ November 2014)
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



existence of narrative in this new environment, or has it metamorphosed in-
to what Henry Jenkins has defined as “transmedia storytelling”? While pre-
senting some narrative examples which fit Jenkins’ definition, this paper al-
so aims to discuss possible future developments and opportunities for new,
experimental forms of storytelling. Better the reader be aware though that
not all the above questions will be extensively answered in these pages,
they are in fact the basis of a larger project that I can only sketch out here.



          "Everything, in the world, exists to end up in an e-book"

      In an article entitled “The Many Futures of the Book” (Notaro 2012) I
traced the fascinating history of the e-book reader, from its prophetic antic-
ipations in works of science fiction and the futurist aspirations of modern-
ists artists and writers until “a clunking machine known as Memex” de-
signed by the American engineer Vannevar Bush appeared in 19451. The
pre-Kindle era includes many false starts and speculative projects which
have attempted to disrupt and innovate the printed book through new me-
dia – the Sony’s Data Discman (1990); the SoftBook, the Rocket eBook
(1998), and the eBookMan (1999), to name a few. However, the recent popu-
larization of tablets and e-readers, the emergence of commercial platforms
for production, distribution and sharing of e-books, and the ongoing digi-
talization of printed archives suggest that while digital technology has been
integrated into print publishing processes for decades, a profound material
reformation of how books are produced, distributed, and experienced is
taking place. Hence, it is hardly surprising that controversies around intel-
lectual property, privacy, sustainability, reading (distraction/attention), au-
thorship and the fundamental status of the book as an epistemological ob-
ject regularly arise. The question of how to account for the difference be-
tween reading a text on a computer screen and reading a text on a printed
page is a particularly controversial one. Keith Doubt in his “Ebooks, Deep


      1What I omitted to include in such history were seven fascinating book
machines, among which the “Book Wheel” by Captain Agostino Ramelli
(1588). See Kowalczyk 2014.


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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Reading, and Cultural Lag” (2013) resurrects sociologist George H. Mead’s
1934 distinction between the two parts of the self, the “I” (the impulsive and
instinctive nature of the self) and the “me” (the self’s ability to take the role
of another) to assume that e-books encourage reading with the self’s “I”
while print media encourage reading with the self’s “me”. For example:

        ebooks encourage reading that reflects efficiency, productivity,
     and enjoyment. Readers are more quick, more impulsive, and
     more free to explore the text and its surrounding hyperlinks and
     advertisement in the digital world online. … Reading becomes a
     skimming activity. Readers browse.
        In contrast, print media encourages reading with the self’s
     “me.” Readers take the role of different characters in a work of
     fiction as well as the role of the author who develops these
     characters. … Readers are slower and more reflective. (Ibid.)

Having identified such a clear distinction, Doubt, true to his name, casts
uncertainty upon it only a couple of paragraphs later when he recognizes
that:

        To be honest, it is not that reading with the “me” does not occur
     with digital media. Either way of reading may occur with either
     print or digital media. Kindle, for example, transfers the idea of
     the book from print media to digital media. The book as a
     structure in which reading interaction occurs still exists. Kindle is
     a simulacrum of what the book is. Words are pixels rather than
     ink. (Ibid.)

      Doubt’s candid acknowledgement that the impact of digital media
on reading culture might be more complex than it first appears is in
sharp contrast with the tone of unassailable uprightness typical of
critics of the internet like Nicholas Carr who, in “Is Google making us
Stupid?” (2008) – where the question mark is merely rhetorical
posturing – laments the loss of deep reading (and deep thinking),
while sharing with playwright Richard Foreman the fear that «we risk
turning into ‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect


                                                                                 3
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a
button» (ibid.). Culinary metaphors aside, Carr’s anxieties regarding
the distractions of the digital environment - also articulated in his later
book The Shallows (2011) – are refuted by David Dowling, author of
“Escaping the Shallows: Deep Reading Revival in the Digital Age”
(2014).
      Taking as a premise Henry Jenkins’ percipient observation that «it
is simplistic to assume that technologies can support only one
mindset» (ibid.: 6) associated with scanning and skimming, Dowling
focuses his attention on online reading communities to conclude that
not only they «have seized the tools of social media for deep reading»
(ibid.), thus engaging in «both deep reading and immersion in the
extreme» (ibid.) but also:

         Internet readers of immersive narrative reflect a completeness
      of experience that inspires rather than silences discussion, draws
      out rather than erases the individual reading experience, and
      socializes rather than isolates the pastime of media consumption.
      (Ibid.: 12)

For Dowling online culture has actually enhanced the appreciation of lon-
ger, richer works through its support of "radial reading" as proposed by
McGann, «the person who temporarily stops 'reading' to look up the mea-
ning of a word is properly an emblem of radial reading because that kind of
'radial' operation is repeatedly taking place even while one remains absor-
bed with a text» (ibid.: 19). This type of reading, Dowling argues:

         has never been so rich and rewarding as in the context of the
      online ecosystem, with its readily available search engines and
      social media tools. SMS drives such radial reading in an apparent
      paradox in which brief messaging can aid rather than truncate
      deep understandings and experiences of longer texts, leading to
      further interaction among readers through tools such as email that
      allow for longer nuanced expression. (Ibid.)




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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



      Dowling’s analysis of online reading communities is persuasive
enough. I wish to add to the insights offered so far into the debate
about the current culture of reading I Read Where I Am, (2013) a
publication by designer Mieke Geeritzen and media theorist Geert
Lovink with Minke Kampman, which contains visionary texts about
the future of reading and the status of the word2. Starting from the
consideration that «We read anytime and anywhere. We read on
screens, we read out on the streets, we read in the office but less and
less we read a book at home on the couch» (ibid.). The editors posit that
«We are, or are becoming, a different type of reader. The question
remains which shape will it take and what experience does one want?»
(ibid.). Crucially, the publication’s aim is «to look further than the
current hype around the iPads and Kindles» and to invite the 82
contributors (artists, critics, and designers) to «speculate about the
significance and importance of new forms of image-text in the future»
in order to offer «a guideline for the following generations of ‘reading
machines’» (ibid.).
      I haven’t the space here to dwell at length on the many
penetrating observations offered in this book, besides recalling Lev
Manovich’s claim in his text “From Reading to Pattern Recognition”
that rather than a personal affair, reading has become a communicative
process. I would argue that reading has always been a communicative
process, only the internet has offered an expanded context for it to
occur, a context perfectly apt for exploiting the already inherently
“social” character of literary culture. Word of mouth recommendations
find their Web 2.0 equivalent in online communities of readers like
Goodreads, with the added bonus that the latest Kindle (the current
Paperwhite model is to be superseded by the Voyage one in November
2014) integrates the above mentioned book-centric social network
among its features. Also, the built-in Wi-Fi and 3G allows readers to
see what their friends are reading, share highlights and rate books not

     2There has been a lot of research on digital as against analogue reading,
and the results are decidedly mixed. See Jabr 2013 for a summary of recent
findings.


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Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



only in the context of the Goodreads platform, but on Facebook and
Twitter as well3. As John Paul Titlow notes in his “Keep your Social
Networking out of my book” (2013) the new social reading
environments do not «amount to a full-blown, Facebook-inside-your-
book type of experience» yet, «but the line between social networks
and books is only now beginning to blur» hence, he warns: «Prepare to
get even more distracted» (ibid.). Even a self confessed paper-loving e-
reader holdout like the technology writer Michael Grothaus can’t fail to
envisage a future where «e-books are going to explode beyond just
containing stories, becoming niche social networks where we discuss
our favorite passages with other readers and even authors and
publishers buy our data to make more informed decisions» (Grothaus
2013). So, Grothaus emphatically concludes: «hold on tight, book
lovers. Reading as we know it will soon change, forever» (ibid.).
      It is not only reading that is changing of course, but storytelling
itself. More and more «Top writers look to ebooks to challenge the
rules of fiction» (Thorpe 2013), among such writers are: Iain Pearse
(author of the digital novel Arcadia, 2013) and Blake Morrison, who
sees the success of experimental e-books as depending «on making
interactivity more than just a feature » (ibid.). Morrison aptly reminds
us that «Reading by its very nature is interactive – whether you do it
on an iPad or with a printed book, you participate…The novelist
creates a world and the reader brings something to it. Reading is not a
passive process» (ibid.). While linearity is still recognized by Will Smith
as having «some unavoidable traction for the reader» (endowed with
what McLuhan termed “Gutenberg mind”) publishers like Faber &


      3A competitor of the Goodreads-Amazon alliance was the independent
start app Readmill, which made each and every book its own self-contained
social network. However Readmill «failed to create a sustainable platform for
reading» and was absorbed by Dropbox in March 2014. See the Readmill
“Epilogue” https://readmill.com/ Also, the closure of Readmill has been lin-
ked to the evolution of post-print culture, or what Marshall McLuhan called
“the second orality” (Nawotka 2014).



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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Faber are now urging leading writers to work together with software
developers in order to supersede e-books, «a boring format that just
comes straight out of normal books» (ibid.).
      The answer to the e-books’ uninspiring format is provided by the
tablet, a multi-functional device that supports a wide range of media,
thus opening up new storytelling opportunities and eroding the e-
reader dominance. According to the Adobe Digital Marketing Report
published in 2013, people read at greater length on tablets than on
other devices, hence «tablets could be the device responsible for getting
more people to dive deep into stories» (PSFK 2014). Even in this new
context though writers and designers are faced by the recurrent
question of the reader’s distraction, that is whether the conscious act of
clicking or tapping on links that hyperfiction requires is disturbing the
reading experience or, as Mez Breeze, a digital artist and co-creator of
#Carnivast, an interactive electronic literature application, believes:

       The act of reading has now become acceptably segmented,
     immersive and interactive all at the same time. Nowadays, we
     don't just sit passively and absorb a book or text: many of us read
     with     the      key     desire    to      broadcast  our     own
     opinion/comments/tweets regarding the material [or even our
     own creative take in case of fan fiction]. (Sano 2013)


Perhaps Damien Walter’s prediction of what a fully networked reading
experience will look like in the future is not so far fetched after all:


        Imagine reading a book published in 2013 in the year 2063. In
     the 50 years between now and then, dozens of critical texts,
     hundreds of articles, thousands of reviews and hundreds of
     thousands of comments will have been made on the text. In a fully
     networked reading experience, all of those will be available to the
     reader of the book from within the text… Authors are able to
     shape the discussion on their books, moderating comments in a
     system similar to a blogpost… And perhaps most interesting of




                                                                                 7
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



      all, readers can find each other through the books they read.
      (Walter 2013)

     What is certain is that in an age of significant uncertainties with
regards to publishing practices, artists, authors and designers have
begun exploring new possibilities and re-configurations of bookwork.
Critical and exploratory projects have addressed questions of access,
creativity and epistemological questions at the intersections of
language and machine processing, drawing from histories of avant-
garde practice, artist’s books, and subcultural production. The Ghost
Writers’ project for example has unleashed a small army of bots
designed to flood the Kindle e-book store with texts comprised entirely
of YouTube comments. Its aim was «to address and identify pertinent
questions concerning the digital publishing industry's business
models, as well as to draw the lines of new trends for a possible new
kind of digital literature, after the web» (GhostWriters 2012).
     Also, the project wanted to raise questions like:

         who do YouTube videos/comments belong to? Where does
      authorship start and end? To what extent does the e-book format
      have to be reconsidered with regard to the traditional book form,
      and what are its most innovative opportunities? How could we
      act and work on it? (Ibid.)

     Likewise, engagements with print have become increasingly
experimental by reflexively harnessing the materialities of paper, while
translating and twisting software-based techniques into challenging
neo-analog compositions. One of the most intriguing projects is On the
Upgrade, a series of publications resulting from the activities of online
exhibition platform or-bits.com. In this case, the contribution is the way
in which the “book exhibition” is considered an interface which,
according to Rhizome editor Orit Gat, «seems pretty radical, especially
for an organization that publishes online» (Gat 2013). But is it really as
radical as it seems?




8
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



     As far as the established tradition of the artist’s book is concerned,
the most interesting potential for development does not lie in its recent
impersonation as artist’s e-book. Publisher James Bridle argues
convincingly that:

        We're not going to find new opportunities by aping the old
     forms in a new media: the most interesting literary experiments
     I've seen are taking place fully entwined with the new media,
     embedded in blogs, wikis and services like Twitter, products of
     those cultures rather than interventions in them. (Hromack 2011)

While not denying that «artists' ebooks are a totally viable thing», Bridle
maintains that «they seem to be a very small subset of what an artist or ex-
perimental writer could be doing with electronic technology, and of less in-
terest than either a traditional artists' book, or a more networked ap-
proach.» For him «the magic is in the network» (ibid.).



     This seems to be a time when apparently contrasting dynamics -
the “post-digital” (Ludovico 2012) and the “aesthetic of bookishness”
(Pressman 2009) - intersect and crossover between media, thus
reflecting the complex hybridity and paradoxical status of the book
today.
     For Pressman “the aesthetic of bookishness” is:

        an emergent literary strategy that speaks to our cultural
     moment. These novels exploit the power of the print page in ways
     that draw attention to the book as a multimedia format, one
     informed by and connected to digital technologies. They define
     the book as an aesthetic form whose power has been purposefully
     employed by literature for centuries and will continue to be far
     into the digital age. (Pressman 2009)

     The paradox of such a notion is that it took the perceived death of
the book to bring it into existence, in fact:



                                                                                9
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



          as the codex cedes its dominance as a form of information
      access to other media formats, book-bound content becomes more
      associated with the literary. Thus, the presumed and much-
      prognosticated death of the book just might prove beneficial to
      literature and,… to experimental literature in particular. (Ibid.)

      In conclusion, no matter whether this is the “Late Age of Print”
(Striphas 2009) or the “Postprint Era” (Hayles - Pressman 2013) it is
plausible that print won’t disappear, instead «the ideologies associated
with print are transforming, at greater or lesser speeds, into something
else – ways of thinking native to digital media (Hayles in Leman 2013).
      Personally, I have always found the notion of the terminal demise
of certain media (the book) only to be superseded by new ones as too
teleological, as I discussed in “The Many Futures of the Book” (2012) I
believe the situation to be far more complex. In particular, Derrida's
insights into the continued existence and ongoing transformations of
the book as object and idea in the context of media developments such
as the Web and Web 2.0 are far more interesting. Amazon's Kindle has
certainly brought the question of the future of the book to the fore, and
one might be forgiven for paraphrasing Mallarmé famous dictum –
Everything, in the world, exists in order to end up in a book (1895) – as
the epigraph to this section does. And yet, just like Mallarmé never
wrote his Livre, everything might not end up in an e-book after all, but
dispersed in multiple, rhizomatic networks where storytelling can
better work its magic.

After nourishment, shelter and companionship,

stories are the thing we need most in the world.

(Philip Pullman)

Writing in 2007 Marie-Laure Ryan noted how in the past fifteen years, «the
‘narrative turn in the humanities’ gave way to the narrative turn everywhe-
re», her lucid exposition of the then current (but still valid today) state of af-
fairs is worth quoting at length:


10
                                      Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



        few words have enjoyed so much use and suffered so much
     abuse as narrative and its partial synonym, story. The French
     theorist Jean-François Lyotard invokes the “Grand Narratives” of
     a capitalized History; the psychologist Jerome Bruner speaks of
     narratives of identity; the philosopher Daniel Dennett describes
     mental activity on the neural level as the continuous emergence
     and decay of narrative drafts; the political strategist James Carville
     attributes the loss of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election to
     the lack of a convincing narrative; and “narratives of race, class
     and gender” have become a mantra of cultural studies. Gerald
     Prince regards the contemporary use of the term narrative as a
     hedging device, a way to avoid strong positions: “One says
     'narrative' instead of 'explanation' or 'argumentation' (because it is
     more tentative); one prefers 'narrative' to 'theory,' 'hypothesis,' or
     'evidence' (because it is less scientistic); one speaks of a 'narrative'
     rather than 'ideology' (because it is less judgmental); one
     substitutes 'narrative' for 'message' (because it is more
     indeterminate).” Another narrative theorist, Peter Brooks,
     attributes the surging popularity of the word to a more positive
     cause: “While I think the term has been trivialized through
     overuse, I believe the overuse responds to a recognition that
     narrative is one of the principal ways we organize our experience
     of the world - a part of our cognitive tool kit that was long
     neglected by psychologists and philosophers.” (Ryan 2007: 22)

     Ryan is right in drawing attention to the often interchangeable use
of narrative and story, which are not exactly synonyms, in fact the
distinction between the two terms goes as far back as to Aristotelian
Poetics. 4 However, I am not sure that the word narrative has been
“trivialized through overuse” as she contends, I believe that its
persistent popularity is symptomatic of its enduring relevance.
Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre, far from neglecting it, even claim
that an understanding of narrative history is a prerequisite for any

     4  For the sake of economy in this paper I refer mostly to the term sto-
rytelling, deferring the deep question of narrative/story distinction for
another time.


                                                                                  11
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



understanding of human actions: «man is in his actions and practice, as
well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal… I can only
answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior
question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'» (Carter
2014). Most recently support for the value of fiction has arrived from
psychology (a study has found that reading fiction significantly
increased empathy towards others (Delistraty 2014) and from the
unexpected quarter of neuroscience (Paul 2012), thus supporting the
hypothesis that Evolution has «wired our brains for storytelling»
(Widrich 2012).
      So Henry James was wrong when he maintained in “The Art of
Fiction” (1884), that fiction was merely a personal “impression of life”,
there is something deeper and more fundamental to it, narrative
simulations are a form of existential problem-solving for the individual
and the whole community (somewhat akin to what McLuhan had in
mind with the idea of the global village). Walter Benjamin famously
declared that narrative could not survive the “excessive knowingness
of modern times” (Benjamin, 1969)5, however Benjamin, like James,
failed to appreciate two of narrative’s key qualities which, according to
Caroline Bassett (2007), explain its longevity well into the twenty-first
century: contingency and mutability As Bassett convincingly put it,
«Narrative is at the heart of…everyday culture within a world where
digital technology is becoming pervasive. To consider contemporary
narrative formations is to engage with contemporary techno-culture»
(ibid.: 8).
      Such a view is echoed by Stanford university scholar Lucy
Bernholz in her blog post dedicated to Storytelling. Bernholz writes:
«Even as technology becomes ubiquitous, embedded, and smart we
still need stories. In fact, we need them more than ever» (Bernholz
2011). In order to prove her point she offers a useful overview of
contemporary efforts from Flipoard - which lets you curate your own
magazine on your iPad to My Life is True - which presents two minute

      Benjamin also sees the rise of the novel and its “dependence on the
      5

book” as evidence of the decline of storytelling.


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                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



stories, including a reference to the concept of gamification and to how
it ties in with storytelling6.
       I mentioned above how narrative simulations are a form of
existential problem-solving for the individual and the whole
community, linking the two aspects is at the core of the Center for
Digital Storytelling whose mission statement reads: “To promote the
value of story as a means for compassionate community action.”
(http://storycenter.org/) While the Center helps organizations of all
kinds tell their stories using digital tools, the term “digital storytelling”
has come to refer to the broader world of computer-mediated
narrative. Already in 2002 Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp in New
Screen Media described this broader new world as one of “narrative
chaos”, in which frameworks are being exchanged for experimental
and radical attempts to master anew the art of story telling, with the
aid of developing technologies.

        Traditional media has been augmented by the advent of new
     media, not just trough the revolutionary distributive aspects of the
     technology, but principally through the changed relationship
     between audience and author. New media forms offer both a
     convergence of narrative vehicles and a fragmentation of
     understood forms. (Rieser - Zapp 2002: xxvi)

    This is also a world, in the words of media scholar Henry Jenkins,
«where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate


     6      For      a     list    of     free    Storytelling   apps     see:
http://shambles.net/pages/learning/ict/apps_story/. For a definition of gami-
fication I refer the reader to (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, Nacke 2011).




                                                                                13
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power
of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways» (Jenkins 2006:
2-4).
      I would agree with the definition of “narrative chaos”, provided
that one intends the term chaos not in its literal Greek etymology of an
abyss which is vast and empty, or in the later (from 1600 onwards)
popular meaning of order-less confusion, but rather as a moment of
boundless generative potential. Such generative potential expresses itself
in a narrative «that’s told through many media at once in a way that is
nonlinear, that is participatory and gamelike , and that is designed to
be immersive» (Rose 2011: 4). Unsurprisingly, such narrative chaos is
paralleled by an aesthetic chaos in that, as Henry Jenkins himself
acknowledges:

         We do not yet have very good aesthetic criteria for evaluating
      works that play themselves out across multiple media. There have
      been far too few fully transmedia stories for media makers to act
      with any certainty about what would constitute the best uses of
      this new mode of storytelling. (Jenkins 2006: 98)

      Jenkins is also credited for popularizing the term “transmedia
storytelling,” to be understood as «a process where integral elements of
a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels
for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment
experience» (Jenkins 2007)7.
      Erica Negri (2014) rightly observes that Jenkins defines such term
as a process, thus implying its application to fields beyond the narrative
one, to my mind however the term process in this context also confirms

      7
       An antecedent to contemporary transmedia practices is “Japan’s ‘me-
dia mix’ strategy, «based on the idea that a single story can be told through
several different media at once.» It «emerged in the seventies, decades before
Western publishers or producers saw the potential for any kind of synergistic
storytelling» Rose 2011: 41. For a study of transmedia storytelling in differ-
ent historical periods and countries, see Scolari – Bertetti - Freeman 2014.



14
                                     Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



the expanded generative potential of this kind of narratives.8 Such
potential manifests itself in a multitude of projects that would be too
long to enumerate,9 I just wish to refer the reader to the short list
collated by academic and broadcaster Aleks Krotoski (2011) which
includes, among others, the Blair Witch Project (1999) that exploited to
perfection the Web’s viral capacity for creating buzz and, perhaps
more interestingly, the          We Tell Stories        (2008) project.
(http://www.wetellstories.co.uk/) In the latter case Penguin publishing
commissioned six writers to tell stories using digital media in
innovative ways (Google Maps, infographics, blogs, Twitter, email and
reader-driven plotlines). A year earlier Penguin had launched, in
collaboration with students at De Montfort University in Leicester
(UK), another innovative storytelling project A Million Penguins (2007).
The plan was to create over the month of February the world's first
'wiki' (collaborative) novel. Writing in a blog post for the Guardian in
March 2007 Kate Pullinger, one of the co-ordinators, notes how
fascinating it was «to see how a feeling of solidarity grows between
people who have never met and who know nothing about each other
but who have a common purpose». While the A Million Penguins'
catchline was: Can a community write a novel? Maybe, Pullinger
perceptively suggests, the question should have been:

       Can a community write a narrative? The project shows that
     groups can collaborate and can write a multiplicity of stories, but
     perhaps it's too much to expect such a large community (nearly

8
 Jenkins delves deeper into the concept of transmedia storytelling in his blog
post “Transmedia Storytelling 101” (Jenkins 2007).


9 The recent BBC’s Sherlock TV series is a very interesting example, see (Reif
2014). For articles exploring the creative and technical achievements of
transmedia storytelling consider (Milburn 2014).




                                                                                 15
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



      1,500 contributors) to come up with a single, cohesive narrative in
      such a short space of time. Building communities takes time.
      (Pullinger 2007)

In any case, although the chaos was “exhausting”, excellent ideas were gen-
erated and Pullinger concludes her post by celebrating the chaos or, as she
put it, «to use the lingo - the "bounded instability"» (ibid.). Musing about the
project five years later, on the occasion of her recent experience as external
examiner for a PhD thesis on the Networked Book, Pullinger still recalls the
“chaos and the entertainment”, however she laments the fact that not all the
wiki pages created could be archived. Another unwelcome development
with regards to the evolution of the networked book as a concept is that
contemporary social media marketing campaigns

         aim to foster reader engagement around a newly published
      book, whereas the networked books of the noughties all sought to
      foster creative engagement with text and other forms of
      media. The networked book emphasis was on collaboration and
      contributing, whereas, of necessity, a trade publishing networked
      social media campaign is about sales. (Pullinger 2012)

     Kate Pullinger’s own ouvre - she is the author, with digital artist
Chris Joseph, of the much acclaimed transmedia novel Inanimate Alice
(2005-) and of Flight Path: a Networked Novel (2007-) - shows that it is
perfectly possible to convey profound stories using digital media in
unique and compelling ways10.
     A good story will always capture the audience’s imagination, but
what about the transmedia audiences’ own expectations? What kind of
multi-media reading “experience” do they wish for? To answer these
questions, Latitude, an international research consultancy interviewed
158 early adopters and compiled a report in 2012 that forms the first
phase     of    its    the    Future    of    Storytelling      project.
(http://www.futureofstorytellingproject.com/) The expectations are


      10
           More about Pullinger’s work at http://www.katepullinger.com/


16
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



summarized as “The 4 I’s”: Immersion, Interactivity, Integration and
Impact. Essentially, readers want to be able to explore a story in greater
depth, and have it reach out of the confines of a single medium and
play out in “the real world”.
      Even though the sample of “early adopters” surveyed is not very
broad, the findings are extremely interesting, particularly with regards
to the audience’s yearning for more interativity and immersion. The
transmedia ebook Shuffle (2013) is one of those titles that, at least in
part, attempt to meet such expectations. According to its author (and
digital producer) Chris Rickaby, the aim was «to push boundaries» and
«to have a vision of a very different way to structure a novel-narrative
across multiple platforms» (DBW 2013)11. The ebook consists of seven
stories that can be read in any order the reader chooses, the plot and
the ending are determined accordingly. The reader can use the
mechanism of an iPod playlist to shuffle between songs that are linked
to the different stories. There is also a website, www.Lulzlit.com which
pretends to represent a collective of writers, the supposedly real
authors of the project. So, the book one could shuffle also produced an
online fictional alter-ego for Chris Rickaby (James T. Raydel) and
spread out onto online platforms like YouTube, Pinterest and Twitter
(for the seven writers/characters). Rickaby also envisages for the seven
characters to give minute-long book readings on YouTube because «if
publishers want to engage the next generation of readers, they
absolutely have to develop online avenues.» (Cornish 2013) Although
Shuffle won the Publishing Innovation Award for best ebook fiction
from Digital Book World at the 2013 Digital Book World Conference
and was also a finalist in the transmedia category at the Publishing
Innovation Awards (DBW 2013) Rickaby is well aware that it «will be


     11 Another equally interesting example is Nina Munteanu’s Outer Di-
verse (2011) published in print form and e-format; it then appeared in audio
format        also.       Its       trailer     is        on       YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOIQNeIHVks while the author in-
tended to produce a short story musical, a graphic novel and an interactive
vid. (Munteanu 2013)


                                                                               17
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



all about finding the right audience online. Marmite fiction might be a
good way to describe it. Some love it, but others have been left a little
baffled by stories that you are meant to shuffle» (ibid.).
      The “Marmite factor” Rickaby refers to can be ascribable to the
fact that transmediality, in spite of the definition offered above, is still a
rather nebulous concept, one that can be applied to the latest
Hollywood blockbuster as well as to the more experimental works of
electronic fiction, for which a specific tool-kit of technical and mental
skills is required. Janet Murray in her seminal Hamlet on the Holodeck
(1998) envisioned a half hacker/half bard storyteller of the future
telling stories in a medium that will «reshape the spectrum of narrative
expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing
their timeless bardic work within another framework» (ibid.: 9-10).
Such new framework, I would suggest, is now here, and it is one that
suitably reflect our socially-networked culture.

“For sale. Baby shoes. Never used”

Ernest Hemingway (1920)

      The story goes that in the 1920s Ernest Hemingway's colleagues
bet him that he couldn't write a complete story in just six words. In the
end they paid up and Hemingway is said to have considered “For sale.
Baby shoes. Never used” his best work. No matter whether the
American writer, famous for his terse and concise style, wrote it or
not,12 the scope here is to propose that the Internet has not invented
flash fiction13 (also known as: micro fiction, micro narrative, micro-
story, postcard fiction, short short story, and sudden fiction), rather it
has followed and expanded upon a trend that has its roots in Aesop’s


      12      Apparently         the     story    is      apocryphal.       See
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/01/28/baby-shoes/
      13 The first Flash Fiction anthology was published in 1992, a year before

the World Wide Web became available to the public (Thomas, J. Thomas, D.
Hazuka, T. 1992).


18
                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Fables and ancient Japanese Zen stories. More accurately perhaps one
should argue that the Internet (including micro-blogging sites like
Twitter) is actually bringing about new forms of very short fiction, as
the examples below demonstrate.
       As Brian Alexander puts it «Twitter might appear to be the least
likely storytelling platform of all... its reputation as a site for trivial
pseudo-conversation should preclude meaning and narrative»
(Alexander 2011: 61). Besides, the limitation of one hundred and forty
characters for a “tweet” (due to the start up initial incarnation as a
mobile phone text messaging service) should exacerbate narrative
inhibitions, and yet here lies «Twitter paradox: maximum freedom
through ultimate constraint» (Rose 2012: 214). Writer and actor John
Hodgman recalls how derisive many people were about Twitter when
it first entered the public consciousness, however «The early detractors
failed to note … that Twitter, while faddish, was not only a fad: it is a
tool, one with almost as many unique uses as there are humans to take
it up» (King 2014), in other words «Twitter offered a very restrictive set
of protocols that awaken the imagination: what can I do with 140
characters that will be meaningful to others? The solution has proven
to be pretty much endless» (ibid.).
       For the short-story writer and novelist Thomas Beller such «built-
in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that
writers apply to each line,» however he has no hesitation in
recognising that there are «a set of major problems for writers on
Twitter»

        Does a piece of writing that is never seen by anyone other than
     its author even exist? Does a thought need to be shared to exist?
     What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is
     pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note
     before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. It’s
     like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into
     something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the
     note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances
     that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does



                                                                                19
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



      articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow,
      making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little
      finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing? … Is
      tweeting talking it out before you write it, or part of a process?
      And what if writing a piece in tweets is considered publication?
      And if its appearance on Twitter equals being published, do I even
      have the rights to it anymore? (Beller 2013)

Before concluding:

         Technological innovations regarding writing—the typewriter,
      the electric typewriter, the computer and all its word-processing
      tools—have been about removing impediments to publishing
      one’s words. But they all have, until now, stopped short of the
      actual act of publishing. The line between writing and talking has
      also been blurred, and we can imagine that the line between
      talking and thinking will be, too, at some point (Ibid.).

     What transpires from Beller’s penetrating analysis of the impact of
Twitter on (professional) writers is, predictably, a certain anxiety at the
“blurring of lines” between the public and the private, between what
constitutes literary writing and talking, not to mention the question of
ownership of what is published, and yet Beller’s fine sensitivity allows
him to acknowledge also that: «Writing on Twitter brings the energy of
a début to every phrase. You could say it imbues writing with a sense
of performance, though writing has always involved performance in
the sense of performance anxiety» (ibid.).
     Further on in the article Beller poses another key question: «could
Twitter possibly be productive, beyond the basic act of publicizing
what you have written and/or proving that you still exist?» (ibid.) There
is no better way to answer than by «composing a short piece,
something between a journal entry and a personal essay, in a series of
tweets» (ibid.).

         I wanted to recount an experience but wasn’t sure what I
      thought of it, and suddenly the idea of writing in public seemed


20
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



     like it would force me toward a further understanding. I wrote it
     out at night, when I do most of my writing. Something about
     tweeting at that hour reminded me how it once felt to talk into my
     friend’s C.B. radio —that strange precursor to the Internet and its
     “communities”—way back when. Except, in this case, I wasn’t
     pretending to be a trucker. I was pretending to be me.
        I found the experience to be strange, exhilarating, outrageously
     narcissistic, frightening, and embarrassing. In other words, like
     writing. But also like acting, or playing a concert—something
     whose essence is bound up in the fact that it’s being done live.
     You can’t really see the auditorium and don’t know the size of the
     audience. It’s like throwing paper airplanes out a high window:
     someone may see their elegant dive, maybe a lot of people. The
     plane will be rushed onward and out of sight. Except there is now
     a record of it. I assumed my series of tweets was a draft. They
     were not pages crumpled on the floor, exactly—more like pages to
     be stacked up and put aside, where, like some gourmet dish, its
     elements might have time to blend. (Ibid.)

     A few days later he assembled the tweets and sent them for
publication, the essay “The Maserati Kid” (composed of what one
assumes were “revised” tweets) was published in The Paris Review
(Beller 2011).
     Beller’s experience is revealing of both the similarities, writing a
tweet feels like writing after all, and the differences, tweeting is live
writing. In spite of his enthusiasm for the medium, for Beller some
lines are not to be blurred, the publication of his tweets in The Paris
Review (which, ironically, is shareable across various social media
platforms, including Twitter) confers the literature imprimatur to what
was not the perfect “gourmet dish” that it could become, with time. The
performance needs to be rehearsed (tweets as drafts) in order to
achieve the required literary standard.
     The issues raised by Beller seem to validate the situation of
“aesthetic chaos” mentioned above, while highlighting the need for
further research in “Twitteracy”, a set of literacy practices that are
increasingly multi-modal (Greenhow - Gleason 2012) and in the


                                                                               21
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



academic field of electronic/intermedia literature studies. Such research
is needed in order to elucidate the evolving relationship between new
forms of digital writing and established notions of literariness and the
literary work. In this sense, Bryan Alexander’s attempt at dividing
Twitter storytelling into four modes is very useful (Alexander 2011).
The first mode relates to the fact that «Twitter’s immediacy lends itself
to “live” stories», the second is the possibility for «single tweets to tell
very short stories, … micronarratives», a third category draws upon
the old genre of the aphorism, while the fourth mode «heightens the
human while abstracting it out» (ibid.: 61-64). Alexander provides some
examples to illustrate his four categories and I certainly commend his
effort, however I wish to mention here the work of Masha Tupitsyn
because it defies any categorizations, thus demonstrating the aesthetic
challenges but also the enormous creative potential of digital writing.
Tupitsyn is the author of LACONIA: 1,200 Tweets on Film (2011) the first
book of film criticism written entirely on Twitter and Love Dog (2013)
conceived as a multi-media blog and inspired by Roland Barthes’ A
Lover’s Discourse and Mourning Diary—a sort of art book, part love
manifesto and part philosophical notebook14.
      Certainly not as experimental, but worthy of a reference is the
“Twitter Fiction” series run by The Guardian from October 2012 to
August 2013 which challenged a mix of top writers, journalist and the
odd celebrity (Katie Price) to write a story with only 140 characters to
play with15.
      In 2012 the “Twitter Fiction Festival” took place, it was an
interesting experiment which combined a selection of stories to be
showcased and, crucially, the possibility for readers to contribute
(Fitzgerald 2012). Of all the stories selected the mystery one by Elliott




      14  Tagged #ld100 “quotes” from Love Dog are available at
http://www.berfrois.com/2013/07/joanna-walsh-100-tweets-about-love-dog/
      15
         http://www.theguardian.com/books/series/twitter-fiction


22
                                    Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



Holt16 was particularly successful in that, as the Slate writer Katy
Waldman put it:

         Holt embraces Twitter for what it is, rather than trying to bend
     it into some tool that it isn’t. With its simultaneous narrators and
     fractured storyline, this is not the kind of tale that could march
     steadily across a continuous expanse of white space. It’s actually
     made for the medium. (Waldman 2012)

      Also, in a final twist, Holt asked readers to tweet their choice
among #accident, #homicide, or #suicide, as to the cause of death of the
mysterious character “Miranda Brown, 44, of Brooklyn” (ibid.).
      Another intriguing example of Twitter storytelling, vaguely
reminiscent of the A Million Penguins project discussed above is A Ball
at Pemberley, described as “a new experiment in creative Twitter
collaboration.” As we read in the project’s page «A Ball at Pemberley
came into being after Adam Spunberg and famed author Lynn
Shepherd conceived of an idea: What if Jane Austen lovers from
around the world could tweet a Jane Austen sequel in turns?» As a
result «tens of people from six continents would go on to write a
100,000-word novel!» (http://austenproject.com/about/).
      What is worth considering, once again, is how the notion of
authorship, traditionally tied to the production of a single authored
work of static text is evolving into forms of authorial collaboration.17 As
for publishing, it has metamorphosed into a ubiquitous activity
making thus possible for multiple authors to publish their personal
(re)interpretation of the world they live in. This is exactly the case of
Hi, a new storytelling platform created by writer and designer Craig
Mod. The concept involves participants in various parts of the world

     16      Storified    at     https://storify.com/penguinpress/elliotholt-s-
twitterfiction-story
     17 Among the examples of collaborative authorship on Facebook see

“Finish the Story” initiated in 2013 by the literary-intellectual online maga-
zine Berfrois https://www.facebook.com/berfrois/posts/533685700007618



                                                                                23
Anna Notaro, How Networked Communication has changed the way we tell stories



“mapping” their surroundings with their experiences, all thanks to
their mobile devices. The goal of Hi is:

         To narrative map the world. To achieve that goal, we’ve
      developed, and continue to iterate on, an editorial workflow we
      think is well suited to networked storytelling. To connecting
      narrative with place. To building habit. To making a purposeful
      mess, because the creative process is messy, and our platforms
      should be okay with that. (Mod 2013)

Predicting the future of storytelling (and of books) is something of a fool’s
errand, and yet speculating about it is hard to resist. Perhaps the boundary
between our minds and our technologies will become so blurred that we
turn into “neurofiction readers” (http://neurofiction.net/), or maybe not
human writers but “Literature generators” will provide us with all the sto-
ries we need (http://www.narrabase.net/poetry_generators.html). Novelist
James Warner has come up with a vaguely dystopic chronology which is
both smart and humorous:

      2020: All Books Will Be Cross-Platform and Interactive

      2030: All Books Will Be Crowdsourced and Cloud-Based

      2040: Authors Will Become Like Tamagotchi

      2050: Analog Reading Will Be Digitally Simulated

      2060: Physical Books Will Make a Comeback in Annoying Con-
      texts
      2070: We Will All Become Cyborgs (Warner 2011)

The climax is reached in 2080 when:

         Aroma-bibliography will triumph, as vast epics are composed
      for newly developed scent receptors, transforming the rising seas
      into a giant bath of community-assisted transmedia content. Also



24
                                   Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)



    around this time, the oral literature of dolphins will be deciphered
    and will turn out, inexplicably, to be all about vampires. (Ibid.)

      I find it oddly reassuring that in Warner’s semi-serious
lucubrations the transmedia literature of the future might have a
Gothic tinge (“all about vampires”) since the Gothic, from its inception
in the Enlightenment period, has ushered us into depths of inner
experiences better than any other, more decorous form of storytelling,
could successfully achieve. Perhaps the “vast epics” of the future will
narrate the deeds of a long gone human race, one that found pleasure
in terror and consolation in the technological sublime, a race united by
the collective, emotional experience of storytelling.



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                                 Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)




                             The author
       Anna Notaro
Is Programme Leader for contemporary media theory at Duncan of
Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee (UK). She
has published widely in the field of urban/visual culture, the
blogosphere, authorship, cinema & new technology, e-textuality and
the 'future of the book'. More about her research interests at her home
page: www.notarofam.com/annawork

      Email: a.z.notaro@dundee.ac.uk




                             The paper
Date sent: 30/07/2014
Date accepted: 30/10/2014
Date published: 30/11/2014



                    How to quote this paper
Anna, Notaro, “How Networked Communication has changed the
ways we tell stories”, Technology, Imagination, Narrative Forms, Ed. L.
Esposito, E. Piga, A. Ruggiero, Between, IV.8 (2014),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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