Stories about the Database
Can we plot the database? Can we create narrative texts that mirror our distributed identities? Narrative and storytelling are thriving today, but often in the shared, networked spaces of the web’s vast database. Blogs, hypertext, digital art, online news and social media sites define a vernacular database narrativity in a variety of forms that integrate easily and intuitively with our networked lives. Sharing a Youtube video with friends on Facebook is an act that combines modularity and narrative. Ten years ago we might have sat with a friend to share photo prints of a recent trip and told stories; stories often sparked by certain sequences of prints. Now we post sets of travel photos online, often as events happen, and hope for comments, questions and conversations. While both methods speak of the desire to shape and communicate experience, the former uses media as illustration (and mnemonic device) for linear story composition and the latter presents media as an interface to the unfolding “story” of experience itself. As Katherine Hayles proclaimed, database and narrative live together as “natural symbionts” in a complex ecosystem. A blog post, for example, is an interface to a database of objects (the web) that is then distributed back into that same database as a new narrative object. Like all of language, the web is a complex adaptive system, where narrative order emerges and then decomposes back into the system as modular units to be used again in other narratives or orderings.
To the extent that our technologies impose a database logic on our lives, what happens to narrative and plot in our thinking? There have been movies that are modular in their construction, complex in their time frames, but in some ways they are structured as precisely as any classical Hollywood film. Movies like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while fluid and “networked” across different time periods and spaces, they still work within classical plots for unifying dramatic action. In fact, it is their very linearity that allows these narratives to be so complex. Point of view is established, characters are delineated, cause-and-effect chains attended to and closure defined. For database narratives to find their form, they must look at how the database is lived in everyday life. There are no central conflicts or pure winners and losers, on the web. There are only networks that stretch, snap and pull at our sense of connectedness.
To the extent that our technologies impose a database logic on our lives, what happens to narrative and plot in our thinking? There have been movies that are modular in their construction, complex in their time frames, but in some ways they are structured as precisely as any classical Hollywood film. Movies like Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, while fluid and “networked” across different time periods and spaces, they still work within classical plots for unifying dramatic action. In fact, it is their very linearity that allows these narratives to be so complex. Point of view is established, characters are delineated, cause-and-effect chains attended to and closure defined. For database narratives to find their form, they must look at how the database is lived in everyday life. There are no central conflicts or pure winners and losers, on the web. There are only networks that stretch, snap and pull at our sense of connectedness.
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