Vernacular Database Narrativity
Blogs, hypertext, digital art, online news, social network 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 video with friends on Facebook is an act that combines database and narrative logics. Ten years ago we shared stories around the chronologically developed photo prints of a recent trip. Now we post tagged 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 storytelling 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.
In recent years, database narrative has particularly thrived as a nonfiction form. The aggregation of data around known or culturally shared histories, places, events and personas can engage as narrative in ways that are more difficult for strictly fictional database narratives. A blog, for example, is a primarily nonfiction form, because it is meant to live inside a rich network of other blogs. To the extent that our communication technologies impose a database logic on our lives, what happens to narrative fiction and traditional plotting in our everyday 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 sharply delineated, cause-and-effect chains attended to and closure defined.
In recent years, database narrative has particularly thrived as a nonfiction form. The aggregation of data around known or culturally shared histories, places, events and personas can engage as narrative in ways that are more difficult for strictly fictional database narratives. A blog, for example, is a primarily nonfiction form, because it is meant to live inside a rich network of other blogs. To the extent that our communication technologies impose a database logic on our lives, what happens to narrative fiction and traditional plotting in our everyday 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 sharply delineated, cause-and-effect chains attended to and closure defined.
The database is a mirror, not of the world, but of how we orient our minds to the world. The past and the present can be in front of us simultaneously. In an interface we use nested frames of either images or video to show relations between events that would be difficult to describe linearly. A spatial understanding of time does not necessarily have to have the clarity and accessibility of most information design and data displays. Much of this speculation about the role of interface in replacing plot is a way to think of new kinds of stories, new ways of opening up the world and experience. Drawing on familiar plots from legacy media is inevitable and it will take some time to understand the database nature of our own mind's interface with the world and the ways in which multiple time frames are held within the neural networks. For database narratives to find their natural "story" form, authors and artists must look at how the database is lived in everyday life. There are no central conflicts, heroes and villains, winners and losers, in database logic. There are certainly competing narratives, but there is no center, no central character and no moment of catharsis. There are only networks and relational events that make up a sense of a shared reality. Representation, the world system, is a graphical interface to the world.
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