Scent of New Pages

I’m holding a new book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace by Janet Murray.

 

The scent of new pages is soothing. The book’s weight makes me feel rich. This is a small luxury. A treat that brings me peace and makes me feel at home in the company of my thoughts.

 

For the last six weeks, I have been reading soft copy. My brain has been completely immersed in cyberspace, reading blogs, tweets, examining websites, — learning…

 

So, today, I’m taking a break from the screen and reading about how the computer and the web are transforming storytelling. Yes, ironically from a printed book.

 

In her book, Janet Murray argues that the computer can provide the basis for an expressive narrative form. This is based on the idea that print technology supported the development of the novel and film technology encouraged the development of movies.

 

Murray provides an insightful analysis and I do like her idea of ‘the computer’ as a medium of representation with a distinctive set of properties. For her, the computer is procedural, participatory, encyclopedic, and spatial, which provides immersion, agency, and transformation.

 

Her analysis helps me understand why exploring the web is so satisfying. Her words make me understand why the computer feels like an extension of my brain, an extension of my reality. My computer used to be a portal, but now it is more than that.

 

She defines interactivity as the combination of the procedural and the participatory, which together give agency. And she believes that the computer as a medium generates new possibilities of expression for storytelling.  An entirely new way of telling stories, perhaps? Very inspiring, indeed.

 

The worldwide connected computer is its own medium and agency the core word of its universe.

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