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- There are all manner of narratives or stories, of course. Some of them are slapdash and of little consequence, the little story we tell when someone asks about our day, for example. Others are more complicated and significant, such as the story we might tell about how we fell in love. There are stories, too, with which we identify regarding our family history, our racial or ethnic background, our national identity, our political principles, and our religious convictions (or lack thereof). These stories amount to something like the larger fabric into which we weave the thread of our own biographies. They frame our sense of self, and, to some degree, they provide a template of sorts for how we ought to conduct ourselves, what we ought to value, and who we should aspire to be. This is what MacIntyre was getting at when he said that you can know what you are to do only if you also know what story or stories you are a part of.
- Stories of this sort also act as a filter on reality. We never merely perceive the world, we interpret it. In fact, our perception is already interpretation. And the work of interpretation depends to no small degree on the stories that we have internalized about the world. So when we hear about this, that, or the other thing happening, we tend to fit the event into our paradigmatic stories. To be clear, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Honestly, I don’t see how it could be otherwise. Perhaps this is overstated, but it seems to me that our humanity is, in fact, wrapped up with this story-telling capacity.
- While many have found McLuhan’s aphorism “the medium is the message” confounding, McLuhan actually offered a rather straightforward explanation. “The ‘message’ of any medium or technology,” McLuhan wrote, “is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs.” “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts,” McLuhan added, “but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance.”
Digital media introduced a new scale, pace, and pattern to human communication, and, in this way, altered how the world is perceived. With regards to scale, we encounter an unprecedented amount of information about the world at large through digital media. With regards to pace, we encounter this information with previously unknown and unrelenting immediacy. And, with regards to pattern, we encounter it both in novel social contexts and in a form that bears greater resemblance to a database than a story.
- When you or I read a book or an article, when we listen to someone telling us a story, when we watch a film or a show—in each case, and others like them, we are being led along a particular narrative path by those who have constructed the media artifact. They are telling us a story.
Something very different is happening when we’re online. [*Caveats below.] It’s not that we are literally presented with a relational database, but we are presented with what amounts to a loosely arranged set of data points whose significance and meaning has not been baked into the form itself. Moreover, I can make my way online with a high degree of independence relative to how I might make my way through an analog media artifact. Finally, consider how digital media transforms even the traditional media artifact itself into a kind of database. A movie, for example, is transformed into a series of snippets, clips, lines, gifs, etc., which float around independently of the whole. The digitized artifact is the artifact that has, for all intents and purposes, surrendered its integrity.
- I’m not suggesting we no longer encounter narratives. On the contrary, narratives proliferate in the digital world. Rather, I’m suggesting that the database experience frames the encounter with narratives so that we experience narratives as just so many entries in a database of information. The narratives that we encounter thus fail to be comprehensive accounts of our experience or broadly compelling. Another way to think about a narrative’s compelling power would be to speak of it as being in some sense authoritative. (The etymological link between author and authority, via the Latin auctor, should not be lost on us.)
- However, with the distinction between the actual and potential in mind, we might also say that narratives are instruments of forgetting. They select what is to be remembered, allowing us to discard the rest. Indeed, a narrative might be defined precisely by what it leaves out. When you tell the story of your day, think about how much of what you might possibly relay is left out of your telling. This, in part, is why Manovich argued that databases and narratives are “natural enemies.”
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- Note: But a downside is that some is remembered while some (most?) is imagined. Which often leads to a spiral of imagining, leaving the facts far behind.
- The Database dramatically expands access to information, challenging the authority of even the most venerable professional weavers of Narrative. Official narratives are just one more datapoint, one more entry in the Database, one way among many of generating a path through the entries.
- The Database is blind to traditional categories such as credibility or trustworthiness. The Database is indifferent to truth. All entries in the Database have the same value, although they can be differently organized. This is confirmed by the mostly futile efforts of the Narrative-minded managers of the Database to artificially impose these categories through “fact-checking” notices, warning labels, blue checks, etc.
- Presently, many if not most of us are operating with Narrative assumptions, and we’re responding to the Database as if it were possible to reestablish the Narrative order within it.
- That said, for my purposes here, it is still the case that at the level of user experience, using the internet feels more like navigating across the open sea than driving along a paved road.