On Fiction Writers and Digital Dislike

Chapter 5 was interesting this week. Among the interesting exploration of database, narrative, algorithm, paradigm, and syntagm, I was repeatedly reminded of another TA, Torii Grabowski, who is anti-technology. She’s an MFA in Fiction and just doesn’t think that technology belongs in the classroom. And I have been a bit unclear about exactly why she doesn’t like it. Manovich this week seems to have shown me perhaps why. It deals with the difference between database and narrative. Mr. Manovich says,

As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world (225).

So taking this idea from her perspective, it is really no wonder that as a fiction writer she would not embrace the miscellany of the web; it is completely counter to what she is trying to do as an author. My question then becomes: Does she know this on some intuitive level? She has tried to explain why she doesn’t use technology, but hasn’t been able to; at least in any way that I have been able to understand. But perhaps I am starting to.
I was reminded of her again on page 232. There Mr. Manovich writes,

As I noted in chapter one, new media takes “interaction” literally, equating it with a strictly physical interaction between a user and a computer, at the expense of psychological interaction. The cognitive processes involved in understanding any cultural text are erroneously equated with an objectively existing structure of interactive links.

So if I understand the argument here, Manovich is asserting that we mistake the kind of interaction we have with a computer to be much the same as an interaction we have with a book or poem or other cultural piece of writing. But it is wrong to equate simply clicking links and reading text with the meta-engagement we undergo when reading and understanding a non-new media piece of writing. This is an important distinction. He is not merely saying that it is harder to psychologically digest something we read on the web; he is saying that our brains don’t even try. And I remember that we have discussed in class that it is more difficult to read something in a digital presentation; that it takes more time and is more difficult to understand. I know from my own magazine editing days that it was much harder for me to find mistakes in a text when it was only on the screen.
Manovich also almost overwhelms with cultural references this week. So many names I have never heard of. I wanted to put together another Prezi and showcase all of these names, but I ran out of time. I did watch “The Street of Crocodiles,” which I had to look up on IMDB.com to know what it was about. It was quite bizarre. But, after watching it, I do understand what Manovich is describing when he speaks of how “the camera suddenly takes off, rapidly moving in a straight line parallel to an image plane… the logic of these movements is clearly non-human; this is the vision of some alien creature” (262). I wasn’t able to contrast it with The Forest by Tamas Waliczky because I couldn’t find it to watch.
I also watched After Life by Hirokazu Kore-eda. According to Manovich, this film is not the normal narrative, but an example of something else. He uses After Life as an example of “other forms in which the actions of characters do not dominate the narrative” (246). It was honestly a little hard for me to understand just how this film was different than all the other films I have watched. I think this may be because I am only used to films with narratives. After re-reading how Manovich (paraphrasing Mieke Bal) defines narrative, I do understand better. In the text, narrative should have:

both an actor and a narrator
three distinct levels consisting of the text, the story, and the fibula
“a series of connected events caused or experienced by actors” (227)

The key item that After Life is missing is “a series of connected events.” In fact the final story line that closes the film isn’t even introduced until just before the film ends. So in that way, After Life is not a narrative film.


For what it is worth, I have NO IDEA what this is... I watched both parts.