I’ve been wanting to write this post on my IM1 blog for a little while. It’s going to be all about FOMO – the fear of missing out.
I don’t know if this is a trait I have always had, but I am a bit of a ‘completionist‘. I always have to experience and (attempt to) understand everything I encounter – whether this be crossing the road, where I have to be 100% entirely certain that I’ve accounted for all moving cars, objects, etc, or reading a novel, where I must have read every sentence in every paragraph on every page (yes, even the boring acknowledgements at the end). If I open a news article or (god forbid) a long-form piece, you can bet it won’t be exited until I’ve read everything on the page.
I recently got really into the world of audiobooks through the Amazon website audible.com. I would use these books as a tool to help me get to sleep when I was battling a particularly insomniac-like few months. But what would inevitably happen would be that I would leave a chapter on to play whilst I fell asleep, then wake up in the morning and have to listen to the entire chapter again to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.
What concerns me about Korsakow is that every time you view a K-film, you could have a different experience or a different trajectory. I know that this is one of the wonderful features of the software, which teaches us to think of media consumption in a new, fragmented way. But almost every time I’ve watched a K-film so far, I’m overwhelmingly concerned with the content that I might miss.
Because K-films are database-driven, there can be many relationships with many fragments because of the way they are pulled from the database. But they can also be independent and self-sufficient. The way you can build these ‘structures’ can vary immensely.
Sometimes I will see a preview that immediately grabs my attention and I know I want to view it, but if I decide to click another preview instead, it can take a very long time for the clip to resurface again (due to the key wording nature of Korsakow). Or, depending on how the author has set up the SNUs, it may ‘die’ and never reappear – denying me the option to ever experience and (attempt to) understand it, as I inherently do.
Something I picked up on early in the course is that interactive media, and K-films in particular, are designed to be grazed on. They are structured in a way that the user can leave and return as many times as they may want, and consume the content of a work in vastly different ways from the way we consume traditional media.
I’m not too sure if I’m ready to embrace this new method of viewing entirely yet. I’m all for it, but I might need to make some adjustments first.
