I’m feeling proactive tonight – fresh out of the lecture theatre and straight into blogging! Adrian Miles continues to surprise us with his unique approach to networked media, and today’s symposium was no exception. Adrian delved into ideas of materiality and storytelling – how they interrelate and what they mean for networked media. He encouraged us to question our familiarity of common objects by analysing their purpose and function.

Through the use of long-winded analogies and naïve questions, we established the fact that materiality matters, and the way through which a story may be told is subject to its physical form. For example, a paper-back book always has a beginning, middle and end, not only for completeness sake, but also due to the limitations of the material it’s composed of.

In today’s generation, the means of storytelling has drastically changed as a result of material evolution. A 300page book generally only contains one story, yet a slim, portable iPad can contain thousands. The Internet then takes this notion to a whole new level, leading us to wonder if a traditional narrative can ever exist in this form. I would argue, however, that independent stories with a beginning, middle and end, can absolutely exist within the world wide web. It is true though, that due to the internets ‘unlimited’ capacity, networked media has great strength as a medium and thus stands out among many traditional forms.