Narrative is defined as: an account of connected events. In regards to media, I understand narrative as a sequence of connections created between elements of a production. These connections are used to discover meaning (to use the term broadly) behind the organisation of the sequence.  It also occurs to me that humans will naturally create such narratives sequences in every day life, whether sub-conciously or not. This is due to the level at which narrative is ingrained as a culture form. That way, narrative can be seen as a way of organising human experience, by forming connections between elements of our experiences to juxtapose, a potential meaning can be created.

In this weeks reading, particular theories were collated to highlight the decreased prominence of narrative throughout new informational technology. The opposing organisational principle to narrative is called a database. A database is a collection of elements, independent of any narrative ordering. The world wide web and new media, often feature non-linear collections of data, such as blog posts. A series of blogposts thus form a database, without the presence of any narrative sequence associating each blog post with another. This shows the declination of narrative in new media. Moreover, day to day life today is sporadic and discontinuous as we weave in and out of different sites, stop, start, abruptly change direction of thoughts. This indicates that everyday life is becoming more like a database and less like a narrative. However this reading attempts to demonstrate that it’s not about narrative becoming irrelevant in the contemporary world, but that the notion of a narrative is mutating to accommodate the practices of the time. That new forms of narrative practice within informational technologies are established to assemble connections between elements of a database, unrestricted by logic and instead forming an anti-narrative. An anti-narrative presents elements of a narrative in a disconfigured order, therefore removing the ability for conventional juxtapositions to be made to create meaning from the elements. This is a difficult concept for me to wrap my head around, but this reading mainly seems to highlight the evidence of the database in a new, mutated narrative practice online which has created notions of the anti-narrative as a prominent feature in contemporary media.