This week in Networked Media, Adrian delivered another fascinating symposium. We were given the challenge to explain and define: What is a book?
Through this thought experiment, conventions and assumptions were once again challenged. Text, pages, words, meanings, beginnings and ends are part of a system we invented and have since been taken for granted as infallible definitions of everything we experience. As we progress in a new world of internet cultures, we are forced to adapt to a world where there is no beginning or end. As we discussed these changes to story organisation, I was reminded of a book I recently came across. In Douglas Rushkoff‘s Present Shock, the media theorist explains the narrative collapse in storytelling in the digital age. He does so focusing not just on the materiality of the traditional and new mediums, but the different temporal experience of the two worlds that affect the way we use them. From reading and watching books and movies that begin and end, we now shift towards a dynamic world of the internet, where we can create our own stories within interactive virtual spaces such as social media and open world RPG games.
If anyone is interested, Rushkoff is on an episode of Joe Rogan Experience.