Learning to swim

If the novel is no longer novel, what will take its place? Perhaps online writing, the subject of last week's Radio New Zealand technology show Digital Life. (You can listen to the show as a RealAudio clip.)

Dale Spender might have reluctantly accepted the death of the book, but Sue Thomas of trAce is not ready to bury her books just yet. For her, new media represent a new kind of reading experience, but one which "is not superior or inferior, it's simply different."

According to Thomas our familiarity with the book has rendered its interactivity transparent. Similarly, Thomas says the acceptance of digital texts will come when writers see through the technology and focus on the narrative. As Janet H. Murray points out in Hamlet on the Holodeck:

A stirring narrative in any medium can be experienced as a virtual reality because our brains are programmed to tune into stories with an intensity that can obliterate the world around us.

Thomas believes that until people become fluent in digital media they will not feel comfortable with the kind of narratives it produces. Technological transparency and digital media fluency will be brought about by familiarity. To again quote Murray:

…in a participatory medium, immersion implies learning to swim, to do the things that the new environment makes possible.

So we must bath ourselves in bits if we are to be strong enough digital swimmers to take advantage of the new media, but as Thomas points out there are sharks in the sea.

Writers, like the rest of the networked world, are struggling with issues of control. Traditionally writers have had control of their reader's experience; new media change the old rules. Thomas suggests we look to the gaming world to learn from their use of participatory narrative. Educators are facing the same issues and Thomas' conclusion is equally valid for them:

…there is an increasing audience who actually do want to engage with the work, and want to engage with other people through the work… it is interactivity that will make the big difference.

Update: Listen in to Digital Life this week to meet a US trading company that recruits on the basis of video game proficiency. Now if it was only available as a podcast!