Who Reads Hypermediated Tales? Children.
March 7, 2006
“Hypermedia art seems to follow a trajectory from the salon to the playground,” writes Mark Marino in his March 1st post on the WRT blog. He speculates about the reasons why, at the present time, children tend to comprise the audience that can best appreciate experimental works of hypermedia, digital fiction and poetry. Children are natural interacters. Children like to use all their senses. They like to play. They like to be physical. They are curious. Adults, on the other hand, Marino speculates, have become more accustomed to boredom. We have become accustomed to relatively disembodied and desensualized forms of interaction with the written word.
An interesting insight. I wonder if the adults of the future will be more like children, in that they will develop greater enthusiasm and openness toward multi-sensory, whole-being forms of interaction with media. Yet, is the dominant digital environment on the PC and the web conducive to stimulating adults to overcome their laziness, sensory atrophy and loss of curiosity? Andrei Herasimchuk, in “Please make me think! Potential dangers in usability culture“, dared to play with the heretical notion that it is not.
Other Posts Categorized as Hypermedia Storytelling:
- New on Dreaming Methods: "The Flat" - October 16th, 2006
- Bunk Magazine, a Hypermedia Humor E-Zine, Launches - September 11th, 2006
- Literatronic Software for Online Writing - May 27th, 2006
Other Posts Categorized as New Media Theory:
- Citizen Journalism No Longer Just an Interesting Idea - July 7th, 2007
- Henry Jenkins on Two Approaches to Participatory Culture: Prohibitionists and Collaborationists - July 25th, 2006
- What is New Media? - July 24th, 2006
- The People Formerly Known as the Audience - July 24th, 2006
- Transmodiology - July 11th, 2006
- Concrete Poetry - A World View - June 29th, 2006
Other Posts Categorized as Usability:
- Design Eye for the Usability Guy - March 4th, 2006
Jennifer, I like this thought about new adults. Since we’ve had these noise-making, blinking books around for a little while–at least a generation or even longer if we go back to pop-up books– do you see any signs (other than us) of changes in adults? Or are the signs everywhere? In the folks glued to their SMS cellphones, reading House of Leaves, watching tv online while uploading music?
The Heraimchuk link is also priceless. Thank you for that.
Adults have changed slightly, but the proliferation of new media and new devices does not appear, to me, to be encouraging people to recover the lost capacities of childhood. They are not becoming more multi-sensory or physical in their modes of engaging with new media. Many commentators have pointed out that people behave differently on the internet than they do while watching TV. They are used to being in control, and they get easily distracted while watching even a very short video online, especially if it doesn’t require any interaction from them. So the difference in media enables a difference in the consumer of media. How big a difference, though?
Despite things like Flash, and in spite of more interactivity, the internet is still very much a text-based medium, although it’s less linear a text world than a book. In fact, the drives for web standards, CSS, accessibiliy and usability - combined with the need to fit a web page onto a tiny Blackberry screen - are re-popularizing the internet purist who wants a web with nothing but text and data. At the extreme, having everything in text and on one long page, just like in the beginning, is the simplest way to make it usable on a cell phone or other small device. (This isn’t strictly necessary, though, since an alternative stylesheet just for small devices can also be used.)
Yet, there continues to be a place for both the “information web” and the “experience web”. The information web is the web of text, data, usability, discussion forums, text blogs, database-driven e-commerce catalogs, etc. The experience web is the web of interactive stories, animations, amateur videos, “branding”, and anything else that is more about inducing a subjective inner experience than utilizing information.
After writing all of the above, it occurs to me that there is still a simple but profound sign of change. Illustrations have quietly snuck back into fiction. They haven’t gotten much attention on their own. Only technology gets much attention. Thus, Flash and multimedia have gotten some attention, but the even larger phenomenon of mixing text fiction with illustrations (whether static or animated) has been taken for granted. Web comics, in particular, are very popular.
So I guess the answer to your question is that adults are changing in some ways while retrogressing in others. They get more illustrations with their online stories, and they interact with them less passively than they interact with their TV shows. Yet, they still don’t seem ready to form as enthusiastic an audience as children do, for the most experimental works of digital media, art and literature.