Clio Wired (History 696)

Murray argues in Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace that the advent of the new media will allow for the cyberbard of the future to tell entirely different kinds of stories, as distinct from print and film as the capabilities of those two media are from each other. Breathlessly peddling the innovative aspects of storytelling in cyberspace, Murray leads the reader through her theme using examples as disparate as Star Trek: Voyager, the graphic sequential art of Mike Baron and Art Spiegelman, the science fiction of Willaim Gibson (originator of the term "cyberspace"), and of course Murray’s own realm of literary criticism. To carry forward Murray’s preoccupation with role-playing and masks, her tone makes her the high priestess preaching to the masses, foretelling not omens of doom but prophecies of a bright, glorious future. In this future cyberdramas will turn the audience into interactors, free to use the flexible technology of the new media to explore the virtual worlds designed for them and find/construct their own plots and resolutions.

Lev Manovich’s approach is different, and certainly more cautious. He examines apparent dichotomies relevant to the new media – information access vs. psychological engagement, data vs. algorithm, database vs. narrative – and reveals their similarities rather than their differences. His sources and topics are strikingly similar to Murray’s; they both address the game TETRIS, for instance. This common ground only serves to throw their differences into relief, however. Where Murray, as the literary analyst, reads the 1990s popularity of the falling-block game as a metaphor for the chaotic lives of postmodern, late twentieth-century players who use their agency within the game to express their inner conflicts, Manovich sees the game “playing” the players by teaching them the algorithm to be successful.

Both Manovich and Murray acknowledge that a new form will emerge. Murray stresses the supremacy of the narrative, confident that above all the new media will be an outlet for storytelling. It will likely be interactive storytelling, but there will be plot nonetheless. Manovich doubts the preeminence of the narrative and lends much weight to the database, the syntagm that Murray largely ignores. For Manovich, the power of the new media is not in the unique forms of expression it may allow, but in the breadth and depth of information available to the narrator/audience/interactor.

While initially quit taken with Murray’s proposal, her argument lost steam for me as I progressed through her book. I read Manovich’s piece with roughly one hundred pages to go in Murray’s book, and found myself siding more and more with the theory of the primacy of the database. Perhaps I am merely an unconverted heathen, too cold of heart to listen to Murray’s gospel of an entirely new media art form to be born out of my desktop. I am more swayed by the weight Manovich places on the database over the narrative. One is not superior to the other, but Murray ignores the database at her own peril. Her experience with IBM punchcards and core dumps may have soured her on the true advantage that vast amount of data storage and collation the new media can lend to narrative, for the positive influence of both.