Media vs Life
When I read JD Applen’s section on New Media, his connections from the internet to real life fascinated me. Applen mentions Baudelaire, a French flaneur who observes the people around him. Applen calls upon Lev Manovich to compare strolling through life to surfing the internet. I agree that both forms are unfixed interaction methods, despite being polar opposites. When I go for walks outside, I pass by so many people, cars, and buildings. Those components make up the flow of life. Similarly, when I search the web, I see the modularity and variability of websites that all make up the flow of the internet. I get to interact with both in different ways, yet they function similarly.
Compare and Contrast
We compare so many forms of media to each other. Applen distinguishes this “cultural form” between modular, interactive constructs such as databases to linear narrative forms such as books. Databases and websites are unfixed and do not require a fixed layout to serve their purposes. However, books, films and other such narrative media do. Applen argues, “traditional narratives are thought of as incomplete or senseless if they are unstructured; we like our plots presented to us in the right order and with enough information in each scene that we can follow and understand it” (Applen 9). What if there were narratives that bend this rule and become interactive and modular?
A Media Blend
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events follows three orphaned siblings. The twelfth installment of thirteen books, The Penultimate Peril, finds the children at a hotel. Each book in the series has thirteen chapters, keeping that consistent, linear narrative plot. However, Snicket does something interesting at one point in this particular book. The three children split up across the hotel for different tasks at the end of chapter three. The next three chapters follow each sibling’s journey individually, and Snicket tells the reader that they can these three chapters out of order. Snicket, real name Daniel Handler, writes these chapters in a way that readers actually can read them in any order. Readers can choose which sibling to follow first, and nothing changes about the plot except for the order in which the book presents information.
As remarkable as this may seem, Snicket specifies that this works for only those three chapters. The overall book and series, of course, is linear and unchanged, yet this one small section is not. This shows that authors can bend the rules of fixed media, but only to an extent. In the Netflix TV series adaptation of Unfortunate Events, viewers see the three separate stories sequentially. While Netflix does have an Interactive feature, it is impossible to set that feature for just a portion of an episode. New media has its limits, yet it can be interesting to perceive things differently in the electronic world as opposed to the real world.
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