Oh I’m Sorry, Did I Break Your Concentration?

In “Stitch Bitch”, Shelley Jackson makes the point that experiences and stories are best served non-linear and that the “future” lies in this kind of storytelling through hyperlinks. While her references and the term “hypertext” sound laughable today, her point is even more applicable now than when she wrote it. The internet has no beginning and no end and almost every page can lead to 100 more pages or a desire to enter something new into the search engine. New methods of interactive media provide all kinds of opportunities for non-linear storytelling. With the rise of social networking and its integration with advertising, personalization is key. Being able to craft a story, advertisement, or experience to the individual user will undoubtedly serve us, the creators, well.

While I agree with Jackson’s views, I don’t feel it necessary to compliment her style in this article. At one point she says “I am interested in writing that verges on nonsense, where nonsense is not the absence of sense but the superfluity of it. I would like to sneak as close to that limit as possible without reaching it.” This pretty much sums it up.

I get her point but found the flow of the article distracting and confusing. Unless you assume that you are preaching to the choir, why would you represent such a novel idea in such an uncomfortable way? If this were not a reading assignment for class I would have given up on it earlier and simply went to Google to lookup “non-linear writing”. Her overall point of using non-linear writing is a good one but her execution leaves something to be desired.

Even in examples like the film “Memento” or “Pulp Fiction” which were intentionally edited and presented out of sequence, each sequence was still constructed in a way that was easily digestible. The viewer was given the tools to easily piece the story together which was in fact the point. If there was any kind of specific structure to the reorganization of Jacksons writing after “shuffling her pages”, I wasn’t able to pick up on it. Worse, there was no real reward at the end of the article to make you feel that all of the effort was worth it. In this way she doesn’t do justice to non-linear storytelling.

I do, however, like her metaphorical representation of non-linear writing through allusions to Frankenstein. We are each a product of our experiences and all of us are different. What kind of people would we all be if every aspect of what we learned and how we learned it was controlled?

“It is as though somebody chewed a hole in a solid and irrefutable wall, and revealed an expanse of no-space as extensive as the space we live in.”

Just as scientists and hopefully the general public have now realized, space is infinite. You can travel in any direction for a hundred lifetimes and never run out of places to go. When I was growing up, most video games were played in two dimensions. Mario, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat come to mind as some of my favorites. In these games you were forced to play within some pretty strict confines. Imagine fighting against someone in real life but only being able to run straight at them or straight away from them (and no more than 10 or so feet away). The limits of the medium stifled the imagination and thus the experience. Nobody seemed to mind though, because we didn’t know at the time what we were missing.

I specifically remember the first time I played Mario64. I was amazed at the freedom of movement and the ability to see my character from every angle. In everyday life this was normal but it had never been presented this way in a game. Now there are games including Grand Theft Auto IV that are giant open sandboxes.

The biggest service this article provided for me was that it made me feel better about my “self-portrait” assignment. Before reading this article I was extremely frustrated with the project. I felt the need to fit neatly inside of a few different boxes and it just wasn’t happening for me. I was trying to be original and artistic and creative but I just wasn’t feeling inspired. The expressionist work was the hardest. How can I tell my hand to just “let it flow” when that type of art just isn’t my style? In all honesty, the final product of both of my projects is not a true representation of myself as much as it was a compromise between what I thought the assignment was and what the frustration and block in my creativity would allow. After reading this article I just decided, “it is what it is.”