from here to there: an introduction

Throughout my academic life I have become increasingly interested in the structure and process of the stories we tell each other. From a structural point of view, I have been exploring the methods and media of storytelling, looking at the way we use words, images, sounds, etc. to relate stories. From a perspective of process, I have been examining the interaction between the sender and receiver of a story, the dance through which meaning occurs. In talking of structure and process, I am essentially discussing form and function. Or in other words, structure is the architectural building, the medium, and process is the creation of that building and then the interaction within it. And when we tell stories, I am more than aware that these terms blur quite nicely.

It seems that we stitch the fabric of our lives together with and through narrative; it's how we make sense of our world(s). And there are so many different ways that we can tell stories; through various media with different audiences we strive to communicate and narrate our stories to each other. Although each form of media (television, novels, performances, movies, paintings, hypertexts, comics, etc.) has its strengths and weaknesses, I am particularly interested in stories told across multiple media. Yes, novels are made into movies and movies are made into CD-ROM games, but some stories now travel across many mediums and these narratives evolve by experiencing/reading/playing with each medium incorporated. As McLuhan is famous for saying, "the medium is the message" (Understanding Media, 7). The structure shapes the process of the story. So, given that each medium adds to the experience of a narrative in a different way, can we not complementarily combine media together to relate and experience a new type of story?

I believe that such a combination of multiple media would create a unique form of narrative in which the story is linked among mediums through the echoing of words, images, characters and environment. To get the story, the reader has to play within and among the various mediums. Granted, the stories we have heard, seen and read in a single medium have not lacked impact, but incorporating several mediums offers a whole new experience. Also, I am not advocating that we supplant or replace older forms of media with new ones, but instead that we use old and new together and see what they have to say about each other and how they allow us to gather the best of each to offset the worst of each. New developments in technology may give us new mediums that change our conceptions of what a story is and can do, but older forms of storytelling still work quite well. Computational media does bring a whirlwind of new potential, but a good old book is still a nice thing with which to curl up. Using multiple mediums to relate a story would give us varied structure and process; the sender(s) and receiver(s) would be involved with each medium in different ways. This would not only refine our understanding of the subject at hand, but also refine our awareness of the structural and processual narrative strengths and weaknesses of the incorporated mediums themselves. Thus, we would understand more about the narrative itself and the components (the mediums) through which it was expressed. The computational revolution is happening, we have the chance to make an informed choice about how we use this new medium by seeing how it relates to preceding media.