The Exploding Internet - A Medium for Interactive Storytelling
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The link posted above is an interesting visualization of the extreme growth of the internet over the past decade. Note how 17% of world commerce now occurs through a medium that was barely present just 20 years ago.
Chris Crawford is known to consider interactive fiction a dead end for interactive storytelling. As he states in his book, "Interactive fiction is certainly interactive, and it’s fictional in the sense of being made up, but it’s certainly not storytelling." But the medium itself, in this case the internet, can be considered a story, or at least the initiation of an ever-flowing story where the characters are endless and the plots are f0rever interesting.
A closer inspection of the linked image reveals such storylines that may give us a glimpse at what kind of cultural experiences will overtake the medium in the coming years. For example, it is obvious and widely known that most technology advancements have emerged from the western world (as well as Japan and Korea), yet the advancement of the internet into the traditional household, even in the poorest countries, allows us to get an intimate look at some cultural underpinnings never before seen by the internet's traditional western audience. And the poorest countries taken into consideration are only poor in the financial sense; culturally there is a wealth of knowledge that make these an untapped source of richness unimagined by most.
Just a few days ago, I came upon a photojournalism blog that showed a fascinating story about an Israeli woman being wed to a Syrian man. They met through the internet, and though they loved each other unconditionally, their families were each on the other side of a heavily contested border that has to be patrolled by armed UN peacekeepers. The woman chose to travel across the border to be with her husband, in spite of the sharp cultural chasm encountered when moving across that border. Like a modern take on Romeo and Juliet, this story reveals an incredible set of experiences in another part of the world that I would have never known about if it wasn't for the onset of the digital age. And this is just one of thousands of events being catalogued daily through the several blogs and websites covering the internet.
China now has more internet users than the entire population of the entire United States; India's tremendous population is seeing a technology boom that reaches to the poorest neighborhoods; cheaper technologies allow children in Africa to crank a manual battery to power laptops provided by aid research from MIT. All of these events have allowed cultural hegemony to dissolve. The possibilities are now endless, and I would envision Chris Crawford agreeing that the internet as a medium on its own can be one of the most interesting interactive storytelling devices ever devised. The possibilities are truly endless here.
The link posted above is an interesting visualization of the extreme growth of the internet over the past decade. Note how 17% of world commerce now occurs through a medium that was barely present just 20 years ago.
Chris Crawford is known to consider interactive fiction a dead end for interactive storytelling. As he states in his book, "Interactive fiction is certainly interactive, and it’s fictional in the sense of being made up, but it’s certainly not storytelling." But the medium itself, in this case the internet, can be considered a story, or at least the initiation of an ever-flowing story where the characters are endless and the plots are f0rever interesting.
A closer inspection of the linked image reveals such storylines that may give us a glimpse at what kind of cultural experiences will overtake the medium in the coming years. For example, it is obvious and widely known that most technology advancements have emerged from the western world (as well as Japan and Korea), yet the advancement of the internet into the traditional household, even in the poorest countries, allows us to get an intimate look at some cultural underpinnings never before seen by the internet's traditional western audience. And the poorest countries taken into consideration are only poor in the financial sense; culturally there is a wealth of knowledge that make these an untapped source of richness unimagined by most.
Just a few days ago, I came upon a photojournalism blog that showed a fascinating story about an Israeli woman being wed to a Syrian man. They met through the internet, and though they loved each other unconditionally, their families were each on the other side of a heavily contested border that has to be patrolled by armed UN peacekeepers. The woman chose to travel across the border to be with her husband, in spite of the sharp cultural chasm encountered when moving across that border. Like a modern take on Romeo and Juliet, this story reveals an incredible set of experiences in another part of the world that I would have never known about if it wasn't for the onset of the digital age. And this is just one of thousands of events being catalogued daily through the several blogs and websites covering the internet.
China now has more internet users than the entire population of the entire United States; India's tremendous population is seeing a technology boom that reaches to the poorest neighborhoods; cheaper technologies allow children in Africa to crank a manual battery to power laptops provided by aid research from MIT. All of these events have allowed cultural hegemony to dissolve. The possibilities are now endless, and I would envision Chris Crawford agreeing that the internet as a medium on its own can be one of the most interesting interactive storytelling devices ever devised. The possibilities are truly endless here.
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