Serial Narrativity in Online Space

Where to begin?

At first, the scope of the task seems too ridiculous for words. However I shall attempt to describe and discuss the varying forms of online seriality and narrativity, via a discussion of the issues raised by Guattari (1995) and Ndalianis (…). As with any discussion of the Internet or its media applications, the temptation is always to try and differentiate between media forms that came “before” (print, broadcast radio and television, etc) and “after” the advent of the Internet. This binary gives rise to the rather nebulous and somewhat unhelpful term “new media”, or digital media, which has been used in Utopian modes by writers like Mark Poster (1995) to describe a new age in which digital communications will open up new avenues of communication between media producers and consumers, leading to the democratisation of media systems. Well, that was thirteen years ago, and people are still paying to see movies like Jumper (Doug Liman, 2008), so what’s actually happening? (Watching that movie was like inviting Doug Liman to my house for dinner, but instead of bringing a nice dessert, or even a salad, he kicked me in the balls, then kicked my dog in the balls, and slapped my mum around for a bit. Thanks Doug!) Here I will try to elaborate on what is happening to the workings of seriality/narrativity in the online space, and try to sketch a groundwork for how we might understand and discuss these phenomena.

One of the often-cited criticisms of new/digital media discourse include Lev Manovich’s discussion of critical terminology (2001), where he argues that a historical perspective on new media reveals it is not quite so new after all, in fact sharing traits with traditional cinematic production, itself over a hundred years old:

“Indeed, any digital representation consists of a limited number of samples. For example, a digital still image is a matrix of pixels – a 2-D sampling of space. However, cinema was from its beginnings based on sampling – the sampling of time. Cinema sampled time twenty-four times a second. So we can say that cinema prepared us for new media. All that remained was to take this already discrete representation and to quantify it. But this is simply a mechanical step; what cinema accomplished was a much more difficult conceptual break – from the continuous to the discrete.” – (Manovich, 2001: p50)

So, when we browse the net looking for funny videos, are we experiencing something truly new, or is this just the next step in the machinic processes of culture? Guattari reminds us that machines/machinic assemblages beget technology, and not necessarily the other way around (1995: p33). The example given above by Manovich illustrates this point, as the machinic assemblage of cinema paved the way for digital photography technology.

The Big Picture

How can we conceive of the Internet, or Internet culture in all its vastness? Moreover, how do we separate out what is ‘of the Internet’ from what is borrowed, taken, or re-presented from other sources? Is the Internet so ubiquitous, its roots and tendrils ensconced in almost every aspect of media, that it qualifies as a huge machine, or perhaps just one facet of an even larger one?

The two pictures above provide divergent ways of conceiving the internet. The first is a topography showing all possible IP addresses and how they are allocated and distributed to various vendors, a technical perspective which reveals the substructure of the internet, and links it with the ‘real’ world of capital and production. The second is an approach to online communities, approximating the size of the community with the size of an imagined landmass. This view seems geared toward the average internet user, who may take the hidden workings of IP addresses, subnets and bits for granted, but understands the virtual communities and systems that operate on the screen.

Both of these images present the internet from different perspectives, but both illustrate a similar point about internet culture:  that the internet is a site where considerable work takes place.  Physical and mental energy, time, expertise, engineering, programming, etc being contributed by millions of people to create and populate those landmasses, manage those IP’s and network systems.  There is a constant production of ideas, programs, relations, connections, which give these networks a life and a purpose.  And not everything produced need necessarily be product, ie: labour, in the capitalist sense, for cultural production on the internet (blogging, chatting, gaming, email, forum discussions, flame wars, etc) probably accounts for far more of the average internet users’ time than work applications.

The constant “chatter” of the internet, the nonstop production and reproduction of cultural symbols and connections, conjures images of Guattari’s machinic assemblage (1995: p35). Not only are the spaces of the internet culture-machine taking on a geography and life of their own, they are also taking our lives into its fold.

“Curiously, in acquiring more and more life, machines demand in return more and more abstract human vitality: and this has occurred throughout their evolutionary development. Computers, expert systems and artificial intelligence add as much to thought as they subtract from thinking. They relieve thought of inert schemas. The forms of thought assisted by computer are mutant, relating to other musics, other Universes of reference.” – (Guattari, 1995: p36)

And so, we become enculturated to the Internet, our brains begin to think in ways they didn’t before. When my parents were young, they never had to worry about spam mail, but now they do. Before the advent of YouTube, I didn’t know what a rickroll was, now an increasing number of us do (if you are one that just learned thanks to my link, welcome!). Likewise, online seriality is also penetrating how writers and audiences think about traditional narrative spaces such as television.

Think of the twisting, circling webs of mystery, drama and intrigue on recent tv programs like Lost, Heroes, Battlestar Galactica etc, and how those programs are integrating web based content such as mobisodes/webisodes alongside and in some cases into their ongoing serial narratives. TBC

Bibliography:

Guattari, Felix (1995), ‘Machinic Heterogenesis’, Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm, trans. P. Bains and J. Pejanis. Sydney: Power Publications: pp33-59

Manovich, Lev (2001),

Poster, Mark (1995),