I must say I enjoyed reading the Lev Manovich article, even though I’m not sure I agreed with everything he wrote. I think the examples of new media like the weather visualizer and conversation fit in pretty well with his description of databases as ever-growing algorithms of data that contain no narratives. While I can listen to people prattle on about products, there really are no elements of narrative, but certainly one would say there is something to these sites on a deeper level than just a list of links.
One thing I think sites like the “conversation” allow users to do is create their own narrative. An author is not weaving a carefully constructed story, but, rather, the user is allowed to take the elements that Jason Nelson provides and create their own type of story from it. This is much what Lev Manovich argues is behind databases as a genre of new media, but a lot has happened since Manovich wrote this article. I think video games have changed in a way so that they both serve as database and narrative, but what I want to explore here is how Web 2.0 has changed the way databases operate.
One good example of this is the “We Feel Fine” page. This is a database of sentences (and sometimes pictures) and it operates in much the same way that Manovich describes. However, in the current post-postmodern state of New Media, the user has become increasingly more important. The “We Feel Fine” database serves as more of a thief than an organizer of information. It requires users blogging out there in the world to write a sentence with the word “feel” in it, then it goes and steals that sentence for its own purposes. Not only is this cool, but the algorithm at play here would have little to work with if the Web was not increasingly user-generated. Manovich mentioned in his article that with the advent of the Web, people became data archivists for work or hobby. We Feel Fine is serving this role, but what about all the people out there blogging? Those people are not really archiving data in a narrative-free database environment. Blogs, while short, actually serve as a collection of narratives, like a collection of short stories, that is forever growing. Blogs may not always have character, conflict, plot, etc., but often have some of these elements, especially when people are recounting their day/week/month.
Nowadays, the Web thrives because people like us post to blogs and allow a site like We Feel Fine to continue populating its content. We post videos to Youtube and, in so doing, are as responsible for the growth of the database as the adminstrator who may be adding content to another site. While I agree that these types of sites still function in the way Manovich describes, I find a new and exciting element as well. Youtube can still be surfed out of order and the site as a whole lacks narrative, but each video posted is the narrative of someone out there somewhere. Whether you’re watching someone do a stupid trick or a mock trailer for Mary Poppins, these narratives do exist. And because of the increasing amount of user-generated material being posted, the sites now begin to show the human narrative. Youtube allows us to glimpse into all sorts of pockets of life and realize that the idea that there is no universal truth (a postmodern tenet) or one right way of seeing the world becomes pretty evident. I think this is what the Web does now. While each site may not weave its own narrative thread, we get glimpses of the smaller narratives playing out in the world around us every day. And in a sense, this is what books attempt to achieve. The Web is just going about it with a little more chaos and a lot more everyman participation.
