Oldal 40 [40]
Part II.
Storytelling in the Information Age
The computer is a symbol of the information age and the information society,
capable of storing massive amounts of data on an external storage device and
performing operations remarkably faster than humans with large sets of data.
According to Manovich (2001), the Internet particularly favors the
emergence of database-type cultural forms (such as encyclopedic data sets)
whose elements, mostly in listed form, are not causally and temporally
related; this contrasts with the linear narrative character that dominates
human cultural expression. At the turn of the millennium, Manovich still
saw the cataloging, and indexing function of the database as dominant in
the new media world, and narrative construction as possible only through
the construction of individual pathways. In the information jungle of the
Internet, the relationship between data is manifested through hyperlinks,
which, while contextualising information and creating an infinite information
network, is not a transfer of knowledge through the usual narrative structure.
Manovich argued that the most challenging task for new media designers is
how to combine the database and the narrative.
Computational narratology explores how to algorithmically describe
a narrative and its interpretation. Research in the field is mainly artificial
intelligence research based on linguistic principles (Mani, 2013). An obvious
solution to generate narratives could be to use computation and artificial
intelligence. The GPT-3 algorithm has generated coherent blog posts (Raevskij,
2020), but artificial intelligence can also create recipes or even write Eurovision
songs by modelling, and analysing existing structures.
However, this is not where the relationship between narrative structures
and computing has been fully developed. Although Web 1.0 also enabled the
emergence of narrative forms in news portals and private correspondence,
the real narrative breakthrough came with the emergence of Web 2.0. It
was then that the Internet became more than just a one-way medium for
information in the traditional mass communication model, with the possibility
of interpersonal interactions over the network opening up as well.
The IT tools needed to communicate over Web 2.0 platforms have become
more widely available in society, and with the rise of smartphones, networked
communication became a natural practice in the first decade of the 2000s.