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OCR
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.
