Oldal 46 [46]
Part II. Storytelling in the Information Age ] 45
How have these technological innovations affected human storytelling
habits? Alexander (2011) and Handler Miller (2004/2020) interpret the notion
of narratives created through digital means broadly, including transmedia
texts and computer games alongside hypertexts. Alexander (2011, p. 40)
refers to digital storytelling 2.0 as all multimedia phenomena in the world of
Web 2.0 that are at the intersection of storytelling, gaming and social media.
The storytelling of the 21 century is characterized by the interactivity of
the audience, cross-media presentation and the use of branching, modular
narrative forms. In the following chapters, 21‘-century forms of 20-century
multimedia storytelling and new media narratives will be examined. Chapters
3 to 6 discuss in detail the storytelling conventions that emerged around the
turn of the millennium, which, while sharing many common features, are
different in terms of their application and methodological backgrounds.
CHAPTER 1.
STORYTELLING ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND CONTENT-SHARING
PLATFORMS
The first interactive storytelling platforms of web 2.0 to be discussed are blogs,
which contain posts in diary format. A new form of collaborative authorship
is being implemented in the content creation of blogging communities. On
the one hand, shared access allows multiple authors to publish on the same
thematic blog, which on the other hand allows readers and other authors to
react to each other’s posts. The world of blogs created the communication
and publishing conventions that have being applied on social media and
content-sharing platforms.
Since the emergence of Web 2.0, stories are no longer told by a single
author or filtered and moderated by editors. The verbal, visual or audio¬
visual narrative of a post published on a content-sharing portal or social
media platform and the comments form the narrative, which the user can
shape by adding further comments. The endless, open-ended narrative form
of the 21“ century has emerged: the content of a Web 2.0 narrative can be
constantly updated and modified by adding comments that cannot be limited
in terms of time or quantity. In addition to the unfinished nature of such
narratives, two other issues arise. The first is how the user reconstructs the
story itself from the infinite number of existing online narratives of the same
story. The other question is how, despite the disappearance of editors, posts
and comments can be manipulated on Web 2.0.
Previous anthropological, sociological, historical, and narratological studies
have focused on the reach of posts and comments on today’s social media
and content-sharing portals, as well as the communication routes and tools
by which the collectively constructed narrative is created.