The Vital Narrative Dimensions, a Narrative Network in Digital Media

Abstract

The networks of digital media not just impacted our society, but also reconstructed our thinking of storytelling. The hyperlinks and interactive platforms of digital media entail a new narrative dimension of describing human life which approach of parallel narratives adapted to less dynamic platforms of media (eg. text, film) as well.

At the same time, these parallel life narratives, what I call Vital Narrative Dimensions contributed to various media hybrids as the interactive movie in steaming services (eg. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018)) or the “interactive film” with complex narrative structure appearing in the gaming industry (eg. Detroit Become Human created by Quantic Dreams). Consequently, the boundaries of these different platforms of digital media are shifting and parallel storytelling has a tendency to become interactive where a recipient gains the power of decision-making or becomes a first-person character in the narrative. The immersive digital media like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality break down the walls of the distance between the recipient and character, and a new narrative network of parallel narratives occur in these platforms adapted from other media (eg. Lies Beneath) or created in these platforms (eg. Lone Echo).

Considering the notion that parallel life narratives due to their features to a certain extent contribute to blurring of digital media boundaries, the lecture aims to focus on the question of how the network of parallel narratives creates a digital media discourse and impacts their boundaries by the structural representation of above-mentioned instances (Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Detroit Become Human, Lies Beneath).