The Best Part of Digital Stories

My fascination with digital literature is curious considering I love physical books. I think a book is an amazing piece of technology, indestructible unless you rip it, water it or set it on fire. And stories in books can last thousands of years and still be accessed (give or take an evolution of a language), unlike their computerized counterparts which struggle to last longer than a decade.

But that’s part of the fascination for me: what can books do that computer stories can’t do and visa versa. So the most important element about a digital story for me is how the story uses its affordances, or the unique properties of its machine, to tell a story in a way that a book could not. And related, how digital stories fail in ways that books do not. As C.T. Funkhouser says, "When people read a book, they never receive a message that a page doesn't work" (193).

So point of view, tone, theme, setting, plot, and conflict: all these are all important to a story, but for me the device is everything, how does it work to unveil setting, conflict, tone and plot with branching choices, interactivity and all the baggage of online culture.

For example, the story "De Baron" by Victor Gijsbers (2006), (view Mark Sample’s walk through video, 48 minutes, warning: very difficult content), uses gameplay format to force the moral decisions of the “hero” on to you. This is something a book cannot do very well. Readers of books are given the distance of non-participation. Readers are allowed to feel like witnesses rather than participants. In gameplay however, readers suddenly become culpable for their choices and the results of those choices feel very visceral. Suddenly, all the dangerous choices in this game become a metaphor for very tragic choices in a human life. The medium gives the story a startling and tragic affordance, just by offering (or forcing) the reader to deal with the responsibilities of choice.

Of the stories I've read in class, I still appreciate how “The Dionea House” used its mechanisms and all the functionality of blogging to tell its tale. This story would not work the same way on paper. The characters, plot and conflict all evolved over multiple blog posts and a plethora of comments where sub-plots unfolded. Transformation and point of view unfolded over multiple blogs:

This is the original display of the main story, a blog of emails compiled by the character Eric to tell friends and family about the tragic disappearance of their friend Mark. The blog format provides assumed implications of a community readership because of the fact that multiple readers can access a web page at the same time, unlike readers of a book.

The author uses the date stamp functionality of blogs, which works to build suspense over time. 

The inserted emails also make use of email affordances (subject lines, date stamps and uncanny, undeliverable messages).

Eric also starts a personal blog when the public blog garners too much attention. This illustrates how easy it is to jump to other channels for storytelling (starting a new blog is usually free, after all). His thoughts turn much more personal here and so the blogs contrast each other in tone. His last comment attracts hundreds of comments, both real and fake, which work to increase the uncanny ambiance of the story. Everyone else is alarmed about Eric, so we should be too.

Jenny’s blog is a great example of an abandoned blog, started with the best intentions but left like so much Internet debris. However, a fascinating thread of comments lies beneath its surface. The author uses hidden comments like Easter eggs.

The babysitter Dani gives us our first glimpse into a first-hand account of someone operating from inside the house! Her blog is a good example of characterization through blog functionality (the mood barometer and her ASCII character emotive faces and teen-speak).

In contrast, Loreen’s blog is a first hand account of the house but from a tough-talking, gritty homeless woman.

All the blogs hide story elements within the functionality allowed within the blogging platform and Internet machinery, which provide experiences in reading unavailable from a book.

As a reader you can choose to read only part of the story or follow every comment trail and link to the sub-blogs and creative blogger profiles. Or you could choose to read only the surface story. It’s very similar to "Infinite Jest" readers who refuse to read the nine-hundred plus footnotes in the back of that book. You can do that but you miss plot points that way. The blog format allows an author the opportunity to explore all the options of date stamps, comments, html and blogger culture and David Foster Wallace, likewise, was exploring the limits of what a physical book’s footnotes could do. Because a book is a machine, too.


Works Cited

Funkhouser, C.T. "New Directions in Digital Poetry." Continuum International. 2012.

Gijsbers, Victor. "De Baron" walkthrough video by Mark Sample, YouTube,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-iuO6gq0tk&feature=youtu.be,  Accessed 9 March  2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “The Dionaea House.” Creepypasta, http://creepypasta.wikia.com/wiki/The_Dionaea_House. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Heisserer, Eric. “A Quiet Space.” Blogger, http://dionaeahouse.blogspot.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Ohdanigirl. Adventures in Babysitting, LiveJournal, https://ohdanigirl.livejournal.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Levin, Jennifer. Missing Since Sept, Blogger, http://jennylevin.blogspot.com/.  Accessed 9 March 2019.

Mathers, Loreen. loreenmathers, LiveJournal, https://loreenmathers.livejournal.com/. Accessed 9 March 2019.

Wallace, David Foster. “Infinite Jest.”  Back Bay Books. 1997.