Narrative Across Media: Trans-Stories In-Betweeness (original) (raw)

Digital Media and Textuality

In 1996, Sherry Turkle gave her first Ted Talk to express how moving it was to be connected in chatrooms and to belong to certain virtual communities. According to Turkle, what was important about those moments was not just the act of connecting, but also, and above all, that of disconnecting in order to lead our own lives and live our own identities. Years later, in 2012, in a new presentation called "Connected but Alone," Turkle claimed that technology is dragging us places we really do not want to go. Mobile devices have such psychological power that "they don't only change what we do, they change what we are." We are becoming accustomed to coexisting "alone together," to hiding from each other, even though we remain connected as a group. 1 Along these lines, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han uses the term digital swarm to refer to the mass of isolated individuals that possesses neither soul nor spirit. These "individuals are melting into a new unit; its members no longer have a profile of their own" (Han 10) and "lack the interiority of assembly that would bring forth a we" (11). Han also employs the Japanese term hikikomori to refer to these people who live at the margins of society, seated in front of their computer screens. In the face of this isolation, Sherry Turkle, in her latest book, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), strongly advocates face-to-face dialogue to regain the power of physical interaction, impaired by the advent of electronic media. Digital networks and the current state of the entertainment media have favored the rise of personalized production and creation, à la carte, via streaming, as the tool of various distinct narrative forms. These recent cultural models adopt intermedial or transmedial methods, situating themselves in virtual spaces which have replaced physical ones and which require a great deal of interactivity. These are spaces of presence, given that their temporality is that of an "immediate present" (Han 15) in which representation becomes co-presentation (16). I would now like to discuss those narratives that are ingrained between memory and the ephemeral, between conservation, reinvention, multiplication