Introduction: Interactive Style
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Saper, Craig. “Introduction: Interactive Style.” Style 33, no. 2 (1999): 180–83. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.33.2.180
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As an introduction to the emerging field of new media studies, the essays in this issue chart the changes underway in the reception of new media and interactive narrative. These changes are similar to the reactions to Continental theory in earlier decades. Terms like frictions, misadventure, hacking, tension, and even death may help form accurate descriptions of the new media's potential. The titles of the essays in this issue use these terms to point to new, paradoxically positive conceptions of new media as well as impasses and apprehensions. These articles argue that there is no single form or list of attributes for new media precisely because terms like interactivity point to paraformal and post-structural attributes. One way to appreciate this new area is to compare it to previous arts and literature as well as the competing conceptions of the future of this technology. Other ways of appreciating interactivity include comparing it to peculiar types of dialogue, relationships among people, animals, and robots, or to other forms of social interaction. In comparing interactive narrative to literary forms, the essays here argue that it is a unique type of narrative that has goals and attributes of great aesthetic significance even if exemplary interactive narratives do not achieve literary aesthetic goals. Beyond the specific comparisons to arts, literature, and social interactions, the new media also suggest new types of institutional organization. Essays here explain how the uses of new media create infrastructural problems as well as highlight new organizational possibilities. New media changes the social situation and context of scholarship, academia, and textual style. Among these changes, pedagogy now has a forum for experimentation as list servers and e-mail allow for alternatives to classroom settings. In all of the essays in this special issue, the main question is how to translate narratives and social situations into situations and narratives made possible by interactivity and new media.