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Embodiment of Stories in Hybrid Environments:Narrative Art in the Age of Social Networking and Locative Media
Anatole Pierre Fuksas
Univeristà degli Studi di CassinoDipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate Via Bellini 1, 03043 Cassino - Italiaanatolepierre.fuksas@unicas.itS
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This paper investigates potential literary applications based on Global Positioning System (GPS),Geographic Information System (GIS) or similar geocoding standards. In a few years narrative artistsand storytellers’ communities will be likely writing or taping stories to be broadcasted by locativemedia mining 2.0 websites for contents delivered by Location-based media on GPS or GIS enabledportable wireless devices. Textual narratives as podcasted stories will invade laptop computers andmobile phones, providing readers and listeners with pertinent references or analogical interferencesaimed to enriching natural environments. Presences triggered by the mirror matching of narrativereferences will infest urban and rural environments, enhancing sensory experiences of perceivedlandscapes. What formats may be forecasted as the standards ones when it will come to the imple-mentation of socially shared narrative art with locative tagging? Will these new narrative standardsreshape interactions between subjects and environments? Moreover, while providing a permanently operative level of interaction between narrative contents and natural environments, will geocodedstories play crucial role in the literary system?L
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Philology and criticism usually apply to literary works that have been written and published or literary systems as actual genres. That is, literary studies generally focus on past or present state of the art butthey hardly offer predictions, prefiguring forms that will play a role into the future development of cultural landscapes. Making a remarkable exception in respect to the norm, the present contributionaims to forecast potential development in storytelling based on locative media. That is, as part of amore general inquiry on the Ecology of the Novel, it will investigate potential literary applications based on Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) or similargeocoding standards.In a few years narrative artists and storytellers’ communities will be likely writing or taping stories to be broadcasted by locative media mining 2.0 websites for contents delivered by Location-based mediaon GPS or GIS enabled portable wireless devices. Textual narratives as podcasted stories will invadelaptop computers and mobile phones, providing readers and listeners with pertinent references oranalogical interferences aimed to enriching natural environments. Presences triggered by the mirrormatching of references entailed by symbolically encoded narratives, both in audio and written textformats, will infest urban and rural environments, forests and deserts, islands and hills, mountainsand beaches, enhancing sensory experiences of perceived landscapes.So, questions arise. What formats may be forecasted as the standards ones when it will come to theimplementation of socially shared narrative art with locative tagging? Will these new narrativestandards reshape interactions between subjects and environments? Moreover, while providing apermanently operative level of interaction between narrative contents and natural environments, willgeocoded stories play crucial role in the literary system? Will eventually the novel be doomed tomarginality or even extinction because of the rise of socially-networked locative narratives? Rather, will the novel outlast this technological revolution too?
Anatole Pierre Fuksas2
The theoretical extent of the ‘digital menace’, often predicted as a book-killer, hasoften be overrated, not to say generally mistaken, by common sense. Actually, therise of new media in the Digital Age slightly affected the popularity of the the book asa medium and even more slightly the one of novel as a genre. Basically, Calvino(1988) offered a very wise advice when he introduced his «Six memos for the nextmillennium» stating that he trusted in literature and in its ability to last through thecurrent millennium, because its specific bag of tools is able to do things that areotherwise undoable.Far from having been threatened, not to mention killed, by web culture and new media, literature has played an essential part in the development of groundbreakingcommercial web based services such as Amazon, originally established in order tosell books online. Moreover, literature has found plenty of room in second generation web-based communities, even representing the main interest which very crowded web based communities of enthusiastic readers share through social network services, such as aNobii, LibraryThing, or Goodreads (Fuksas 2008). When it comesto genres, such literary systems emerging from digital shelves of socially networked bookworms look like ‘Estremistan’ as defined by Taleb (2007: 30), that is as a winner-takes-(almost)-all cultural environment in which the novel definitely plays anhegemonic role.So, the major environmental shift determined by the rise of digital media did notimpacted dramatically neither the popularity of literature, that looks pretty much ina good shape, and the predominance of the novel, that is emerging more and more asa global standard. Still, an eventual new ‘threat’ to the novel might come frompotential advancements in storytelling based on the forthcoming massive propaga-tion of locative media. Indeed, the very probable rise of personal devices based onthe Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) orsimilar geocoding standards and platforms may very likely provide storytellers a very interesting ground for the development of specific and very new literary applications.So far, such hypothesis is just matter of science-fiction novels, as in the case de-scribed by William Gibson in
Spook Country
:
«“the artist Beth Baker is here, her apartment. You will come, you will experiencethe apartment, this environment. This is an annotated environment, do you know it?”“annotated how?”“Each object is hyperspatially tagged with Beth Barker’s description, with BethBarker’s narrative of this object. One simple water glass has twenty tags”She looked at the white orchid blooming on the taller coffee table, imagined itlayered with virtual file cards».
Still, similar applications are not necessarily ‘impossible’, that is technologically unsupportable by locative media, as Karlis Kalnins defined them at the RIXC Centrefor New Media Culture in order to distinguish the latter creative explorations of themedium from the corporate hype surrounding location-based services (LBS):
Embodiment of Stories in Hybrid Environments
3«as an artistic form Locative Media explores the social potential of location-aware devices, inspired by the use of tracking technology and wireless media,human relationships, movement and identity, seeking to extend and reappro-priate the functions of locative technologies by exploring ways in which they can be socially constructive and facilitate new dynamics to occur withineveryday life».(http://wiki.media-culture.org.au/index.php/Technologies_- _Locative_Media)
The concept of locative media is typically associated with ‘ubiquitous computing’or ‘pervasive computing’, referring to the proliferation of digital devices in thenatural environment. Both are generally framed in speculations about so called‘augmented reality’, based on the interaction of natural and virtual environments. According to common approaches, technical solutions, which make it possible to‘augment’ so called ‘reality’, rely on pervasive computing and locative media, by nesting social interaction into merged natural and digital environments.Locative devices provide Location-based services (LBS) developed and distributed by wireless carriers and their partners which provide locative-specific information,such as the position of the nearest ATM or restaurant or notifications of weather andtraffic jams. Location-based services even enable resource tracking of, say, taxis, orrental equipment, and make it possible to find people matching needs and skills by supplying business directories or, say, buddy lists. Proximity-based notification(push or pull) will very likely play a very crucial role in targeted advertising, sincecustomers can be directed or redirected to shops in the area where they actually are.The provider gets the location from a GPS chip built into the phone, so that dataabout the actual subscribers' locations and their historical movements are owned andmanaged by the network operator. Revelations that the U.S. government maintains amassive database of all domestic phone calls suggests that a permanent log of thelocation of every cell phone may be collected as well. With the passing of the CanSpam Act in 2005, it became illegal in the United States to send any message withoutthe end user specifically opting-in. Regulation will of course change on the basis of political decisions adopted by different countries.Still, since the aim is to reach potentially every single location on the planet,'carrier-centric' location-based services and applications are being more and morereplaced by user-centric ones. The user gets more and more control of theexperience, typically by opting in advance via a website or mobile interface for mediacontents of choice, that are produced, edited and managed offline, on a standarddesktop or laptop. Indeed, the production and pre-production of the overall experi-ence has to be planned, designed and formatted to be of optimal relevance to theintended user, his needs, his likings, the peculiar location he is in and its surround-ings.The downloading of contents on a locative device is triggered by the cross-match-ing of the user’s likings and requests with his current position in the locative field. Assoon as the location-aware device enters a new area, satellites trigger media corre-sponding to new GPS coordinates and interests previously declared by the user.Downloaded media, any combination of video, audio, images and text fed to the
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