Description

This text attempts to approach digital media via brief examinations of spatial and narrative discourse networks not often associated with the digital. The use of such discourses is meant to suggest that digital media is a product and a producer of dramatic change in cultural assumptions globally, such as what is considered to be “narrative”. The fields of discourse that I discuss in relation to digital media are the performance of pilgrimage and some of the story telling systems of the Australian Aboriginals. In relation to pilgrimage, the 9th century Buddhist stupa of Borobudur on the Indonesian island of Java is examined here as an example of spatial hypermedia that immerses the pilgrim in a story manifest through spatial interaction.