Interactivity and choice

A summary of:
Ryan, M.-L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore.
Chapter 8 – Can Coherence Be Saved?: Selective Interactivity and Narrativity
& Chapter 9 – Participatory Interactivity from Life Situations to Drama
& Chapter 10 – Participatory Interactivity in Electronic Media
(& Conclusion)

I have argued elsewhere that the aim in designing an alternative Internet is to provide Real Choice to people who would otherwise have to twist themselves and their values in order to participate in society. Here, again, we see that the evolution of art/literature is helpful in making the case for me; that both have deluded people that what they offer is this Real Choice. Ryan quotes Julian Barnes:

When the writer provides two different endings to his novel (why two? why not a hundred?), does the reader seriously imagine he is being ‘offered a choice’ and that the work is reflecting life’s variable outcomes? Such a ‘choice’ is never real, because the reader is obliged to consume both endings. In life, we make a decision – or a decision makes us – and we go one way; had we made a different decision… we would have been elsewhere. The novel with two endings doesn’t reproduce this reality: it merely takes us down two diverging paths. It’s a form of cubism, I suppose. And that’s all right; but let’s not deceive ourselves about the artifice involved. / After all, if novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life’s possibilities, this is what they’d do. At the back of the book would be a series of sealed enveloped in various colors. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending; Traditional Half-and-Half Ending; Deus ex Machina; Modernist Arbitrary Ending… and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn’t select. That’s what I call offering the reader a choice of endings (242).

I suggest that what we would offer in envelopes in terms of Real Choice for the Internet would be different value sets: Materialistic/Consumerist; Capitalistic/Efficient; Compassionate/Selfless, etc..

Most eloquently in the following passage Ryan makes the point that what we think of as choice is an illusion, saying, “Even in a conceptualization that presents hypertext as a matrix of worlds and of stories, what readers do is control the strings of the fictional worlds through either reasoned or arbitrary choices, but they are themselves the puppets of the author” (283). This is exactly what I’ve been trying to argue for Internet use: that people think they are completely free in this space, but that they are being manipulated completely by the rules of the space, and furthermore the space actively participates in deluding them that they are free.

Ryan makes an interesting point about design as narrative, that it is up to the designer to envision the plot of the product’s use: “The system designer must be able to foresee the possible actions of the user and to streamline them toward the desired effect. The user should progress under the impression that his actions determine the course of the plot, when in fact his choices are set up by the system as a function of the effect to be reached. The need to steer the user toward a certain goal without revealing this purpose (for fear of spoiling its effect) explains why dramatic structure, the fullest form of narrativity, is also the most problematic of interactive design” (246). I think we tend to forget that in creating a product for use, we provide the setting of the story, setting the parameters around which a possible narrative scenario can conceivably take place; and this setting is in fact the value sets that the product embodies. It is no wonder that products prescribe certain use that is in line with these values.

Ryan quotes an interesting passage from Randall Walser with regards to the function of cyberspace media: “Whereas film is used to show a reality to an audience, cyberspace is used to give a virtual body, and a role, to everyone in the audience. Print and radio tell; stage and film show; cyberspace embodies…. Whereas the playwright and the filmmaker both try to communicate the idea of an experience, the spacemaker tries to communicate the experience itself. A spacemaker sets up a world for an audience to act directly within, and not just so the audience can imagine they are experiencing an interesting reality, but so they can experience it directly…. Thus the spacemaker can never hope to communicate a particular reality, but only to set up opportunities for certain kinds of realities to emerge. The filmmaker says, ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ The spacemaker says, ‘Here, I’ll help you discover’” (306). This fits well with the above notion of the system designer as the creator of setting. And interestingly, it shows that while many people associate the Internet with a lack of embodiment, cyberspace embodies in the Foucauldian sense, in that it subjectifies. It also implies that the medium itself helps the ‘user’ discover; but that said, it helps the ‘user’ discover only the particular realities it allows to be discovered. In other words, it prescribes a way of seeing and discovering that precludes alternative vision. I think this is what I’m so interested in changing, or creating alternatives for. As it is now, cyberspace is a self-perpetuating, self-reinforcing worldview that allows users to discover again and again the merit of the kind of thinking that created the Internet in the first place. I guess what I’m asking is if people are going to embody the reality promoted by the medium of the Internet, should we not put some consideration into the version of reality we wish to promote? How can people discover themselves and their world as being more than this materialistic vision promoted by cyberspace now?

I picked up on a useful term, namely “emergent.” Ryan writes, “Emergent is the favorite term of contemporary literary theory for a type of meaning that comes out of the text, rather than goes into it, and that is produced dynamically in the interaction between the text and the reader” (258). I think this is a fundamental truth about the construction of the Internet, that it is emergent. It will become whatever it will become through its use by people. I guess I wonder if an especially radical revisioning of the Internet might come in challenging the assumed value of this emergent quality.

Ryan also implies that engagement with media can have a psychological effect on people. This is something that Juliet B. Schor (Born to Buy, 2004) argued in relation to consumerist engagement:

High consumer involvement is a significant cause of depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, and psychosomatic complaints. Psychologically healthy children will be made worse off if they become more enmeshed in the culture of getting and spending. Children with emotional problems will be helped if they disengage from the worlds that corporations are constructing for them…. [L]ess involvement in consumer culture leads to healthier kids, and more involvement leads kids’ psychological well-being to deteriorate (167).

Similarly, Ryan quotes Michael Heim, who writes, “’Hypertext thinking may indeed reveal something about us that is agitated, panicky, or even pathological. As the mind jumps, the psyche gets jumpy or hyper’ (Metaphysics, 40)” (261). It’s not difficult to extend this argument to the Internet in general. How much is its jumpiness negatively affecting our mental well-being?