The Transformation of Narrative

Abstract

Narrative depends on and creates coherences, but coherence dissolves in the links and clicks, “send” and “delete,” of technological existence. Our technological devices and habits undermine narrative. Our PowerPoint presentations, emails, texts, and tweets are disconnected, fragmented, and acontextual. These “stories” are insignificant and ephemeral, deleted or lost as the feed or thread scrolls ineluctably onward into the void of the no longer relevant past. Now, machines automatically and algorithmically generate our “narratives” for us. Such narrative breaks with all past history, experience, and wisdom. Ultimately, the technological frameworks which govern and shape us and our stories produce a narrative-at-odds-with-narrative (and narrative-at-odds-with-human-beings) which we cannot use to know or find any meaning for ourselves and our world other than in technology itself.