This book includes a short history of interactive narrative and an
account of a small group collaboratively authored social media
narrative: Romeo and Juliet on Facebook: After Love Comes Destruction.
At the forefront of narrative innovation are social media channels -
speculative spaces for creating and experiencing stories that are
interactive and collaborative. Media, however, is only the access point
to the expressiveness of narrative content. Wikis, messaging, mash-ups,
and social media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and others) are on a
trajectory of participatory story creation that goes back many
centuries. These forms offer authors ways to create narrative meaning
that reflects our current media culture, as the harlequinade reflected
the culture of the 18th century, and as the volvelle reflected that of
the 13th century.
Interactivity, Collaboration, and Authoring in Social Media first
prospects the last millennium for antecedents of today's authoring
practices. It does so with a view to considering how today's digital
manifestations are a continuation, perhaps a reiteration, perhaps a
novel pioneering, of humans' abiding interest in interactive narrative.
The book then takes the reader inside the process of creating a
collaborative, interactive narrative in today's social media through an
authoring experience undertaken by a group of graduate students. The
engaging mix of blogs, emails, personal diaries
, and fabricated documents used to create the narrative demonstrates
that a social media environment can facilitate a meaningful and
productive collaborative authorial experience and result in an abundance
of networked, personally expressive, and visually and textually
referential content. The resulting narrative, After Love Comes
Destruction, based in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, shows how a
generative narrative space evolved around the students' use of social
media in ways they had not previously considered both for authoring and
for delivery of their final narrative artifact.
