Editors' Introduction

What happens when criticism becomes a space of possibility, inviting accident, play, and mutability? Can we imagine critical scholarly argument let loose from the tight constraints of linearity, of the watchful eye of a single greedy author intent on shaping meaning? What happens to argument when new media criticism is enacted in new media? Narrating Bits models one answer to these questions, repositioning the work of N. Katherine Hayles along new visual and interactive registers. At one level, the piece preserves the linearity of Hayles' argument, a careful parsing of the relationship of database to narrative and of the principle tenets of narrative theory. Hayles insists that the potentialities of dynamic media demand a decoupling of the narrative/database dyad, urging instead a consideration of narrative via the emergent potentialities of the 'possibility space.' The user-reader of Narrating Bits can follow this argument along a horizontal trajectory, 'clicking' through the text.


Editors' Introduction Continued