The internet has altered the way time operates in how we communicate.
Its a medium where people can connect and share, transcending the typical boundaries of space and time. ‘How can it transcend time?’ I hear you asking, it sounds like science fiction. However with the sharing power of the internet it is no more complicated than a ‘jump to the left’ or ‘step to the right’.
This written piece has its own inbuilt private chronology. It reads from start to finish and from top to bottom. It does not, however, have a place in conventional natural time that us mortals dwell within. This content is accessible at all times from almost anywhere, it does not have a cyclical nature of life to death or day to night. As pointed out by Angela Ehmer at Literacysolutions.com, the contents of both fictional and non-fictional texts have an ‘overall chronological sequence’.
The invention of hypertext-style narrative, even going back to hardcover ‘choose your own adventure’ style novels (Alexander. 18), further subverts conventional ideas of chronology. This has only been built upon by the development of the internet and especially with the technology to embed video content.
The SBS interactive documentary on the Goa Hippy Tribe though not a purely hypertext document utilises a hyper-textual structure as users negotiate through various connected pages to learn the story of the Goa Hippy Tribe. The documentary begins with a memorable quote from one of the Goa Hippies Tobias Moss “I really believe that everyone should take LSD at one point in their lives. It should be mandatory”. This quote opens the linear beginning of this documentary and serves to set the tone for what is discussed further. The website features a kind of virtual passport that is connected to your Facebook account as you login which allows the user to interact with past and future users of the site through comments left on different pages.
From that point forwards there is no defined path, through different hyperlinked web pages we get to choose the order in which we engage with content.
This gives hypertext-driven interactive platforms a meandering structure. It allows the user to explore content and engage, it is inherently democratising in its freedom of choice. We get to decide the order in which we interact with the content giving us co-authorship of our experience. Espen Aarseth aptly referred to these narratives as ‘ergodic literature’ where the term ergodic is derived from the Greek words for ‘work’ and ‘path’.
Ergodic literature, in its subversion of chronology, loses elements of conventional narrative structure. As an overall project of connected ideas it does not always have a coherency but it does maintain more conventional chronology in its sub-elements. The order you consume and observe different elements of the project may not have an order but those elements themselves do. As I mentioned before, text has its own convention of non-natural time and the embedded video interviews featured in Goa Hippy Tribe similarly have there own chronology.
The interviews, as examples of embedded video, show a small parcels of ‘now’ that present the same experience for all audiences. As stated by Lenart-Cheng in the journal article Concepts of Simultaneity and Community in the Crowd-Sourced Video Diary ‘Life in a Day,‘ “Video promises a unique way to capture the moment as it unfolds”. The ordered temporal nature of the videos that captures moments so purely, though antithetical to the more disparate overall hyper-textual structure, ensures that there is still that coherency within the documentary.
The progress of accessibility and video formatting has allowed not only a growth in interactivity but has granted us the ability to dictate the chronology with which we engage with media. The value of choice brought about through ergodic literature has been democratising without a loss of coherence due to the order brought by video elements.
You can find my sources here.
The Nuclear Alternative 