6


Story is a Playground

 
Collaborative Digital Stories: It's not about the text

Texts transcend media - the experience is always new, every time, every reader (Hayles, 2005).
 
"In order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship to the whole" (Eco, 1986: 463).  The work need not be extremely high quality or even fully cohesive - the parts here are more important that the whole.
 
"The most usable texts are those which are most frequently updated. The most commending publishers are those which consistently update their code. The most active readers are those who keep pace with the new interface" (Heckman & Ren 2010: n.p.).
 
Jenkins notes the Wachowski brothers' cross-platform Matrix project: they "built a playground" (2006: 115).