Interactivity, Collaboration, and Authoring in Social Media

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.  

Krystina Madej is Visiting Professor at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and at the Center for Digital Media in Vancouver, Canada. She is co-author of Disney Stories: Getting to Digital with Newton Lee (Springer 2012).