The Path Tells a Story

Stories have been shared in every culture because they are a powerful means to entertain, educate, preserve traditions or instill values. In the history of storytelling technological evolution has changed the tools available to storytellers, from primarily oral representations that have been enriched with gestures and expressions to the sophisticated forms we enjoy today, such as film or complex layered hypermedia environments. Despite these developments the traditional linear presentation of a story is still the most dominant. Yet, the first decade of the 21 st century established a technology that finally, after many attempts, can challenge the dogma of passive linearity. It is mobile technology that makes people aware that a digital environment opens opportunities to everybody to freely socialise through and with stories relevant for the current spatial, temporal and social context. The path to this now open gate to the land of creative communication was long, winded and, like all relevant paths, with a forking origin. One of those was Paul Otlet's Mundaneum, an archive in Brussels with more than 12 million index cards and documents that showed a first glimpse of what information combination could achieve. A more technological inspired vision was presented by Vannevar Bush [1], who described a futuristic device, the Memex, which is electronically linked to a library, able to display books and films from the library and automatically follow cross-references from one work to another. The Memex was the first simple and elegant approach towards multimedia information access and it formed the inspirational space for Ted Nelson [2] to establish what is now known as " Hypertext " and 'Hypermedia'. The exploration of hypertext as a technology as well as an art form was certainly influenced by the post-structuralism as well as postmodernism movement within literature and philosophy. Hypertext also emphasizes that the linear narrative typical of print is not the only acceptable model of storytelling. The second important vision of Hypertext is that the reader's physical as well as cognitive encounters with the text as much form the basis of the text as the words and links provided by the author [3, 4, 5]. Digital fiction in form of hypertext or hypermedia is interactive but it is not structureless. Hypermedia narratives follow common patterns that provide coherence through tight organization of material on the basis of composition and aggregation. Famous examples are the interactive novels 'Afternoon' by Michael Joyce, or 'Victory Garden' …