This volume, the 199th in the Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, is introduced by the editor and includes ten essays on various aspects of storytelling, in particular computer-mediated storytelling. Although the volume is part of an extremely large research literature on communication in new media, it examines not yet studied aspects of multimodality, assuming, therefore, the characteristics of originality and interest. With the exception of the contribution by Anita Fetzer on the form and function of small stories in political discourse, which is of essentially pragmatic character, and a paper by Richard R. Janney on film discourse cohesion, which deals with linguistics and text comprehension, all of the other paper deal with the narrative in new media.
Christoph Schubert focuses on narrative sequences in political oratory integrated into hypertext frameworks of online narratives in support of the function of persuasion. Axel Hübler emphasizes the role of electronic media in the perception of narrative. Andreas H. Jucker examines the similarities and differences among personal narratives, unscripted radio reports, and live text commentaries. These chapters provide step-by-step overviews of what has already happened in the field. Hybridity between spoken and written language is central to the essay by Jenny Arendholz, who analyzes narratives on message boards. The author compares the message boards to other types of computer-mediated forums, using a sociolinguistic and conversational model. The notion of transmedial narration is examined by Chiaoi Tseng & John A. Bateman in a chapter dedicated to the definition and use of the constructs of multimodal filmic cohesion and logical sequential filmic relations.
Particularly interesting are the contributions on contextual constraint on CMC (computer-mediated communication) narrative, by Carla Bazzanella, on storytelling in weblogs, by Volker Eisenlauer & Christian Hoffmann, and on unpacking narrative in a hypermedia “artedventure” for children, by Maree Stenglin & Emilia Djonov. The first of these shows that people are inclined to talk about events in ordinary conversation because they are considered interesting, while in CMC they talk to make contact with others. The second is a study of weblog-specific narrative features: interactivity, fragmentation, multilinearity, and multimodality. The existence of various degrees of narration in weblogs leads the authors to challenge the static models proposed in sociolinguistic and conversational approaches to narrative analysis. The concepts of tellability and narrativity are highly meaningful. Weblog stories can be more cooperative and interactive than their printed counterparts. They adopt the setup and basic sequences of story phases described by William Labov & Joshua Waletzky (Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In June Helm (ed.), Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 12–44. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), “but the appearance and positioning of narrative components is considerably altered and may be distributed on various websites” (106). The third focuses on education. Stenglin & Djonov argue that narrative “can force players to take an active role as key protagonists in a game and thus promote a more active orientation to learning—one that fosters discovery, exploration and involvement” (207).
