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30 Aug 09

24 Apr 09

Mikhail Bakhtin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Bakhtin explains the generation of meaning through the "primacy of context over text" (heteroglossia), the hybrid nature of language (polyglossia) and the relation between utterances (intertextuality).
The word “chronotope” literally means “time space” and, in the essay, Bakhtin defines it as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature”
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- For the purpose of his writing, an author must create entire worlds and, in doing so, is forced to make use of the organizing categories of the real world in which he lives
- For this reason chronotope is a concept that engages reality

Digital Narratives

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Status updates, narrative beginnings and chronotopes
The social network of Facebook complicates locating the beginning of the sequence of status updates
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- Walker Rettberg points out that blogs are dominated by the present tense, supported by technology that prioritizes the new (2008: 65)
- Status updates share a similar focus on recency, as writers respond to the question of what they are doing ‘right now’
- Like email in-boxes and blogs, status updates appear in reverse chronological order, so that the most recent activity appears at the top of the list the reader encounters when opening their profile
- If the reader wants to reconstruct the updates in the chronological sequence in which they were posted, they have to visit the writer’s profile page, extract the status stories from the archive of wall interaction and read backwards from the furthest point in the list.
- So the sequence of status updates has at least two points of inception: the assumed chronological beginning of the events which are posted about, or the position of the most recent update.
- unlike blogs and email in-boxes which build a single archive of an individual’s interactions, when status updates are posted, they appear not only on the writer’s profile but also distributed via RSS feeds into each of their Friends’ profiles.
- Individual status updates are thus simultaneously positioned in multiple sequences which we might explain using Bakhtin’s concept of the Chronotope (1966)
- The Chronotope plots two intersecting parameters: the time and space of a narrative.
- Here I am re-appropriating this matrix to plot the sequence of status updates that appears in the writer’s profile against the sequence of updates that appear in the Friends’ news feed page.
- Heuristically, we might think of the first of these as the ‘narrative of the individual’ – the series of their life experiences documented in status updates, which intersects with the ‘narrative of the social network’ – the sequence of all Facebook activity constructed by the RSS technology into a single temporal series
- The status update ‘knots together’ the life documentation of the individual with that of their community in the social network as a point of intersection between the writer’s profile and its distribution across the online context
- So, not only does the position of the initial update continuously change relative to subsequent facebook activity (it will move further down the archive as new activity supersedes it in recency), it also changes relative to the newsfeed that it is being distributed into across the network
- For the narrative of the network is not a homogenous entity but a composite mass constructed from the profiles of potential hundreds of Friends.
- What this means is that it becomes very difficult to think of the series of status updates as a single chronological thread, with a unique starting point and unified trajectory
- Instead, the position of any given status update will occur in potentially hundreds of combinations within the space of the online community

Chronotope and Cybertexts:. Bakhtinian Theory for Tracing Sources of. Narrative in Interactive Virtual Environments: From Naked Lunch to Fast City

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Narrative: a user's manual - Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling by Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps - Book Review | Style | Find Articles at BNET

Harvard University Press,

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Harvard University Press,
in the opinion of this reviewer, one of very best books ever published on the subject of conversational storytelling

Harvard University Press: Living Narrative : Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling by Elinor Ochs

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decipher.postliteracy.org - decoding recursive visual communication for a post-literate century

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Digital Narratives

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I've been battling with trying to get a handle on the temporality of status updates in Facebook.
Special thanks to Amy Elias for making me go and read some phenomenology and Joe Baker for pointing me to Ricouer's work on cosmic time
15 more annotations...
- The temporality of the status updates operates on a number of levels.
- Against the backdrop of a-personal cosmic time, the writer’s status updates can be seen in Ricouer’s terms as an attempt to ‘make time human’ (1984:52) by selecting particular events as worthy of narration while other material is not.
- However, the human time depicted in the updates themselves is far from a linear string of dates. Rather, as Ochs and Capps put it, human time is ‘sensed holistically’ (2001:157) where the past and future are brought to bear on the present moment.
- We might interpret the significance of the ‘pull of the present’ in terms of the particular context created by the social network.
- At one level, the significant of the present moment in status updates might be interpreted simply as a result of the immediate discourse situation.
- The prompt for the status update after all, asks the writer what they are doing ‘right now’, not what they were doing at some point earlier in their life
- As such, the stories in the status updates are a far cry from the canonical examples so influential in work on life story (Linde 1993) or narratives of personal experience (Labov 1972) where the speaker is narrating past events that have since been completed, and are usually retrospectively distant from the present moment.
- The significance of what is happening ‘right now’ to a writer is clearly appropriate to the technology of Facebook, which is driven by the RSS feeds that promote recency as a driving organizational force.
- Returning to the Chronotope of the status update, we are reminded that FB is not a collection of updates that exist in isolation to each other.
- Instead, there are two parameters (the time of the individual's narrative and the space of the social network) where updates are distributed across and form intersections in the social network of Friends.
- Within the framework of Newtonian time imprinted by the Facebook timestamp, a framework which is linear and unidirectional, the present moments narrated in the status update construct an elastic temporality that generates a sense of ongoing-ness that transcends objective measurement.
- Hermeneutic approaches to time are useful here. Drawing on Heidegger’s (1962) concept of Dasein, time is not defined in individual terms, but profoundly contextualised by living with others.
- Status updates are an apt vehicle for realising this idea, for they project an illusion of a present moment that carries beyond its point of articulation (it remains in the archive for longer than the moment it is written) and which is instantaneously shared with all others in the Friendship network
- The effect of this ongoing present is one of intimacy, “through mutual embracing of the temporal context (Dasein) we come to understand one another and our own being as well” (Bennett 2000:13).
- The present tense quality of the status updates’ narrative is not just one that humanizes time (Ricouer) but also is inextricably linked to the social dimension of human reality.