No End In Sight

What is a networked narrative? In what respect does it differ from a hypernarrative? And “what is an author” when a text is no longer attached to a physical support, but is processed and formatted through layers and layers of code? This chapter of Networked tries to tackle these difficult questions by arguing that there exists a set of online narratives which revive the unity of pragmatic and denotative knowledge that once belonged to oral culture. When a network lacks a center or a leader, narratives that are truly open to participation function as a cohesive factor, holding together various nodes and components of the network. The chapter illustrates those concepts by analyzing different types of networked narratives, with a specific focus on hacktivism and the net.art of the last decade.

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