Laurel: Where's the Hardy?

Oh, That's Right It's in the Humanities!

It's argue ably not the first approach that we've seen from the Humanities, both Nelson and McLuhan have some pretty humanistic undergirding. However, Laurel makes no excuse for her roots AND their usefulness in the realms of the digital.

It's the Story, Stupid!

Consider me biased, but I think that throughout all of the reading to date a large quantity of great ideas have been given, a lot of these ideas have been tied to potential ways of seeing the world of work and thinking in new and original ways. What has been missing, and I think Nelson was pointing to the to a degree, has been the ability to analyze and critique these stories of the digital age.

It is to here that Laurel brings her thinking and from whence that I think people like Tom Chatfield and Jane McGonigal draw their ideas for their, relatively recent TED talks, Found here, where they begin to draw out some interesting potentials for human-computer interaction.

What's It To You?
Well, to me, it's nearly everything in terms of research but also filters down to my teaching to a large degree. The concept that the interaction between agents involves their actions and also the motivations and beliefs behind those characters and actions is a powerful one. It clearly filters into any number of situations: advertising, politics, history, and even science. The structure of the narrative affects its meaning.

In almost every class that I teach, I give at least one example of how looking closely at the form of something can give us an understanding of how it works. This hierarchy, or should I say hierarchies, presents a method of analysis that not only goes beyond the efficacy of something being studied but also can contain and explore the discussion of efficacy itself.

In other words, it gives a process for both the exploration of the process but also for the reasons behind the processes that is not always available to more scientific approaches to phenomena. In this way a researcher can employ a transmedia approach to interactions that could be analyzed as narrative.

An Example?

Really? I'd love to.

Let's say, hypothetically, that you were interested in the changes in characters/agents that one might commonly call "detectives". Let's say that you want to also look at agents that seem to border on the definition of that character based on their actions, language, or motivations.

Well, traditionally, one would need to do literary analysis on the literary examples, applying film theory to the cinematic examples, and mass media approaches to the televisual sorts. Additionally, techniques might need to be formed for musical, video game, comic, and advertising examples to name a few.

Applying Aristotelian approaches to narratives and ins that we agree on as narratives is not new, but the idea of applying them to non-narrative characters and interactions is very valuable. now, we can compare the driving of a character in a 1940s noir to the use of a controller in playing Max Payne. We can unpack the agency of the characters involved and compare the different modes of thought and ethical questions behind them in a way that more resembles the ways that individuals use media and engage in narrative.

The modern human agent does not really differentiate between computer time and movie time and TV time and Video Game time. it's screen time and needs to be studied as such.

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