When attempting to understand what constitutes a narrative, one can easily reference a structuralist approach by Barthes[1], or a more textbook oriented discourse by Abbott[2], of what constitutes a narrative. While this foundation may be an effective starting point, further refinement is needed during this era of digital information, when computational technology speeds double almost every two years. It now will become more important than ever to define a narrative by who can create, and what cannot ever, create a narrative.
The main support for this idea can be found in the list created by Marie-Laure Ryan, which begins by her usage of the idea of chronotopos,[3]to begin a list of stipulations necessary in order to create a narrative. The topos in her argument is that a “Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents.”[4], which is then coupled with the chronos dimension, wherein she adds “This world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations…The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events.”[5] After using chronotopos to tie the narrative into space and time, a further “mental dimension” is added in which “Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world...Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents.”[6]These set forth the conditions necessary which differentiate that, that it is only humans who can truly ever create a narrative.
In the current state of the cyber realm a new presence has only begun to emerge; the presence of aggregated content farms, and digital creations, created solely by computers. These content farms can already digest large volumes of information on their own, and with the aid of some artificial intelligence programming and nary a human input, they can convert that information into seemingly human like answers and responses which could fool many people into thinking it was written by a human. These same computers are learning to master the recreation of language and writing. Couple this with the recent advances of a supercomputer on Jeopardy!, named Watson, who vied with human contestants in a battle of human versus artificial intelligence. Watson’s superior computational speeds and continuously refined search algorithms, easily allowed it to best his human counterparts.
Watson demonstrated the ability of a computer to understand the difficult nuances of subtle human questions. Combine this ability with the easy consumption of huge volumes of facts, and the recreation of written language and it may be entirely possible for a computer like Watson, to someday crowd out the true narratives and voices of humans in the online world. And one day the content they create may compete with our own voices as humans. But those voices, if they do emerge, will always be deficient in their ability to tell narratives. They not only lack the chronotopos of the human endeavor, but the very essential human understanding, experience, and perspective. Which is what makes our narratives so unique, so rich and so unequivocally human.
[1] Barthes, Roland. “An introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative”. Volume 6, No.2 (1975)
[2] Abbott, H. Porter: The Cambridge Companion to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature). Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002
[3] Bakhtin, M. Mikhail: Chrono topos . Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2008
[4] Ryan, Marie-Laure: Toward a Definition of Narrative, in: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 29.
[5], Marie-Laure: Toward a Definition of Narrative, in: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 29
[6] , Marie-Laure: Toward a Definition of Narrative, in: Herman, David (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007, p. 29
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