Jackanory, Jackanory

When I was a kid I used to sometimes watch Jackanory on television. It was a bit boring I used to think, as the programme was just some woman or some man reading a story out of a book. Personally I found the readers a bit posh and preferred to read my own choice of stuff. Also I thought that the telly was best at cartoons and programmes like Crackerjack and possibly Blue Peter.
The music for the opening credits for Jackanory was quite boring too, but if anyone at school was ever thought to be lying or 'telling a porky' (pork pies = lies) then we would quietly sing the Jackanory theme tune as the person spoke. The idea was, that fiction is lies; a made up story; something that is not factual, is a lie. Later when I was at university I discovered that Plato thought this too, whilst Aristotle was all in favour saying that fiction or 'Art' offers us central truths.

Anyway obviously in the post modern world the idea of an essential truth is one we find difficult to accept. We talk about narratives and versions and points of view. This blog offers a perspective on me and my life but it is difficult to say that it offers a story of the real me.

Kate has been thinking about narrative too and I loved her link to these visual naratives in the post the day before. This site has a link to the author's Flickr stream here and when I went to the Flickr place I felt I was seeing behind the scenes. That was a strange thing; I thought I was seeing into the prep room or studio, before the photos were selected for the posher narrative site.

I have referred in this post today, to Kate's site, and to the narrative site and to the associated Flickr stream. Kate today referred to Guy's site.

We all made proper hypertext links, so the fabric of out narrative is DIGITALLY ENABLED. We are weaving together our texts which make another larger text together. It makes the reading experience feel dynamic. And you can ignore the links if you want and just try to get meaning from the 'surface text'. So there may be multiple levels of narrative going on.

I am very interested in the idea of how we tell a story together we all hold the different threads of the narrative across our sites. We could see it merely as discursive and intertextual; I think it is more than this. I see it as a distributed narrative as Jill Walker explains.

This is a wonderfully written article and even draws on the old stuff of English Literature and the three unities and all that jazz. It is beautifuly crafted, very well theorised stuff.

I think that on the web I am part of a number of narrative threads across various blogs and in the Flickr community. These narratives cross the boundares of cyberspace and 'real space' into what Mitra calls 'cybernetic space'. I mentioned it here today too.

These patternings and narratives and different types of crossings form affinities which I think are significant socially and make different meanings in different ways. Sometimes these are to do with the sharing of words and phrases across a group of people as here. See the comments here too. Sometimes it is developing ideas together and here I am clearly helped by Kate's posts earlier in the week.
Finally thinking back to Jackanory, narratives seem less static than in book/paper based texts, more interactive somehow. They are shared across time and space in asynchronous ways and cross borders of formal/informal private/public in what feels like a more dynamic experience.

But this is still not unique, as there have been intertextual references, stories told across time and shared in different spaces since Aristotle's time. We still tell his story now. The ways in which we share in the narrative, the distributive nature of text feels unique... but is it? IF so how can we decsribe that new essence?