Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative Cyberspace

Journal of Engineering Education, Oct 1998

Hamlet on the Holodeck appeared on the radar screen as I was searching for additional books that dealt with the role of narrative. I found more electronically published reviews for it than any of the books above (The Call of Stories was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review) - The New York Times Book Review and Wired, and extensive review and commentary at the bookstore Amazon.com. The reviews were mixed, but I found the book fascinating. Here's what the author, Janet H. Murray, posted to Amazon.com:

"I really welcome reader comments on the book. I wrote this book in order to celebrate and inspire creative storytelling in the new digital medium. I sympathize with many of the fears computers inspire, but I am mostly exhilarated by the possibilities they offer for human expression. I would be happy to hear from people who agree, disagree, or who have suggestions on how I can offer support over the Web for those who want more information. Most of all, I hope people write to tell me about their most compelling narrative experiences with hypertexts, muds, games, or virtual reality experiments."

Hamlet on the Holodeck made me think about media format, especially the sacred place of print. She writes:

"We often assume that stories told in one medium are intrinsically inferior to those told in another. Shakespeare and Jane Austen were once considered to be working in less legitimate formats that those used by Aeschylus and Homes. One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles The very activity of watching a television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of the content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing here. . .The real literary hierarchy is not of medium but of meaning." (pp. 273-274)

As our students create their home pages on the Web, post papers with embedded graphics and animations, engage in various role-plays and simulations, we must, if we are going to be connected to our students, explore the future of narrative in cyberspace. As Jean-Luc Picard says, let's "Make it so."

Interested in "writing for story"? Here's a book recommended by Peter Kakala (Professor of Resource Development at Michigan State University and featured in Twenty Teachers by Ken Macrorie) that will help. Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a Two-Time Pulitzer Prize Winner by Jon Franklin, Plume, 1994.

In closing, I offer a favorite story of mine from Gregory Bateson, author of Steps to an Ecology of Mind. (Next to Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, probably one of the most personally significant books written in the past twenty-five years).

"A man wanted to know about mind, not in nature but in his personal, large computer. So he asked it, `Do you compute you'll ever think like a human being?' The computer set about to analyze its computational habits. Some time later it printed out its results. The man ran to read the results and found the words neatly typed,

`THAT REMINDS ME OF A STORY."'

Karl Smith is back at the University of Minnesota. He can be reached at 612-625-0305 or ksmith@tc.umn.edu. His address is Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota, 500 Pillsbury Drive SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455.