Fragmented Stories: Hyperfiction and Social Networks.

I must say that I was quite transfixed with the recent Hyperfiction assignment. The vehicles for the hyperfiction looked like any other web-site, yet it was strategically linked and worked to be a fragmented story that the reader must piece together. Some pages bring you back to familiar pages, some pages take you to paragraphs you've never seen, others seem to be a dead end. Hyperlink fiction is a colorful, technological twist on literature, fragmenting and interweaving a story for the audience.

Reading this hyperfiction, in all its colors and links, made me think of the fragmentation that seems to parallel with it in today's culture. On Facebook and Twitter, we take the fragmented stories of our friends and followers, and create a story depicting their lives. Sometimes there are multiple players within the story (for example, a couple on Facebook has recently separated and are constantly updating on their progressions through a tough break-up). You can watch two sides of a story unfold all at once. Or, like "Charmin Cleary", multiple characters address a single issue that most characters don't really know much about. Similarly, large events can unfold on Facebook, where anyone can post their feelings or contribute to the discussion.

Simply put, Hyperfiction is an extension of the many fragmented and twisted stories similar to the Facebook and Twitter culture. Clive Thompson, a journalist for The New York Times, suggest in his article Brave New World of Digital Intimacy that fragmented stories can create a novel. "Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting." Could this be the basis of Hyperfiction? Every little piece is mundane and insignficant, yet in a whole, creates a portrait of a meaningful story? Hyperfiction, along with up-to-the-minute updating services such as Facebook and Twitter, may have brought in a new form of literature and story-telling: the fragmentation of a larger whole, the incorporation of the pieces into the puzzle.


—Lindsey V