We Are Our Interconnection - The ebook as our story

In popular culture, the idea of the ebook has not yet progressed from the notion of the early ebooks, something alluded to as archaic by the contributors in Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto. By understanding the fundamental purpose of the book, and how a digital process and product might enrich that purpose, we begin to foresee an imminent popular use and consumption of ebooks.

The concept of a container benefits how we conceive of our projects, not only because it allows us to upturn our notion of the container-first model of production, but because it allows us to envision something (semi)finite in a world of infinite connections. The book has always offered the valuable service of collecting story and information and sharing it though one reliable point of reference. The ebook  can offer similar utility, while staying up-to-date. The information might change, but the subject/story and the point of reference (the ebook) stays the same.

The title of our course “Interactive Narrative” first captured me; the proposition that I needed to create an ebook, well, I figured that could be worked out.  I am captivated by the now ubiquitous (if not ubiquitously recognized) mode of a-linear story-telling in which we engage. Is this possible with ebooks beyond cheesy choose your own adventure stories and cumbersome distracting digital “enhancements”?

We (as a generation or a society, perhaps both) have come to expect intertextual abilities, community building, and relevancy in the media with which we interact. We expect to see things authored locally (whether local means geographically or topically nearby) on subjects which matter to us. We create community by choosing the threads of society which most resonate with our interests in any place and moment, and we weave them together to create our own identity. In doing so, we weave a society of strongly realized interconnection.

Media for an interwoven society - a community of story-tellers - this is the project I would like to create. How will my ebook/app (remember that this implies more than a body of work copied into the digital world) rise to that challenge?