Database and Narrative with Lev Manovich

In The Language of New Media Lev Manovich operates within a limited notion of “narrative” that prevents him from recognizing the semantic potential present within the term to which he opposes it: the database.  Setting up the contrast between these two terms (database/narrative), Manovich writes:

As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world. (225, emphasis added)

Although Manovich defines a database early in this chapter as “a structured collection of data,” he quickly differentiates it from the kind of linear, cause-effect structure of narrative, which he describes as simply one method among many others for “accessing data” (220). Manovich then condenses these various methods of accessing databases into the more general term “interface.” As an example of interface, he describes a database of images being represented by a page of hyperlinked thumbnails which provide the user with a structured interface to access the underlying data.

For Manovich, the database and interface are mutually constitutive elements of new media. The interface relies upon the database for its content, and the database relies upon the interface for providing the user access to its content. In locating this symbiotic relationship between database and interface, Manovich argues that the ability to construct alternate interfaces over the same database (what he terms “variability”) “places the opposition between database and narrative in a new light” (227). Indeed, it is not so much that alternate interfaces create alternate narratives, but that even within a single interface there exist “multiple trajectories” that a user could potentially construct. In other words, the narrative that an interface actualizes in relation to its database is highly contingent upon the actions of the user.

However, Manovich’s limited notion of narrative begins to reveal its frailty when he describes the inability of random access (the user contingent narrative described above) to generate a narrative structuration of database content. He writes, “if the user simply accesses different elements, one after another, in a usually random order, there is no reason to assume that these elements will form a narrative at all” (228). And again when he writes that “a database can support a narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the medium itself that would foster its generation” (228). In short, a database holds the potential for narrative but does not in itself create this narrative.

However, I think Manovich is neglecting the degree to which a meaningful narrative is dependent upon the user’s interpretation. Although there may appear to be limitations contingent upon the database material itself, this limitation is predominantly subjective. The onus of determining what constitutes a narrative falls upon the user/reader.  

In this way, one can see how the “variability” which Manovich claims occurs at the level of interface also occurs at the level of the user, and even more so if we consider that Manovich’s notion of narrative stems from Mieke Bal’s general definition of “ ‘a series of connected events caused or experienced by  actors’” (228).

For Manovich it is the role of the author, or programmer, to “control the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connection so that the resulting object will meet the criteria of narrative” (228). Thus, Manovich neglects the database’s potential for generating alternative narratives in favor of the author’s pre-“programmed” interpretation of what constitutes one.

Manovich’s most prescient analysis of the relationship between database and narrative occurs in his inversion of the materiality of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic functions of new media. Bridging off of the semiological definitions of the two terms provided Barthes and Saussure, Manovich describes how the syntagmatic is the actual set of words that are strung together in a materialized sentence or phase, and the paradigmatic dimension is the set of potential words for which they could be exchanged. As Manovich puts it, “syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit; one is real and the other is imagined” (230).

New media, however, construct opposite functions of paradigm and syntagm by inverting their underlying material structures:  “database (paradigm) is given material existence, while narrative (the syntagm) is dematerialized” (231). In a database, the range of possible elements (paradigm) with which one could construct a narrative (syntagm) is the only stable, material reality of a new media object. As each syntagmatic construction appears and disappears, the underlying material with which it was formed remains consistent for the user. “On the material level, a narrative is just a set of links; the elements themselves remain stored in the database. Thus narrative is virtual while the database exists materially” (231). 

However, Manovich’s linguistic correlation is complicated once again by the nominal difference he sets up between narrative and interface. Undoubtedly, the majority of database elements that a user is likely to encounter in new media have already been constructed within a navigable, user friendly interface which not only accounts for possible trajectories but oftentimes explicitly encourages them. In addition, as new media databases increase in quantity they often decrease the amount of possible trajectories. Consider for example the innovations made to video databases such as Netflix and YouTube. The massive amount of elements stored in each database necessitates an efficient interface that corresponds to the particularities of individual users. They offer suggested videos and even (as in the case of Netflix) entire genres based off your viewing history. Thus, for Manovich, I would propose a new formula for new media: as the paradigmatic increases in quantity, the syntagmatic increases in prominence.

As another example, consider the many changes made to Facebook’s news feed option which many users initially decried because it was “too cluttered with excess information” (Wikipedia). In a 2006 blog titled “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you,” Mark Zuckerberg defended the increasing syntagmatization of the user’s Facebook experience writing that “information people used to dig for on a daily basis” is now “nicely reorganized and summarized.” The exploding popularity of Facebook combined with the proliferation of smartphone technology resulted in an overwhelming database of information that necessitated a more limiting and narrativized interface.