Narrative Ecologies: A Living Landscape Between Hyper and Deep Attention?

In response to Hayles, Ed Folsom discusses the interplay of narrative and database, noting that the most powerful narratives become like databases in themselves, their plethora of meanings and throughways—like the Garden of Forking Paths—always exceeding any singular account/interpretation. Notably, Hayles positions narrative as a potential “common ground between hyper and deep attention” (197). 

If hyper attention stems from an increasingly hypercultural context, wherein databases thrive and the capacity for narrative bodies to hold deep attention dwindles, then we must teach narrative as an ecology—a constellated space in which deep attention is geared more towards reading as relationship-building rather than solitary consuming. In other words, it’s precisely the fact that narratives have a capacious, database-like quality—and are always in the process of becoming—that they can so powerfully bridge the gap between hyper and deep attention. The agility of the hyper can map out pathways of interpretation and forge new connections with texts, technologies, humans, and nonhumans. Meanwhile, the fixity of deep attention can sustain the very relationships fostered by traveling interpretive pathways and connecting with others anew. (178) [JZ-15]

[Borges, 1941; Folsom, 2007; Han, 2011; Hayles, 2007]