Walk This Way: Mobile Narrative as Composed Experience

Raley examines mobile narratives, contrasting narratives that are simply narratives that are delivered to mobile phones, such as Japanese cell phone novels, with narrative experiences that are specific to their medial situation. That is "narrative that emphasizes the exploration of place and locality but is not strictly annotative." Rayley identifies three key terms of GPS and SMS-based narrative practice: experience, movement, and environment. Rita sees the participant in a mobile narrative as playing a function in the Nelsonian hypertext sense of branching, "performing on request." Having established a categorical frame, Raley reads a number of locative narratives including Hundekopf, Itinerant, Ping, and 34N188W.

Pull Quotes

Implicit in my taxonomy of mobile narratives is what I see as the three key terms of GPS- and SMS-based narratological practice: experience, movement, and environment. These terms are at once themes, structural features, and modes of engagement that consciously suggest a range of humanistic disciplinary practices.

. . . mobile narratives engage not just physical, material space but also embodied, lived space. If we think about location in purely functional terms--time, position, speed--we risk overlooking its social and political aspects, its terms and conditions of use.

Creative Works referenced