Storytelling in digital ink

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting in the chair at my tattooists, wincing and trying to relax as the needle pierced my skin leaving behind a permanent layer of ink. We were discussing the state of literature, how literature was changing and how he (my tattooist) thinks that people these days don’t have the patience or the attention span to appreciate more traditional literature such as printed novels and poetry. This discussion made me think that it was fitting that a tattooist would consider literature from a traditional perspective. Every tattoo tells a story, and that story cannot change once it has been set down in ink. If you think about it in this way, a tattoo is as mutable than a novel that has ben printed in ink. Once an author’s final manuscript has been set down in ink (i.e. published in a book), that text becomes immutable and as unchanging as my tattoo. The story of my tattoo will not change, much like how a print text’s story will remain the same between different readings. With these static texts, what you see is what you get. Printed texts also exist with only a one-way communication between author and reader. Certainly, with my tattoo I would not allow some random reader to be able to make changes. The permanence of these static texts discourages that sort of collaboration.

When you get a tattoo, you must be very sure that you are happy with your chosen design, because once the ink is on your skin it is too late to change your mind. This is broadly the case for print literature as well: if you are an author with a published novel and you want to change something, possibly as a result from feedback from your readers (feedback that is facilitated much more through digital technology), the only change possible is to include those changes in a new novel. This is one area where the power of digital storytelling shines through. The relationship between author and reader becomes a two-way relationship, where authors can receive faster feedback from their audience. The line between author and reader can become blurred, with readers having the potential to contribute to the creation of a text. Collaborative digital storytelling means that the text is no longer fixed, but instead the text is mutable. Digital storytelling becomes more fluid rather than static. This fluidity rolls into how digital texts are read compared to print texts. Print texts are static, there is one accepted way of reading them: you start at the beginning, go through the middle, and finish at the end. Digital texts are not constrained by a linear mode of storytelling. Networked narratives allow the reader to read the text non-linearly, and potentially differently each time. This can create a new story every time a text is read. My tattoo is static: its story will always be told the same way. Digital texts are not static: those stories can change with every reading, and they don’t have to be told the same way twice.