"Lost" and the Emergence of Hypertext Storytelling 170
Hugh Pickens writes "The TV series 'Lost' involves a large cast of characters marooned on a tropical island after a plane crash, with episodes that thread lengthy flashbacks of characters' backstories with immediate plots of day-to-day survival and interpersonal relationships, and a larger 'mythos' involving the strange and apparently supernatural (or science-fictional) happenings on the island. Independent scholar Amelia Beamer writes that the series works as an example of a recent cultural creation: that of the hypertext narrative. 'In Lost, the connections between characters form the essential hypertext content, which is emphasized by the structure of flashbacks that give the viewer privileged information about characters,' writes Beamer. 'Paramount are the connections unfolding between characters, ranging from mundane, apparently coincidental meetings in the airport, to more unlikely and in-depth meetings, reaching back through their entire lives and the lives of their families.' Beamer writes that the series also pays tribute to video games, another relatively recent interactive means of storytelling."
Right. (Score:5, Informative)
Because nobody ever told stories with large amounts of flashback before the advent of hypertext.
Re:Odyssey (Score:2, Informative)
Umm... I remember reading "Choose Your Own Adventure" books when I was 7. Circa 1987.
Bad exemple - we're speaking about out-of-order (Score:4, Informative)
Although they are written in a random order to avoid spoiling the plot, while playing "Choose Your Own Adventure" books you still have a story starting with its beginning, finishing with its end, and in between told chronologically. The story happens in-order of the reading order (even if the reading order itself is a little bit complex).
Whereas with Lost, most of what would be an introduction and put into the beginning of the show, is told during the show in flashbacks. What is chronologically the beginning is spread all over the season. In turn what is the first episode happens only later in the story (the crash and following events).
To go back to my classical example, the Odyssey begins telling the end of the story (the gods deciding to let Odysseus go home) and the biggest part of the story is told through flashbacks and characters telling what happened to them before, sometime with several such layers of indirection. (Imagine flashback-in-a-flashback). The begging of the story (War against Troy) is told in a such several-layered indirection somewhere in the middle of the text. This leads to a great complexity in story telling. The story doesn't happen in the same order as one reads the chapters.
Probably other even older epic poem feature similar out-of-order telling. But Odyssey is the oldest I've studied. As the top-parent sarcastically said, it's nothing new and it's not something specific of Lost or of Hypertext. Human mind works in non linear manner, so out-of-order story telling is probably as old as story telling around a fire in some cave.
Re:Metaphor (Score:3, Informative)
Scholarly attribution of cultural shifts often use cotemporal shifts in alternate media to describe anything sufficiently novel that it can be distinguished from the previous generation. People make labels and associations out of stuff in order to categorize and examine and study, and it isn't necessarily a literal equivalence. In this case it is merely the codification of an emerging trend using an easily understandable metaphor borrowed from something most people are at least familiar with.
In other words, this has exceeded the nominal number of flashbacks for a television show, now someone is looking around for a relevant explanation and nomenclature so that people studying this can use a common understanding. "The storytelling works a lot like hypertext" is a metaphor. If it really were hypertext, it would be a choose your own adventure book.
In art, Impressionism started in painting around 1850 or so, named because a critic latched on to the painting "Impression, soleil" by Monet to describe the new style. A similar movement in music happened, probably due to the same need to break accepted rules in order to make more use of the medium. This lagged behind painting by maybe 30 years, and when music appeared they called it Impressionism too. Music had already by that time evolved through Romanticism, which broke the established Classical rules enough that it was distinguishable from the previous generation. Painting did not have that Romantic period so much, since the emphasis was on realism, and Impressionism was the rule-breaking group.
Musical Romanticism had already begun the "impression" style by introducing the tone poem and other works meant to simply evoke and emotion - not to tell a story or be enjoyed intrinsically. This started around 1830 with Mendelssohn and Franck, and Liszt. That was the musical equivalent to artistic Impressionism. The equivalent to musical Impressionism was really more like Cubism.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Right. (Score:2, Informative)
2.5 cents (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Odyssey (Score:3, Informative)
They started in 1979, at least under that term.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choose_your_own_adventure [wikipedia.org]