The narratives of the world are numberless. It can be written, spoken, be expressed through images and gestures. Not to mention it can be anything from a myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass window, cinema, comics, news, conversation, etc.
Today our understanding of narrative has grown, because we now have terms such as transmedial and transdisplian. We now understand that media offers different narrative resources and that stories can be presented in different ways. Not to mention that transferring a story from one media to another doesn’t have any kind of consequences.
However, there are also limits to what storytelling can do, since it depends on a special type of narrative. For instance can semantic content often only work through visual or musical forms of narratives. What one needs to understand here is that there is a difference between oral and written narrative and that both of them has limits and benefits.
Yet the term ‘narrative’ is hard to define itself the moment transmedia is involved, since one would have to use a very board scope. Yet in the text ‘narrative’ as a term is defined as a combination of story and discourse. (story being an event or sequence of events, and narrative discourse is those events as represented). However, the author divides the forms of narrative into different dimensions, so they are easier to gain an overview over: spatial dimension, temporal dimension, mental dimension, formal and pragmatic dimension. The author then mention various types of ways to avoid getting the same representation created as well as the story, which is important when one is considering narrative. Not to mention that using the narrative correctly, one is able to evoke a certain type of emotions etc. if that is the wished intention.
There are different types of narrative modes, that being the external/internal, fictional/nonfictional, representational/simulative, diegetic/mimetic, autotelic/utilitarian, autonomous/illustrative, scripted/emergent, receptive/participatory, determinate/indeterminate, retrospective/simultaneous/prospective, literal/metaphorical. Some of these modes have strong affinities for certain media, while others can appear in several physical supports, but no mode is totally medium-independent.
The author then defines what media is and what kind of semiotic behavior one would expect to find associated with this. Not to mention the benefits and negative points each of these has in comparison to storytelling. Here the key words worth noticing is: Media as semiotic phenomena, media as technologies and media as cultural practices.
To round everything up the author then mentions the different kind of features a medium can have: spatiotemporal extension, kinetic properties, number of semiotic channels and priority of sensory channels.
