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INVOLVING THE AUDIENCE - STRATEGIES AND MODES OF INTERACTIVE DRAMATURGY In the rapidly changing Internet environment, which has evolved in the past decade from small text-based experimental community to commercially driven graphic interfaced media, writers of electronic literature must adapt not only to the intertwined processes of writing and interface (how the writer shapes the user's communication with the work) but also to radical changes in the audience and environment.

In the 21st Century, readers will turn on and interact with literature that is displayed on affordable, book-sized computers. Electronic fiction forms will include "narrabases" (nonsequential novels that rely on large computer databases); "narrative data structures" that elegantly organize fictional information on eye-pleasing computer screens; complex narrative investigations based on the adventure story model developed in computer games; and stories told collaboratively by groups of writers in online communities. Computers may even store their own observations and use them to tell their own stories in their own words.

Imagine the stories we would tell, if we could construct video movies as easily and playfully as we now use spoken language. The Story Networks group explores storymaking principles and technologies that enhance cinematic story creation and sharing as activities of intelligent play and seeks to discover the empowering and framing constraints of designing these experiences for digital delivery over emerging networks in contemporary social contexts. Research complements, informs and is informed by research on Media Fabrics at the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Lab.

However in court I argued that Facebook is essentially a fantasy environment, and that expressions within Facebook should be regarded as existing within a virtual reality. The purpose of Facebook is to offer its users a stage upon which to construct a shared narrative, an interactive play, that while based on real life, is in fact fantasy. Unlike a resume or CV, people spin their profiles to reflect the more positive and attractive elements of their personality

What I'm onto here is writing and researching and thinking about hypertext fiction. For those of you familiar with it already, enough said--you may want to go back to the Contents. For those of you unfamiliar with it, hypertext fiction (aka hyperfiction, interactive fiction, nonlinear fiction) is a new art form that while not necessarily made possible by the computer was certainly made feasible by it. Its creators make use of hypertext--of which the Web is only one widespread albeit limited incarnation--to create fiction with many features uncharacteristic of print fiction: multiple paths through the same text; multiple endings (and beginnings); questions posed to the reader which, once answered, influence what the reader will read; audiovisual attachments; navigable maps; and so on and so on. Readers seeking more extensive definitions of hypertext fiction are invited to browse through the Theory and Criticism section or, better yet, simply start reading a few works--artists always outstrip their would-be definers.

Transliteracy and polyphonic narrative: a case study "Judith Aston is a specialist in cross-cultural communication and digital media practice. She was a pioneer in the emergent multimedia industry in the mid-1980s, working with the BBC Interactive Television Unit, Virgin Publishing, Apple Computers and the Soros Open Society Institute. Based in Bristol, she now divides her time between teaching and practice-led research in the Creative Arts Faculty at the University of the West of England. " Judith Aston "Using Digital Media to Create a Multilayered Associative Narrative "

With hundreds of works of computer mediated fiction or poetry available either on disk, largely through the Eastgate Systems catalog, or on the net, hypernarrative, its definition as open-ended as the many-faceted reading experience it engenders, is a primary way of storytelling in the era of the World Wide Web.