New Media

more likely to conditions of capitalism and an expanding middle class that not only allowed, but necessitated, unending lifetransformation). The need to account for one's own life changes had much more to do with the ideology[4] of nineteenth-century realist fiction, than they ever had to do with the medial form of print: Stern, no less than Pynchon, demonstrates print's perfect compatibility with disjunctions and nonlinearities that are now endemic to new media. The physical enclosure of a codex does not in itself guarantee narrative closure, and printed text itself, due to variations in type setting and the proliferation of multiple, often unauthorized editions, is less stable than we might think (as Adrian Johns has shown in The Nature of the Book).

Still less should new media be made to reinforce nineteenth century realism, that one relatively brief narrative turn in the history of literary fiction. (Recognizing this brevity, in relation to the longer tradition of non-narrative fiction, is part of what makes Steven Moore's encyclopedic work on the novel from Gilgamesh to William Gaddis, an Alternative History.) But the reinforcement of personal narrative as a cultural dominant in new media is what seems to have happened - if not in the early, important but relatively small-scale and short-lived experimentation of avant garde literary hypertext, then in the explosion of social networking media. At first glance, the persistence of narrative in new media can be dismissed as an imposition of a commercial ideology - in which all media has to be "mine," with the same possessive individualism we are taught to bring to purchased goods and sexual relationships. More generally, however, the emergence of the personal narrative in new media can be understood as a powerful development in what James Phelan (who knows a thing or two about narrative structuring) calls its current tendency toward "imperialism."

The persistence of narrative in new media is an artifact of our own