The Age of Multimedia: Exploring Multilayered Narratives

The Miracle in July begins with a song, Big Tasty by Tetris=Therapy. This mellow opening song infuses Michelle Anderson's digital love story with a movie-like quality. As I read along, accompanying music in the background, I see sweeping views of Copenhagen. My view, like a camera angle at the beginning of a movie, drops through foreign neighborhoods to focus in on the author, sitting on the living room floor of her rented Denmark home, near empty schnapps bottle in hand, and shoe box full of mementos at her feet. I'm already hooked.

The Miracle in July is an online experiment that takes advantage of various multimedia tools to enhance the story, although Anderson is creating this narrative to stand on its own, so that it can be published as a traditional book. The book is comprised of a prologue, three acts, and an epilogue, and is still being posted. To date, the experiment is complete through the second act. Multimedia tools, links, and pop-ups include:

• Songs
• Google maps
• Wikipedia notes
• Images
• Additional writing
• Instant message recreations 

Multimedia information flows seamlessly within the narrative, and if users don't want to click on links, they aren't missing any crucial plot details. All links are worked into the sentence structure. Consider: "Becca came to [sit down by the fire] next to me..." In this passage, "sit down by the fire" is a link to a song by The Veils. Clicking the link starts the embedded song, and also brings up a very small box that has links to The Veils on Amazon, a Scribd box with song lyrics, The Veils official web page, and also a link to their MySpace page. That's an impressive amount of information tucked neatly into this story.

I tried to read through the story as intended, clicking on each link, but failed. Song links in particular were a problem. I found that before one song was finished, I had already read to another song link. They were good songs, which presented another problem. Was I to stop and listen to each song, or continue reading with music in the background? How did the song fit into the plot? I really like the idea of listening to the same songs as the character, but I need more than a single run through to understand and like songs, and here the plot was compelling enough that I didn't want to stop reading.

Multimedia experiments are also being tested by some of the big publishing houses. Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins have partnered with Vook. A Vook is a multi-sensory reading experience that offers users the chance to read a book and experience video relating to it as well, thus a video-book. This is not a separate piece of equipment, which is a great thing. Vooks are available as web-based or mobile applications. I haven't watched any Vooks, but the idea sounds intriguing.

Monica Hesse shares her Vook experience in an article for the LA Times and mentions that the Vook Embassy, by Richard Doetsch, shows a character out of sync with her imagination. I felt the same way when I saw the first Harry Potter movie, and Tolkien's Aragorn will now forever be the face of Viggo Mortensen; not necessarily a bad thing, eh? This complaint seems silly considering that Hollywood has mined our literary history dry for years now. Are we still talking about ruining children's imaginations, because I thought we quit caring about that sometime around the advent of the Super Nintendo? Oh, Johnny reads comic books? He's a regular bookworm!

I'm more concerned with something else that Hesse relates. She mentions that in order to "see what happens" at certain points, users are encouraged to click and watch a video. It isn't clear to me whether there is also an accompanying transcript, but this seems like a major downfall of the experience, and where I think that Anderson's The Miracle in July wins. Until everyone has high-speed, reliable internet connections, publishers and producers need to be wary of overusing these multimedia tools. We've just gained MMS on the iPhone after all. If the plot is good, I don't want to be bouncing all over the internet to get pieces of the story. I just want to READ THE BOOK.