Word: nonlinearity
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...other hand, the central principles that guided Burnett's practice remain prescient. His celebration of nonlinear advertising strategies, characterized by visual entreaties to the optical unconscious, continues to inform the strategies of adcult. In advertising copy, the conspicuous triumph of typography over text, of catchphrase over explanation, reflects Burnett's admonition that--to the public mind--visual form is more persuasive than carefully reasoned argument...
...consider the completely nonlinear narrative of your average shoot-'em-up "twitch" game, such as Quake II or Tomb Raider. (Twitch games test reflexes rather than brains.) Players are dropped down in a game and proceed, level by level, learning the skills they need to survive in this new place and acquiring knowledge that leads them to the end, to closure that is as satisfying and complete as the epilogue to a 500-page thriller. Why watch The Terminator when you can be the Terminator, tapping into your own fight-or-flight feedback loop and blasting and stun-gunning your...
...There is no popular need right now for multimedia. That's obvious," sighs Michael Joyce, the father of hypertext fiction--nonlinear storytelling in which plot lines unfold in different ways upon subsequent readings. Joyce, an associate professor of English at Vassar College, wrote the "classic" hypertext novel, afternoon, a story. The piece is told one screenful of text at a time; by clicking on adjectives and verbs, readers veer off in far-flung narrative directions. While this may sound like the same experience as following hypertext links around the World Wide Web, afternoon was written in 1987 and distributed...
...novels--neither with anything much to say about the year 2000 or whither-Western-civilization or other matters of substance--are set at the edgy moment when the 21st century rumbles into view. A Lover's Almanac, by Maureen Howard (Viking; 270 pages; $24.95), is a funny, grouchy, madly nonlinear love story that commences in Manhattan after a drunken quarrel at a turn-of-the century party. Artie, a free-lance computer wizard, has behaved badly, and Louise, a gifted painter of enigmatic farm scenes, has kicked him out of their apartment. The novel, of course, must get them back...
Welles' narration technique set a standard for all films to follow; anyone who believes that "Pulp Fiction" was the first film with a nonlinear plot should take a front row seat at the Brattle on Monday night. The film is told, in present and past, as a quest for the elusive element that drove him through his triumphs and to his downfall. The only clue is Kane's dying word, "a piece in a jigsaw puzzle": "Rosebud...