Banister was an exciting speaker. Watching faculty members work to control their twitching was exciting - it makes our own restlessness seem forgiven.

People seemed alternatively vexed and vindicated by his taxonomies. This guy brought a large pile of metaphors to his sense of media. It was bold in a way, to march into an interactive media department, and so thoroughly situate interactive media in a evolutionary context. Many of us spend our time lurking on media fringes, looking for exciting exceptions that prove that we are not alone in wanting to defy the rules of production and consumption. Banister worked hard to assert the steady trajectory of storytelling.

So that was drama, and it was informative in a way. I learned, or re-learned, that there is some vast gap between the sorts of presentations artistically-inclined folks enjoy, and the types of presentations designed to give businesspeople an easy handle to understand and mine new media landscapes.

But I wanted to know what was next. After "storydwelling" in networked space. Give me a metaphor for the future unseen, not the present I know. Banister says his next books will consider the sentience of institutions, and the history of power. Fuel. Both of these seem like smart choices, but not for me. At least not as I see myself, not yet. I'm more interested in the social and ethical impact of all these systems, where Banister seems driven to outline them for people to find their place within.

Banister used a taxonimy to help describe what he saw emerging in the networked age, and I think his ideas are very solid. Several technologies converged to finally allow a space where production to consumption was possible. One of the (many, many ) reasons for the Dot Com Crash was that while it was technically possible for people to build, view, distribute, market and buy stuff online, very few people (from typical producers to typical consumers) were really used to what that implied.

Comparing the "networked" media to television and readio was useful, but (and Banister would be the first to say this) networked media is a much greater potential space. This is another reason why a theoretical taxonomy has been hard to codify, compared to film, literature, and radio. While the film space includes "Mothlight" and "Citizen Kane", the networked space includes things from "jodi.org" to e-bay. I would humbly assert that's a wider range of content to try and grasp. The variance and possibilities are also part of what draw me to interactivity...I would be very sad if such a definition grew to be very specific.

I found Banister to be an incredibly powerful and persuasive speaker. I don't tend to think of myself as commercially oriented, and yet he really managed to get me hooked on his assessment of the current state of media.

I found two things he said particularly interesting. The first was that narrative is not the same as story, that narrative is instead a context through which story emerges. I think this is a fascinating take on the idea we've been grappling with since Spielberg visited, that "games need more story". Perhaps instead games (and perhaps interactive pieces in general) need more narrative, more context for users to develop stories that are meaningful to them.

A larger concept that grabbed me was that of community. I know that in the pieces I have made here so far I have focused on the experience of the user in the process of exploring my work, not at all on any feedback to me or any sense of connection with other users. I think that is something else we should think about in our designs, whether we want users to have a solitary, introspective experience or whether we want them to be aware of the author or of the others who have used it. I don't think one is necessarily a richer experience than the other, just that it should be a conscious choice rather than an afterthought.

I found Jim Bannister’s talk very different from most of the speakers that have addressed the 511 Seminar. He was able to share his ideas about how he defines new media and the elements that are necessary for traditional forms of media to make a successful transition for the future. While I will refer to his definitions and graphs/charts and compare them to other examples that I hope to be exposed to over the course of my studies in the Interactive Media department, hopefully I will be able to come to further define my own views on what new media and narrative mean to me.

However, what I found intriguing was the business side of his talk. His model of the Traditional Value Chain versus the Value Net and the shifting sands that exist across all industries that influence New Media is worth a closer look. As someone who is looking for possible career opportunities outside of what I’ve been exposed to in the department so far, his talk presented other avenues to explore.

It's too late when I tumbled to the fact that not only media industries but also commercial people are playing their own part on qualifying interactive media at our Wed. forum, during which I'd been rushing through pages of absorbed stenography that evening. Sometimes, the voice from the real world can be used for reference on what students can do after leaving the school. So, it's the bitterness for those who's enjoying "pure" academic life to be hammered at occasionally.

Obviously, the "storytelling" of Banister's sense is in a way empty, at least for me, simply because it's non-manipulable. IMHO, while people of IMD have been penetrating deeper, deeper and deeper from Social/Ethic to Narration/Storytelling, then to Visual/Aural/Other, then anchoring themselves about the ultimate layer of CERTAIN Medium + ITS Interactivity and enjoying the sweetness, a business-layered taxonomy would either be inevitably empty and makes faculty members twitch or insignificant at all.

Jim Bannister has created an interesting critical vocabulary for new media. Delineating storytelling from storyforming and storydwelling is a sharp way to discuss interactive narratives. It gives us a vocabulary that recognizes the difference in narrative possibilities that different mediums and platforms provide. To me, it doesn't necessarily make sense to talk about the narrative of a video game under the same terms as a movie.

But these new words are Jim Bannister's words. And right now I get the impression that the only other people who are hearing these words are the corporate execs that Bannister consults with. It'd be useful if these terms became part of the critical discourse of interactive narrative, but in their current context, that seems doubtful.

Banister knocked my socks off. After the talk was over, I looked down and wondered: Hey! Where are my socks?!

I could help but think, though, about the amount of constraint I'd need to exercise to work within this taxonomy. But I guess this is probably a good thing... wring the commercial out of us (or into us) in order to reach some sort of artistic method. The thought of Bolas that Jim reaches the same sort of conclusion that he does when using this totally different method is surprising. Not once does Jim use the word art, after all...

I wonder what is the next step after storydwelling. Maybe a couple of years from now, he'll name something that we will make: story****** (to be filled in in three years).

Banister reminded me again of the unbelievably great potential of network in a very analytical way. By comparing before network market with

the one after that, he suggested clear in-depth perspective to look at this new form of market and also a new possibility of storytelling

or storydwelling. I could re-appreciate how many things in our world have changed after internet came out listening his speech. After

internet became so essential part of my life, there were certain aspects that I've considered as a matter of course just because it became

familiar to me now, but analysing what's the actual differences that internet made really aroused me to think about how I can be the part

of them or how I should predict and prepare for the future of our network. So after another 10years from now, what the internet will be

evolved into? How much closer and essential it will be in our life? How should we deal with the enormous amount of information and get the

best out of it? And also how different it will be for the game industry? Now it seems to be true that a recluse or a hermit can be re-

defined as a person who doesn't reveal any of his life on a network so nobody is accessible to any of his information 24 hours. Now writing

a comment here, I feel like being at least a really little part of it by expressing what I think. My little voice here. Cool.

Any framework will come with a loss in granularity (especially in an area as diverse as interactive media) but I found many of the ways Jim broke down story forms to be useful in distinguishing ways to create function (e.g., separating narration from narrative). What struck me most during his talk was his suggestion of evolving our aspirations as auteurs from creating stories for an audience into creating tools for an audience to create their own stories.

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