New Avenues for Digital Narrative

The digital affects the way we tell stories. While this fact is easily observable through computer graphics in blockbuster Hollywood films and triple-A videogames, it operates more subtly through recommendation algorithms and generative AI in online content such as news media, social media, and streaming platforms. Digital narratives thus have broad impacts on culture and society. 

Organized by the Center for Digital Narrative, this symposium gathers researchers who will discuss the effect of digital technology on storytelling in different ways. The speakers will address topics spanning how people use digital media as part of their identity formation to how algorithms affect world views and storytelling within groups.

Program

10.00-10.20 – Opening: Welcome by Kristine Jørgensen, PI of Understanding Masculinity in Gaming 

10.30-11.15 – Lin Prøitz, Professor, Østfold University College: The role of tempo and emotion in social media 

In this talk I will explore the role of tempo in social media, and how feelings of time affect self-understanding and ways in which we connect. The talk is informed by feminist media analyses from various empirical fieldwork on social and digital media (e.g. incel-subcultures; the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî-movement (women life freedom), to earlier work on young people and mobile phone practices)

11.15-11.30 – BREAK 

11.30-12.30 – Megan Condis, Texas Tech University: Whatever Happened to GamerGate 2? Notes on a Failed Sequel 

In 2018 I wrote a book in which I described how #GamerGate was taken up by political operatives in order to woo young male gamers towards the alt-right and then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.  Unsurprisingly, in the year leading up to the 2024 US Presidential election, some online are trying to push a sequel to the notorious anti-feminist social media campaign.  In this talk I will discuss how the history of video game advertising created the “boys only” atmosphere that led to the original #GamerGate.  I will also explore #GamerGate2’s rhetoric and attempt to explain why the campaign has failed to gain traction within the community in comparison to its predecessor.  

12.30-13.30 – LUNCH  

13.30-13.50 – Mikko Meriläinen, Tampere University: Men in gaming – Making sense of conflicting narratives 

 Both public discourse and academia put forward different narratives of men in gaming cultures. On one hand they are a risk: they harass, gatekeep, and hate. On the other they are at risk: addicted, not masculine and adult enough, and physically out of shape. Further complicating the issue are other stories: of feminist men’s gaming groups, solidarity, and bonding between fathers and children. In his talk, Academy Research Fellow Mikko Meriläinen (Tampere University) discusses different perspectives on men in gaming, and how these seemingly conflicting narratives might form a coherent whole after all.

13.50-14.10 – Hanna-Rikka Roine, University of Bergen Imagining and Prefiguring Democracy in Digital Platform Narratives 

The current age of polycrisis severely tests the resilience of democracy. As an assemblage of cultural practices, democracy exists and is sustained only if citizens do democracy. The resilience of democracy thus depends on how deeply and widely democratic practices are cultivated in the everyday lives of citizens – in other words, on the strength of democratic cultures. The foundation for such cultures is imagination, the capacity to imagine and prefigure different futures and societies together as equals. In this presentation, Hanna-Riikka Roine focuses on this foundation from the perspective of narratives and storytelling as the central arenas for imaginative work in the cultural sphere. Today, uses of narrative increasingly take place on various digital platforms, which have brought about new affordances for collective imagining and prefiguring the futures. Roine presents a framework for analyzing different forms and meanings democratic imagination may have as it is enacted through storytelling on digital platforms. 

14:10-14:30 – Jill Walker Rettberg, University of Bergen: How does AI-driven storytelling mediate our collective sense of reality?  

Digital narratives are co-created by humans and AI. Algorithms curate the content we see in social media, games are built around AI engines, and generative AI produces stories, images and movies. In this closing presentation, Jill Walker Rettberg will reflect upon the day’s talks, connecting them to current developments in generative AI as well as to the deep narrative archetypes that AI may be drawing upon.  

14.30-15.00 – BREAK  

15.00-16.00 – Panel discussion, chaired by CDN Communications Officer Andreas Hadsel Opsvik 

Reception at CDN, Langes gate 3, Bergen