Stories, Games, Databases and Film: The Aristotle-McLuhan Field

My pre­vi­ous mus­ings on the oppo­si­tion between McLuhan and Aris­to­tle imply a two-dimen­sion­al con­tin­u­um for locat­ing var­i­ous forms of media.  If we let the term “nar­ra­tive” cov­er what Butch­er trans­lates as “plot” in Aris­to­tle, and we clas­si­fy the four kinds of media dis­cussed by Manovich, then he have the fol­low­ing struc­tur­al table:

This table is an exam­ple of the clas­sic struc­tural­ist device, made famous by Lévi-Strauss, where all pos­si­ble vari­a­tions of an oppo­si­tion are laid out in a kind of truth table.  A plus sign (+) means that the cat­e­go­ry is present in the item, while a minus sign (–) indi­cates its absence. These tables are use­ful for gen­er­at­ing ideas about how ele­ments in a giv­en field — in this case, media forms — are relat­ed to each oth­er, gen­er­at­ing fur­ther ques­tions.  For exam­ple, it emerges that data­bas­es are the strong oppo­site of films, while sto­ries and games are weak opposites.

The table above can also be expressed as a two-dimen­sion­al field, where the named col­umn head­ers become the X and Y axes of a dis­crete Carte­sian plane, and the val­ues in the first col­umn become val­ues in the field.  This is the sort of device made famous by Bour­dieu (see Dis­tinc­tion).  The advan­tage of this device is that it allows us locate media forms with more pre­ci­sion.  Here’s what I have in mind:

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