Things as They Are.?

Not as LOST as One Might Think....

It's been difficult to avoid getting swept up into the LOST hype pervading the internet right now. Last night's episode was indeed finally worthwhile, and many online have weighed in on ABC's series in the past couple of weeks. Dan Hill's City of Sound entry, which originally caught my attention courtesy of The Chutry Experiment, makes the argument that lost is interactive-cum-new media, as the "episodes are famously laden with arcana to pore over, deconstruct and even construct in the first place" and that, further, the "ripples made possible by new media...enable a trackable 'social life of a broadcast'". "Such is the collective-imagination-run-wild of the show's fans," he argues. Importantly, Hill's use of the term "new media" refers to a relational defintion of the phrase, one that is not so much concerned with digital or electronic classifications but, rather, the ways in which freshly imagined configurations of a text can create new meanings and new contexts. In many ways, this is something that I've been thinking about a lot lately and, although Matt K. warns me that attempting to redefine the term "new media" is a dark and dangerous road (it is), I can't help but feel that everything I've been talking about in relation to cross-sited narrative is, in some ways, an attempt to reconstitute the means through which we categorize something as "new" media, "new" narrative.

The "embedded puzzles" that Hill speaks about-- show transcripts, backwards dialogue, web URLs, mythical references, disappearing maps, phone numbers to call (1-877-HANSOORG-- I wouldn't try to get through-- Lostpedia has a transcript of what happens if you do), etc.-- represent to him a novel organization of medial/ narrative information, a "new media" contained within a barely contained narrative trajectory. For me, LOST is simply what I would call a horizontally cross-sited narrative, where a story is expanded across a diverse medial set. Only problem is, it's not that simple. Not at all.

What LOST represents is, at this point, a blind spot in my thinking on the subject of cross-sited narrative. I've spoken previously about all of the various traits of a CSN, from the gap filling strategies to the storyworld framing to the migratory cues, but I've done so from the standpoint that, in some ways, the difference between horizontal (expansive) and vertical (narrative redundant) CSNs was, for the most part, clear-cut. Things with LOST, however, aren't that simple. Christy Dena's detailed post this week on the LOST ARG (alternate reality game) launching in the UK this week with the premiere of the second season of the show does an excellent job of predicting/ analysing the ways that such a game could be used to augment the content of the television show. The mere fact that The Cloudmakers are on board bodes well for this game, but there isn't much information right now as to how this will all play out.

Anyways, the problem as I see it in talking about this kind of ARG is that, although I've preivously called ARGs "embedded networks" in that they can be both cross-sited in themselves and a part of another, larger CSN, there's still an adherence to entrenched media such as TV somehow having a position outside of the ARG itself. For example, the I Love Bees ARG, created as a lead-up to Halo 2, took on a life of it's own that was cut short when the game was released. That's not the case with LOST. Instead, I think it's possible to view the entirety of the LOST storyworld, TV show included, as perhaps the most pervasive ARG ever created, with millions upon millions playing it every week, every day, without even realizing it. And although the internet serves in many ways as a focal point, an aggregator for the majority of the information unearthed in these puzzles (a topic I will be presenting on at the Digital Humanities Conference in Paris this summer), the social networks engendered through the LOST narrative, the "water cooler" conversations, are in themselves a means of play.

This play, while dynamic, is also in part self-instructing, teaching the audience/ participants how to engage with the text. Take, for instance, last night's episode, "Two For the Road". One particularly puzzling scene in the episode involves Jack confronting Sawyer on the beach while Sawyer is busy reading a manuscript that was found in the wreckage. Exclaiming that he's "about to find out who the murderer is!", Sawyer is perturbed when Jack grabs the manuscript tosses it in the fire. End of story, right? With a little bit of foreshadowing to the episode's end, perhaps? Not quite. This gap in story continuity or, at least, story flow, was subtle but nonetheless obtrusive. It was also what I call a migratory cue, a sign in one medium that signals a continuation of the narrative in another medium. It wasn't until opening up a USA Today at the local Midas, though, that I realized how deep this particular cue went. Seems that the manuscript reference was, in fact, a signal to Gary Troup's Bad Twin , a published version of the manuscript Sawyer was reading on the beach. A big, full color ad in the Life section said so. Even the author description on Amazon is part of the game:

Bad Twin is the highly-anticipated new novel by acclaimed mystery writer Gary Troup. Bad Twin was delivered to Hyperion just days before Troup boarded Oceanic Flight 815, which was lost in flight from Sydney, Australia to Los Angeles in September 2004. He remains missing and is presumed dead.

It's not necessarily the attempt to make the LOST narrative more explicitly "real" that sticks with me here, nor is the inclusion of a novel in itself anything revolutionary. For me, I guess it's the space in-between them that matters, the processing point between watching the show and seeing the ad and reading the book that makes the difference. Just as Scott McCloud would argue that the gaps between panels in a comic book is where all the action takes place, so would I argue that the in-between matters enormously in cross-sited narratives (I plan to do a lot more on narrative "in-betweeness" in the future once I get my head around some of my grand theories). The in-between. It's the point where, in ARGs such as LOST, the game is played, the blended narrative created and, in a very defined manner, where the relational definition of new media is born. It's also the place where LOST thrives.