In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that the database is a logic, a cultural form, that dominates digital media, and is in opposition to narrative (218 ff.). (Note that he uses a wider definition of database than a computer scientist would.) Web sites, CD-ROMS, even computer games are just interfaces to a dataset, he claims.
Manovich's thoughts are provoking and fascinating. I do agree with his argument that this is a postmodern shift, and that database is an important aspect of contemporary culture.
It is when opposing database to narrative I feel Manovich draws too far-reaching conclusions. As often is the case, Manovich likens media authoring with content. It is true that Macromedia Director uses a "cast" of objects that can be used and re-used in the creation of a film. But this doesn't by default make the media created with the program databases rather than narrative. Look at all the Flash animations in HotWired's Animation Express that are small stories, hardly describable as databases even in Manovich's terms. I certainly agree that authoring tools are important to study and that they do have impact on the resulting texts, but no one could deduct the storytelling of Citizen Kane from the facts of new fine-grained film stock and wide-angle lenses (both important for the film's groundbreaking use of deep focus) alone.
What Manovich forgets is that elements of media authoring are signs. They are meaningful. The causal logic he (correctly, I believe) likens with narrative does not exist in the celluloid strips in the cutting room, but in the meeting of the projected images and the viewers. Thus, a database can be full of causal and temporal relations, and still not be a narrative.
Manovich later claim that cinema "exists right at the intersection of database and narrative" (237), as it consits of mounting different shots together. How database then can be opposed to narrative is a riddle to me, cinema is after all first and foremost narrative (for a variety of reasons, we can assume; cultural rather than technological).
The fact of the matter, I think, is that neither database nor narrative are rooted in technology, but ways of viewing the world. Call it cognitive schemas or epistemologies as you like, but I think they are ordering structures in our minds. Semiotic structures. Then, they are different, and opposed, but they can still be combined -- as in the case of moviemaking.
Mr. Manovich has a picture of his studio at his homepage. I've got a reclining chair just like his in my office. Mine is from IKEA. The New Media Theory Chair?
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