The Existence of Narrative Structure in Databases and Traditional Media

The fairly new medium of databases has far less of a narrative structure than that of traditional media. It is not to say that databases entirely lack a narrative structure but its initial purpose was to collect information that were related and then created into data for users to access. It is sort of a narrative if you really think about it, only it may lack the conventions of an actual story like the setting, climax, resolution, etc. that we are use to. The similarity of traditional media and the medium of databases is that the creator of each is human.

In traditional media such as novels, the writer controls the events in the story. Similarly, we as the users organize and categorize our own data according to our preferences. According to the user, the way in which they categorize their data such as tagging photos or adding captions may form a narrative. However, tagging may not be the useful way to categorize data for other users because what one may consider funny, may not be funny for another person. Metadata is data about data that is used to organize the constantly growing amount of data.

I personally love to use databases such as Google and Bing to search for information that I find interesting or know little of. I am quite impressed at the speed I can access data on the web and how just by typing a few letters of the word or phrase I am searching, some suggestions pop up for me to speed up the searching process as if a search engine is not already fast enough. Today, the use of databases is an important tool for users of both old and new media.