As Lev Manovich states it in her piece “The Database,” society has recently—in the past 20 years—entered into a chaotic system where pieces that were once structured and organized have fallen into unmanageable disarray.  The narrative model that was once used to view the world and that was relied on to structure the world’s “collection of images, texts, and other data” has been replaced.  We now see the world as a database, a collection of algorithms and the symbolic form of the computer age.

One of the distinctions that I found most interesting between narrative and database models was the concept of being finished.  Narratives almost always have an ending, or a conclusion that brings all of the story’s actions to a close.  Some databases that hybrid with narratives, such as video games, also have endings, which appear at the end of each goal or task assigned: shoot everyone around; get to the checkpoint first; retrieve a certain item, etc.  But, databases that are web-based, and most of them are these days, can never be said to be finished.  Their content can be easily added to, edited, or even deleted, which “contributes to its antinarrative logic.”  Each hyperlink or reference that is added to this one database splits its trajectory of into another direction, linking it with a million other databases, a million other trajectories, and a million other possibilities.  Even if these changes blend seamlessly with the original database, because they’ve occurred over time they are no longer considered part of the “story” but have created a collection.

Gilles Deleuze concurs with this in “Postscript on the Societies of Control” when he writes “in societies of control one is never finished with anything.”  These societies are analogous to the world-models that Manovich describes, and the one of control he refers to the database we view the world as now.  Roland Barthes makes the same connection in “The Death of the Author,” by deemphasizing the importance and role of the author.  He states that “to give a text an Author is to impose a limit on the text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”  Authors create endings; scriptors create extensions.  Barthes also connects with Monovich’s assertion that the database has taken priority over narrative when he writes that “it is language which speaks, not the author…to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs’.”  The only question that is left is one of cause-and-effect: did the development of the database trigger the death of the author, or was it the death of the author that forced society to create the database?