From the world-wide database, the user searches for and retrieves data. The data then forms a “tissue of signs” that will find its ultimate cohesiveness in its destination: The user (Barthes 147-148). The user is experiencing the world in a different way, as Manovich argues in his chapter, “The Database” (219). Meaning is created in the experience of the user and “born simultaneously with the text” or I would suggest, as the text is experienced (Barthes 145). There is no end to the data at hand. The data is being constantly added to and renewed, a shifting-changing dynamic as fluid as the ocean and as deep. Everything is accessible, but nothing wholly is organized except in the sequential decisions of the user.

Whatever the motivation is of the user, that motivation will dictate a certain path they will take them through the data. It will decide how the data is searched for, retrieved, and then ordered in the mind of the user. The path becomes Barthes’ syntagmatic or explicit sequence; a sequence which materializes linearly because the user is experiencing time and the series of choices in a linear progression. The linear progression can be viewed as individual pieces of data which are formed into waves, like light’s wave-particle duality. As the elements are linked and move through the time-space trajectory, they unfold into a narrative wave-length which can be viewed as real.

There are no limits for the database, as its information packets can be increased inexhaustibly. The limits are created by the user, as well as the meaning. One can contend that how the user experiences the information is dictated by the interface and that is a construct of the creator. But as Barthes argues, if the voice can lose its origin, and nobody can take “ownership” of the data, then the emphasis is returned to the reader or the user, and their navigation will then affect the spectrum of what is perceived. If data represents the paradigmatic dimension, as Manovich maintains, and the user’s path is a the syntagmatic trajectory, then new media will never be entirely without narrative, and interestingly, the visible results will vary based on the media it passes through as well as the receptors of the user.