The Sense of Connection, or, Complex Narratives and the Aesthetics of Truth

Abstract

This article explores fact and fiction in digital culture by linking “complex” or “networked” narrative forms in television, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), and other transmedia forms of storytelling—with the persistence of paranoid models of knowledge and post-critical modes of judgment. It argues that distinctions between fact and fiction are aesthetic judgments that differentiate kinds of knowledge and kinds of experience, and demonstrate the limits to contemporary articulations of critical interpretation.