Networked Pieces vs. Linear

When you have a network piece to go through, it’s exactly like putting together a puzzle. You get all these bits of information and it’s up to you to put it together in a way that makes sense to you. With a linear story, you get spoon-fed the information in the way that they intend you to absorb the story. The pieces of information given in Patchwork Girl stand alone. Instead of “I need to know what comes next”, they illicit the response of “Wow, this is interesting, I want to learn more.” We link the networked piece together by bringing our own ideas into the story. We involve our own abilities of connectivity into the sequence of the piece, in a sense creating the sequence ourselves, our own unique and original order. When reading linear works, the story is revealed to the reader as he goes whereas with network reading, the reader must actively search for all the pieces of the story, then interpret their meaning on their own.

-Gill, Patrice and Ashley