ABSTRACT
How do the examples in this chapter help us understand the practice of storytelling in the mobile media age? This chapter situates the new stories, fictions, and formats for writing, reading, producing, and distributing narratives within the history of various reading platforms. We look at the increasingly strong relationship between narrative and mobile devices, stretching back to the design of e-readers for mobile devices and the emergence of narratives based on the capacities of cell phones (such as textmessaging stories and Japanese cell phones). We discuss the way that mobile media have been incorporated in ingenious ways into new kinds of situated, locational, cross-media, multimodal literary, artistic, and activist narrative practices. By looking at these emerging mobile storytelling projects through a historical lens (even looking back to the emergence of the novel), this chapter argues for a broader understanding of the practice of discontinuous reading. Engaging stories on platforms that are intimately connected with other media forms, the act of reading can extend beyond the linear, enclosed models of reading that characterize certain texts. As exemplified in e-readers, smartphones, and tablets, there is an opportunity for a much more intense encounter with narratives, and we foresee a much deeper engagement with narrative dynamics from a wider range of producers, consumers, co-creators and distributors.
