Clinamen

I made a more extended comment to your previous _Infinite Jest_ post on my site. I had a few questions/thoughts about your post here. I wonder if the imbalance Manovich describes is actually between information and narratives or between information and meta-narratives (to use one of Lyotard's key terms). It seems in some ways that any interface implies a sort of narrative, no matter how open-ended that narrative might be. From this perspective, we are not lacking narratives so much as navigating through a vast number of micro-narratives. Perhaps this is just another way of making Manovich's point. Either way, I wonder what Wallace is up to when his work tends toward the database end of the spectrum. Do you think this is more mimetic, an attempt to represent the sort of tendencies that Manovich describes, or is there a coaching of an attitude here? For some in our discipline these days, there seems to be a desire to move away from (or at least recognize) the sort of control and power that narrative involves. Do you think Wallace wants us to recover some sort of larger narrative from all this? Does he want us to be more comfortable with this lack of narrative? Something else?