Wrathful Grapes

I reckon it's my turn to weigh in on the Grapes of Wrath piece by McGeal.

I don't think this piece is reinventing Steinbeck or creating something entirely new. Rather, I think it does exactly what the author says it does--it revisits Steinbeck's original narrative at a moment when many parallels were being drawn between the Depression and the current economic state.

The digital nature of this story gives readers an opportunity to experience the narrative in a much different fashion than a traditional text, perhaps mostly because it allows us to choose from three different ways of experiencing it. Whereas a traditional text relies on the reaction between the author's description and the reader's imagination, in this piece, the author's experience is visualized for us.

The story is limited (as are all texts, regardless of medium) in giving us the viewpoint of just one author, which means we have a kind of tunnel vision in experiencing the journey. And, of course, this digital story can't accurately represent the experience of Steinbeck's characters, though as I said above, I don't think that's the purpose of the piece.

Ultimately, digital/new media change the game for nonfiction writers because they can now present their work as more documentary than nonfiction. What I mean by that is, it provides readers with a different sense of the space or the story the author strings together because it increases the range of documents (and you can't spell "documentary" without "document") the author can give as evidence of the non-fictional nature of his or her writing. (Did that make sense? Probably not).