"...Therefore, if we want to see beyond the current horizon of scrapbook multimedia, it is important first to identify the essential properties of digital environments, that is, the qualities comparable to the variability of the lens, the movability of the camera, and the editability of film, that will determine the distinctive power and form of a mature electronic narrative art." - excerpt from "Hamlet on the Holodeck" by Janet H. Murray (http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~murray/hoh/excerpt3.html)

 Janet raises the important question of how we can progress as storytellers in an age where technology has basically combined all media into "multimedia", as well as how we can escape making merely "additive" forms of art when we mix media. Being a youngster myself, and having grown up with technological advancements based around the world wide web, I think it's the "youngsters" that have the task of pushing the mediums in which we work.

If there's anything I've come to realize about a person's natural reaction to a film or story or even a song is that our attention spans have been compressed and simplified. I think we've been dumbed down by instant gratification on the internet, being able to read anything we want, listen to any music we want, and watch any video we want on command. That's not to say film viewers at the dawn of film-making were any smarter than us. If anything, film-viewing virginity seemed to produce a more gullible audience, such as the audience that supposedly fled in panic when viewing the "Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station" by the Lumiére brothers. As for myself, I know I've become lazy, easily bored, and easily distracted because of the brilliant speed of entertainment being shared on the internet. 

I don't want to think of the audience as dimwitted or impatient. But because it's in my best interest to understand my viewers, and because my viewers would most likely be within my age group, I need to analyze myself. And because I've become familiar with my reactions to media in our digital age, I would think we need to work towards a simplification of the narrative within the constraints of digital media given our own tendencies towards distraction and loss of interest. That said, I also realize that, like the inventors of storytelling in film at the dawn of film, we're going to have to realize what can and can't be done to make something more than just an "additive" art form. But since I'm a youngster, and I have yet to really experiment with the mechanics of digital media, the answers are still pretty fuzzy.