Interactive Storytelling, User Agency and Emerging Gender Narratives in the Web Space

Arguably, storytelling has always been part of human existence and has historically played a crucial role in the evolving nature of the society. It could be described as a thriving, highly esteemed art form that enhances community cohesion, assists in learning, preserves memories, and provides amusement. A peek into the historical trend of storytelling reveals a thread of progression with changing times and emerging technologies. But one thing remains constant, the storytelling space has always been a platform for contextualization and interplay of perspectives. Interactive storytelling offers an interesting kind of narrative experience, one in which a story’s unfolding can be influenced by its audience. This study recognizes user agency as a theoretical underpinning of interactive storytelling which allows for the understanding of users’ responses in social media as well as their underlying mechanisms. It leans on the relative theories of Mediamorphosis and Objectification to examine the Honest Bunch Podcast within the framework of coevolution, convergence, and complexity as well as its interception with the framing of gender narratives. Adopting a qualitative content analysis approach, this study explores the relationship between human and technological agency as well as how interactive storytelling presents gender focused narratives as part of our social media experience. It submits that a story can be considered from the perspective of its featured characters or from a more abstract perspective at the global level of the plot while amplifying the narrative experiences with elements of plurality.