I'd like to hear more from Murray

Overall, I enjoyed Hamlet on the Holodeck. Murray has a clear and effective writing style that kept me entertained, and she made some clever and relatable references, from Einstein’s Dreams and Brave New World to the computer game Myst and the Star Tours ride at Disneyland. But even though the writing is brilliant, a part of me felt like it's somewhat out-of-date. So much has changed since this book was published in 1997. Now, almost 10 years later, chat rooms have gone out of style and dial-up connections are becoming obsolete. At the time that Murray wrote this text, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace had not yet risen onto the scene. Napster had not been taken to court, and television episodes had not yet been sold for $1.99 on iTunes. I’m curious to see what Murray would say about all of these occurrences. It seems that she considers the Internet to be a utopia of free exchange (at least at the time that she wrote this book), and I’d be interested to see what she thinks about the issue of copyright violations on the Web, how this might change in the future, etc. Also, she mentions that the Internet allows everyone to tell his or her story through family albums, journals, homepages, and the like, all of which are “pushing digital narrative closer to the mainstream” (252). Today, the majority of the people I know have published information about themselves on the web, whether through MySpace, Flickr, Xanga, Livejournal, or similar sites. But these don’t allow for as much innovation in representation as (I think) Murray anticipated. Their prepackaged formulas for display make personal information somewhat impersonal. Even when you choose a different background for your Blogger or plug in a code to change the look of your MySpace, it’s all very prepackaged and unoriginal. So although digital narrative has become mainstream, just as Murray predicted, it hasn’t taken on a very innovative or immersive form. But who knows... perhaps this will change in the future, as technologies improve and people become even more comfortable interacting with and manipulating the digital world.