Carolyn Guyer, with photographs by Dianne Hagaman: "Into
the Next Room" (17)
| "For a room, as embodiment of time and space, is the fret of human story. We need rooms in order to understand things, to make a story. A room is a frame, a focus, it is the specificity of context." (323) |
Carolyn Guyer uses images and our own concept of a “room” to help us visualize underlying constructs and boundaries in operation when we consider narratives. Although taken for granted, rooms indicate the events, contexts, and stories surrounding people, something that Guyer sees as indicative of the way humans interpret images and text: “when we gaze at a photograph . . . we are making story from a story, just as we do when occupying a room, or reading a novel, or staring into someone’s backyard” (328).
Guyer advocates “boundary-crossing,” or developing an ability or awareness for the differences and interdependency of images and text. Images are always biased and value-laden, but they can also be indicators of society’s values and of how these values invade social structure. By placing equal but different values on both types of communication forms, a potential for creating new spaces and boundaries exists.
From this discussion of images, Guyer continues, focusing on MOO spaces, noting that although (at the time she was writing) MOO rooms are mostly textual, the7 convey the same sense of space as images or photographs. Even the use of a room metaphor seems apropos to online spaces because the narrative structure in a MOO allows multiple individuals to contribute their own understanding and their own conception of the narrative told within that space.
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