The 'Book of Sand' by Jorge Luis Borges, talks of a book, which has an infinite number of pages, and each can only ever be visited once. The inability to ever return to them causes its reader great anxiety. Borges often invents strange and frustrating devices like this within his short fictions (Borges). These devices are a kind of narrative media within his stories, and by media I speak broadly, including metaphor as well as architecture. A common example of this Borgesian media is the labyrinth, which appears in 'The Garden of Forking Paths'. The garden in the story serves both as a maze and a narrative structure, where “forking” happens in “time, rather than in space” (Borges 125). Movement through this structure produces a unique story that the characters cannot predict.

Even though they are frustratingly complex, I believe these kinds of media have untapped properties. What if the wealth of such complex structures were recreated as a real narrative structure? Perhaps the Internet is one example. But I have been interested in wrestling with my own version of this. One of the challenges I undertook while creating my story, “The Flocking Party”, was to grapple with the issue of media arrangement. I ended up making a map-like structure that enables the reader to explore in directions of his or her own choosing. Its narrative connections are made through interactive links, but the integrity of the narrative does not evaporate into chaos. The result is a Borgesian structure that makes understanding the story an act of navigation, but is not meant to frustrate like the ones within Borges stories.

It's very tricky to design a way that information is delivered without boring people to death. In perception there are many neurological steps between the sense organs and consciousness. Because they are located within the body, there is little that can be done with them yet but try to understand how they work. Media, on the other hand, lie within our grasp to change and manipulate. These external representations (i.e. media) mediate between the environment and the senses. They act as perceptual technologies, both helping to perceive the world but also to define a view of it. In this way, media reorder the senses but in some cases they go so far as to become environments.

As information-reliant organisms, humans have cognitively evolved to deal with the complexity and demands of subtle and treacherous environments. Humans are connoisseurs of complexity. They do very well at exploring through environments, associating the elements within. Borges' stories examine the psychology behind such exploration. Perhaps the media arrangements that are more like environments are the best way to utilize this built-in knack for navigating.

“The Flocking Party” is just this sort of narrative environment. The reader does not read from the beginning to the end. They are not carried through the territory along one path; they must walk through. By following the links within, they move from one piece of information to the next. Gradually, a “plot” begins to emerge and the maze of connections becomes an engaging space to explore. The reader begins to wonder what they don't know yet about the story, and the missing pieces drive them forward. They aren't trying to make it to the end; they are trying to digest information at a pace that suits them. Because the story is located online, it is like a public park that they can visit as often as they wish to further explore the territory. This relieves the incessant temporal pressure normally placed on them by media like television, for example.