"The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances — as though any material were fit to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures, and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting … stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news item, conversation. Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all human groups, have their narratives … Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself."
– Roland Barthes, Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives, Image-Music-Text,1966

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths." – Reynolds Price

"Expanded cinema does not mean computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections. Expanded cinema isn't a movie at all: like life it's a process of becoming, man's ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes. One no longer can specialize in a single discipline and hope truthfully to express a clear picture of its relationships in the environment. This is especially true in the case of the intermedia network of cinema and television, which now functions as nothing less than the nervous system of mankind." – Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 1970

Cinema:
- a medium that disseminates moving pictures, short for cinematograph

Cinematic language:
- a “language” of images (visual and aural) that tell story without the use of words.

Interactive:
(OED) adjective 1 influencing each other. 2 (of a computer or other electronic device) allowing a two-way flow of information between it and a user, responding to the user’s input.

Narrative:
(OED) noun 1 an account of connected events; a story. 2 the narrated part of a literary work, as distinct from dialogue.

Discourse:
- an instance of language use whose type can be classified on the basis of such factors as grammatical and lexical choices and their distribution in
* main versus supportive materials
* theme
* style, and
* the framework of knowledge and expectations within which the addressee interprets the discourse.

Narrative Discourse:
- a discourse that is an account of events, usually in the past, that employs verbs of speech, motion, and action to describe a series of events that are contingent one on another, and that typically focuses on one or more performers of actions.