Wednesday February 24, 2010
Why They Cried: Day Three
“Why They Cried: Jisette”—the third part of a five-part series that will culminate in a Significant Objects auction on Friday—is now up at Fictionaut.
A few years ago, I did an interview with Sean Stewart—sf novelist and pioneering writer behind the Alternate Reality Games “The Beast” and “I Love Bees.” (This would make him a pioneer in so-called “transmedia,” I suppose, although that word wasn’t in common circulation then.) Stewart had at that point—and probably still has—done more hard thinking about online storytelling than most of us, and I turn back to that interview from time to time for reference and inspiration. (It also makes the stray syllabus and bibliography, like this one I found the other day.) Here’s what Stewart saw in his crystal ball in 2006:
Another part of that art form that I think is going to really stay with people is that sense of the collective or collaborative audience—that it exists in what we were talking about as porch space or blog space: A connected group of people who are interested in talking to one another about things and are even willing to be moved by those things. And it will be a little bit interactive, I think. This is where my crystal ball gets murky, because obviously you look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, “Wow, that’s a model that works.”
I bring this up now—in the middle of a weeklong discussion of “Why They Cried” and Significant Objects—for two reasons. First, as I was saying yesterday, I think a lot of the value created by Significant Objects auctions comes from the participatory element or, if you will, the community. The site itself is a sort of community and, of course, eBay is one of the biggest online communities around. I did want to experiment with this element a little further with “Why They Cried,” which is why I decided to post the preliminary installments to Fictionaut and Facebook—a specialist and generalist community, respectively—rather than to my own site. Will this increase the significance created? Who knows.
But the part of this quote that’s really been hollering at me this week is the last part. “You look at really passive forms of entertainment like TV and say, ‘Wow, that’s a model that works.’” Except, in this case, the model that really seems to be working to me is Twitter—or the real-time web or ambient awareness or whatever you’d like to call it. Our interview took place before Twitter even launched, and I wonder what Stewart would say about its influence—I should ask him—but here’s my take, which has to do with why I decided to do a serial leading up to my Significant Objects contribution.
With the rise of blogs ten years ago—and the attendant explosion of content—persistence has become one of the single biggest factors in connecting with audiences. And I don’t mean this in the sense of stick-to-it-iveness (which has its points). Instead I mean it in the sense of persistence over time. It’s a common experience for a first-time blogger to craft their first post, put it up, and then be immediately disappointed when no one shows up. But the fact is that a single blog post is practically meaningless when it comes to connecting with audiences. What engages audiences (and builds communities?) is persistence over time.
This effect has been exaggerated, I think, by the rise of social networks. If blogs expanded information 10-fold, then Facebook and Twitter have expanded it at least 100-fold on top of that. Yet as individual blips become even shorter and less consequential, the overall effect of this ambient awareness is more intimacy, not less. (The great divide between people who get Twitter and those who don’t is between people who have experienced this overall effect and those who can’t get past the disposability of the individual blips.) If newspapers are concerts, blogs are lectures, and social networks are coffeehouses. But as a result, storytelling and authorship is going to change. An individual story floated on the social stream is whisked away by the current and forgotten almost immediately. The same thing with books, I’m afraid, which are punctuated events, whatever their length. But a story that unfolds over time—like our awareness of one another via social networks—strikes me as more native to this sort of casual awareness. I’m not saying that stories should simulate social network interactions via online “characters”—plenty of people do this—but that persistence and elongation of a story over time makes more sense for how we read now, which is why I’ve been playing around with serials, including “Why They Cried.”
Do I have any evidence for this, or am I just making it up? Well, I’m sort of making it up, but I do have some anecdotal evidence. One of the bigger stories in literary fiction in the last few months was Electric Literature’s Twitter experiment with Rick Moody, for example. Short fiction, meted out over time, becomes a big mainstream story. Could be the Radiohead effect, but it’s interesting. On a smaller scale, the fastest growing e-book download I’ve seen on Feedbooks is Scott Douglas’s Dispatches from a Public Librarian, a collection of his columns from McSweeneys.net. Again, a narrative with persistence over time, which—I’m suggesting—is what it takes to build an audience (and create significance?) in the post-Twitter world. So that’s the twist I’m hoping to add to the Significant Objects experiment this week with “Why They Cried.” We’ll see how it turns out.
Click here for more information about Significant Objects and my contribution, “Why They Cried.”
