Category "essay1"
November 17, 2005
The more I read blogs, the less I know what blogs are
I am not against blogs. I am not worried about blogs’ lack of a clear identity. The definition of “blog” is not worked out yet, and that is fine – wonderful, even – as far as I am concerned. But some people get uncomfortable around blogs because blogs are new and they straddle categories.
Since blogs fall between the established genres they are pushed and pulled by the expectations pinned to old, established forms. News people want blogs to follow news rules; fiction people want blogs to follow fiction rules; surrealists want blogs to break all the rules. When blogs fail to play by the rules of the established forms some people get mad. Especially journalists. Others get confused.
Confusion in Norway
Even bloggers get flummoxed trying to figure out what a blog is. Jill Walker announced on her blog that she tried a new open-source browser called Flock.<1> Later the same day she was back on her blog with a not-so-happy critique of Flock. She's displeased at the mixing of public and private, personal and professional that a tool like Flock produces.
It connects the aspects of my digital life too much.... I don’t want my students and colleagues and neighbours to find my photos.<2>
It takes us back to this: What is a blog?
It's not all new
Writers have crossed genre barriers, or straddled them, as long as there have been genres. But most of that writing was filed away in manila folders or sitting safely in a spiral notebook on the top book shelf in the spare bedroom or published in a small batch for a select audience.
We try to do the same on the www. We have a professional face on the corporate www site; we let our hair down on the personal blog. But the www is not as secure as a dark spot on the top book shelf. Things on the Internet have a way of getting found. And linked to.
So here's Jill, an avid poster of all manner of material to the www, trying to figure out how to keep here online life comfortably partitioned: this is for the family; this is for the students; this is for...me?
Yes! I mean, no! I mean...
The other morning I ate pancakes and argued with a good friend. She said blogs are evil time- wasters. They allow people to fabricate personalities -- and anything else they wish -- and present phony information to the world. They are "not real," she said. There's no accountability, she said. Why don't these people get real lives? she asked.
I said no, no, no. Bloggers and blog readers have very real conversations and exchange very real info. I asked, Who made you guys (she works in a big, mainstream newsroom) the arbiters of truth? What about the thousands (millions!) of stories you choose not to cover? And when you do cover a story, you present pretty much one person's (the reporter's) take on the thing.
At that point I wondered, How did I get on the other side of this debate? Earlier in the week I had been -- sort of -- taking the other side of this very question in the first post I made to my own brand new blog.<3> In that post I asked:
Isn't the blogoshpere full of cranks and rumormongers and self-appointed "truth-tellers" with nutball political agendas?
Now here I was, a week later, arguing that such a view is self-righteous. The problem is, like all good, thorny questions, this one includes a good-sized hunk of truth in both points of view.
Consider Hurricane Katrina. Bloggers were reporting bedlam in the convention center and the mainstream press was calling the reports mere rumor. But the stories were true, it turns out. <4>
But wait. The blog Boing Boing (joined by many, many others) went on to talk about reports of rape, murder and mayhem in the Astrodome in Houston. Boing Boing posted an internet chat with a blogger in the dome by the name of Jacob Applebaum. He had interviewed people with atrocious stories of life in the Dome.<5> Boing Boing preceded the transcript of the chat with this forewarning:
I have no way of substantiating the statements of those Jacob spoke to, but I present them here as a snapshot of first-person accounts.
Over the next few days we heard other first-hand accounts, this time from reporters and aid workers in the dome who said these reports had been false. Weeks later, investigators reported they found no evidence of widespread rape and assault. Boing Boing and hundreds of other blogs had fueled the flames of rumor. And, my guess is, years from now people around the country will still believe horrible events took place inside the Astrodome.
But we cannot blame that on blogs. At least not entirely. Rumors existed long before blogs, obviously enough. But I wonder if blogs might be changing the mechanics of rumors – giving them more authority, more reach, and more speed.
I am tempted to say that old school media have some degree of accountability that Boing Boing does not have. When a New York Times reporter gets caught lying or passing along bad information, there is a name on the story in question. The reporter (and editors) have to explain themselves. They get shamed, or reprimanded, or fired. Sometimes. So my background as a news reporter makes me reflexively flinch at the anonymity of blogs.
In her article, “Feral Hypertext: When Literature Escapes Control” Jill Walker says that is a common reaction.<6>
Hoaxes, spams and scams abound on the internet, and often the reason that people get so upset by these cases is precisely that the author function has begun to slip. We can no longer trust that the person who claims to be the author of a text is its true author, as is evident from the Kaycee Nicole<7> hoax and its ilk. (p.3)
Hoaxes were around long before the internet. The Piltdown Man charade didn’t rely on email or blogs or IM.
A sucker born every minute
Still, it’s distressing to go to Amazon.com and find people as recently as 2004 writing glowing reviews of A Rock and a Hard Place by Anthony Johnson.<8> It’s been years since an expose in The New Yorker <9> revealed that the author doesn’t exist: this autobiography of a 14-year-old boy and his horrific early childhood is phony. But here’s a reader on Amazon posting a review on October 30, 2004:
Tony's story is absolutely terrible. His abuse is almost unfathomable. For this reason a lot of people can't tolerate it. They need to believe his story is fake…. I emailed with Tony and I'm pretty sure it was him. It was a couple of years ago. Does anyone know if he's still alive? When the book ended, he was suffering from full blown AIDS and had just had his left leg amputated because of the disease. There's a good chance he's no longer alive. Tony, if you are still alive, please believe that I found your story TRULY inspirational.
I have to admit, though, that The New Yorker piece has been collected in a book composed entirely of media hoaxes – and they did not all rely on the web for their success.
So is it fair to look at the buzzing back and forth of web hoaxes, coupled with the general untrustworthiness of online information, and conclude that modern journalism is suffering at the hands of bloggers and other web denizens? Jay Rosen at New York University doesn’t believe it.
Journalism schmournalism
Rosen presented a paper at the “Blogging, Journalism and Credibility” conference in Amherst in January of 2005, and in it he argued that news consumers “don’t buy” the old notion that the “press” is more credible than other information sources.<10>
In 1988, 58 percent of the public agreed with the self-description of the press and saw no bias in political reporting, according to the Pew Research Center. (And that was regarded as a dangerously low figure.) By 2004, agreement on ‘no bias’ had slipped to 38 percent. ‘The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto," wrote Howard Fineman of Newsweek, Jan. 13. ‘Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.’ <11>
So maybe there’s no credibility to erode. Maybe reporters like me should admit that all writing is subjective. Maybe we should consider the history of hazy authorship in the news: unsigned editorials; ghost-written columns, fabricated letters to the editor. Maybe “the news” never had any more authority than blogs in the first place.
Maybe.
Endnotes
1. http://jilltxt.net/?p=1555
2. http://jilltxt.net/?p=1557
3. http://onandonandon.typepad.com/onandon\andon/2005/09/wet_feet.html
4. The blog Boing Boing wrote up a nice little spread on these shenanigans. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/02/npr_interview_with_h.html
5. http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/07/katrina_rape_murder_.html
6. http://jilltxt.net/txt/FeralHypertext.pdf
7. http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/kaycee.html
8. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/0451181859/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/102-0912108-5936126?_encoding=UTF8&customer-reviews.sort_by=-SubmissionDate&n=283155
9. Tad Friend, "Virtual Love," New Yorker, November 26, 2001, pp. 88-99
10. http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/01/15/berk_pprd.html
11. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6813945/
Posted by at 10:57 AM | Comments (4) | essay1
Category "essay1"
November 13, 2005
Games as cod liver oil
Gonzalo Frasca wants game makers to create games with more meat – more social consequence. He wants them to be good for you.
In “Videogames of the Oppressed,” he says most games will continue to be for “entertainment,” but he asks why a healthy number of games cannot “encourage critical attitudes.”
It’s a laudable goal. Why not use games as tools for better thinking? But Fransca’s argument has some holes and some weak spots. Eric Zimmerman writes a more detailed and cogent response than mine which he posted as a Riposte on EBR, and he makes several points that also occurred to me. But here’s a distillation of what I thought about Frasca’s essay.
Frasca distinguishes between “simulation” and “narrative.” Games, he writes, are simulation. He says narrative “is constituted by a fixed series of actions and descriptions,” while videogames “need the active participation of the user not just for interpretational matters, but also for accessing its content.” He finishes this thought by writing, “narrative is about what already happened while simulation is about what could happen.”
There is room for much crossover here between video games and narrative. Zimmerman and others have made that point. So I would not say games and stories are mutually exclusive, but I will say this: narratives have taught social lessons and spurred people to think for millennia. Frasca does not make a convincing point that games have much to offer in this area that narrative does not already do – and better.
He admits, at some length, that gamers would need to become proficient coders to add the sort of complexity he wants to add to game characters. Most gamers are not going to do that, he says, but some will.
As the public becomes more familiar with manipulating and modifying simulations, the concept of designing their own may become more appealing.
But is it a game, then? Zimmerman wonders about that in his Riposte: If gamers program detailed personalities into characters (so the gamers can watch how social interactions play out in the game), do not they begin to take the play out of the game? If characters begin acting more on plot lines than according to variables that players choose each time they play, what you are left with looks more like a short story than a game.
Posted by at 8:19 PM | Comments (0) | essay1
Category "essay1"
November 9, 2005
Everything's a story
And what does that get you?
Henry Jenkins makes some valid points about recognizing the narrative lines inherent in games. But a person wonders if he takes his point too far.
He uses Star Wars as an example. It's a movie, it's a game, it's a novel adapted from the screen play. All of these elements, Jenkins tells us, are part of one big story. A kid who watches the movie and then plays the game uses information from the movie as a backdrop for the game. The "stories" become intertwined.
Jenkins takes issue with critics who doubt the prevalence of narratives within games. He takes Jasper Juul to task. Juul wrote in a 1998 paper that "you clearly can’t deduct the story of Star Wars from the Star Wars the game."
Jenkins responds:
This is a pretty old-fashioned model of the process of adaptation. Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy. The Star Wars game may not simply retell the story of Star Wars , but it doesn’t have to in order to enrich or expand our experience of the Star Wars saga.
We already know the story before we even buy the game and would be frustrated if all it offered us was a regurgitation of the original film experience. Rather, the Star Wars game exists in dialogue with the films, conveying new narrative experiences through its creative manipulation of environmental details. One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels.
Juul tells us the game will not stand on its own; we cannot infer the Star Wars "story" from the game. And Jenkins retorts that in "a world of transmedia storytelling" all media blend together in our reading of stories. The game affects our reading of the movie and vice versa. The movie, the game and the novel are part of one big story. Presumably so are Star Wars action figures and Star Wars drink cups at fast-food restaurants. Each medium borrows from the others; each medium colors our reading of the others.
That much of the argument is sound -- obvious, even. But the extension of the argument moves onto shakier ground. This is an overbroad conclusion: Since game players bring elements of the movie story into their game playing, the game must contain the story.
Her's the problem with that reasoning. It means that everything contains the Star wars story. If a kid plays the game after school on Wednesday, the story he constructs will certainly contain elements of the movie (if he has seen the movie), but it will also contain elements of the fantasy novel he is reading, elements of the history of ancient Egypt he is studying, and elements of a conversation he had with friends over lunch.
It's pointless, though, if we conclude that the story of Egyptian history contains elements of Star Wars. Sure, our schoolboy game player will bring elements of the movie to his understanding of Egyptian history. But if we conclude that Egyptian history is therefore "part of" the Star Wars narrative we have cast such a large theoretical net that the exercise becomes meaningless. We're left with the conclusion that everything is part of every story.
In some sense this is true. Stories exist only in our minds. All narratives twist and tangle in our memories -- all the stories we know affect our reading of any one story. But if we expand the notion of "story" that far, it no longer has any meaning or usefulness.
Posted by at 9:17 AM | Comments (2) | essay1
Category "essay1"
November 8, 2005
More games as stories
Henry Jenkins describes the world of game theorists as divided against itself: designers who thrill to the "game spaces" and spectacular graphics they create; and, storytellers -- fans of story lines in games. Jenkins wants game designers to talk about the technical guts of game design and he wants them to talk about stories.
He says designers with computer science backgrounds tend to have "too limited an understanding of narration, focusing more on the activities and aspirations of the storyteller and too little on the process of narrative comprehension."
Jenkins goes on to describe the design process for rides at Disneyland. He -- and the Disney designer he quotes -- contend that game designers can learn from Disney. Theme park rides and digital games share this: they create worlds that their players -- or riders -- inhabit. Each of those worlds is based on a story. As Jenkins tells it, narrative is crucial to successful rides and games.
I can't help but focus on one aspect of Jenkins argument: rides and games have story lines. Jenkins alludes to a key difference. He says people on a ride must "keep their hands inside" the car; gamers use their hands to muck about in the game -- and the story.
If I read a story, watch a movie, go on a ride at Disneyland, I receive the narrative. of course I interpret it. I create its meaning in my own “reading” of it. But the “author” of the story has charted a course for me.
In good reader-response fashion, we might argue that no two “readers” of a book or movie or theme park ride will experience the same “story.” The readers are active in the sense of decoding and interpreting the story. But they are passive in the sense that the “author” has built a narrative for readers to follow. Readers’ experiences and interpretations vary widely; the narrative itself does not.
Things change in the interactive realm. In games and in collaborative writing no central author controls the narrative. The story as it appears on the screen is unpredictable and ever-changing. Of course, each reader creates her own meaning -- but my point is, each reader is working from a different text in the first place.
Posted by at 10:49 PM | Comments (1) | essay1
Category "essay1"
November 7, 2005
ivanhoe exchange
the game is very clever. and complex.
how useful will it be in a classroom?
andrea posed that question, and i weighed in, too.
Posted by at 9:07 AM | Comments (0) | essay1
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November 6, 2005
techno success
I got Quicktime to behave, so I got a look at the animated demos of the game.
It sinks in
I get Ivanhoe -- a little. I can imagine this being a nifty tool in a class. Say you're discussing Huck Finn in a lit survey course. Students could jump into Ivanhoe and mess with the text. Huck rats Jim out vs Huck doesn't rat Jim out. What happens either way?
New characters could appear. Old characters could say new things. It really would give new meaning to the idea of readers being the writers of the texts they read.
So many words
It looks to me, though, like there'd be a mountain of writing in one of these games. The screen that demonstrates how to navigate through the moves and comments and all -- wow. What a mess. I can't imagine going back to wade through all that material. I suppose you could just go back to the beginning and walk through the game one move at a time to see how it all played out. But once again, that could be a lot of reading.
Deconstruct this
This sort of thing must mightily piss off the Alan Blooms of the world. New Critics are spinning in their graves. This game allows encourages people to mess with texts -- sacred, canoncial texts. The nerve!
So, as a teaching tool, it could be valuable. It might foster a whole lot more interest in a novel, say, than just plunking a book down in front of someone and saying, "Read it and we'll discuss it in class."
Weren't we talking about Moby Dick?
Maybe I have control issues, but I do wonder about the game wandering away from the initial text. Fine, I suppose. But I guess I wonder what the point is if Wuthering Heights fades from the discussion, and by gum, we were playing a game based on Wuthering Heights.
Posted by at 8:42 PM | Comments (0) | essay1
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Is it playing? Is it working?
I'm not sure where the intersection is between NINES and Ivanhoe.
Clearly there's some of the same motivating spirit at work. The people at NINES want to bring serious humanities scholarship online. They want to figure out how to make it work, electronically.
Johanna Drucker and the people behind Ivanhoe wonder in print whether their "game" can produce (or maybe aid) scholarship.
In "Reflections on the Ivanhoe Game," Drucker writes that "collaborative work is still novel in the Humanities, but will increase." (viii)
Scientists have been collarborating for many decades. I'm not aware of them using a role-playing game to do so. Perhaps the "game space" can be a place to get inspired; it can be a place to try out ideas. Scientists have played games and created simulations as long as there have been scientists.
Writing of the possibilities of Ivanhoe as a reading tool, Drucker asks: "Might we, literally, make that reading into a writing, an act of explicit reinterpretation?" (vii)
I'm trying to imagine how role-playing turns into scholarship. This "writing," this "explicit reinterpretation" can be fun, I'm sure. What if Healthcliff and Cathy had taken different paths? you might wonder. And using Ivanhoe, you could explore the possibilities.
Creative. Entertaining. Instructional. But will scholarly work come out of it? The players learn and have fun, maybe, but will the product of this game be something other people want to read? That seems more doubtful.
That's what Geoffrey Rockwell asks at the end of Drucker's article (and it's the title he gives to an article of his own):
"Is gaming serious research in the humanities?" (xvii)
Posted by at 8:33 PM | Comments (1) | essay1
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November 5, 2005
ivanhoe, huh?
I just read the explanation of how the "game" works. Sounds like it might be fairly cool, but I'm not quite picturing it. I can't seem to fire up the demo.
I did sniff around long enough to find a non-dynamic version of the game that some undergrads played five years ago on a blog. They used Wuthering Heights as the basis of their session. You can see how it turned out here.
You have to read from the bottom up to follow the game in time.
I'm a bit lost. It seems folks are taking on roles. (I got that much from the game documentation.) But I'm not following who's who, or what they're talking about at all.
I wish I could see the demo, with all the "player circles" and the "discourse circle" and all. Maybe I'd get a better sense of what's up.
Posted by at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | essay1
Category "essay1"
October 30, 2005
on linear thoughts texts non
Jill Walker likes Justin Hall's project. He's chronicled his own life in one online forum or another for about 12 years. He used to write on his own web site then his own blog. Now he spreads the writing around.
To look at the online ouevre of Hall, then, it would be necessary to look beyond links.net and take note of the many connections between what he has written on his own sites and on other sites. In addition, one could look at what his friends have written about him and about their relationships with him as part of the story of his life during these years.
A couple things strike me about this "Life of Justin Hall" presetned in non-linear fashion. I don't see how it's his story (but maybe that doesn't matter now that the author is superfluous), and I wonder how many people will care to root out such a "narrative."
Fer chrissakes, who was at the keyboard?
Over on her blog, Andrea asks some good questions on this subject. Andrea doubts Walker's assertion that readers will "define" where a narrative begins and ends.
where did it end being Hall's narrative. Here we are again with the broadly scoped word "narrative." It seems pretty basic to me. Hall wrote what Hall wrote. Anything else that others wrote about his blog, he did not write. Anything that is read by some one has an afterlife beyond the initial text, but that is not to say that the author can claim that "narrative."
Absolutely. I mean, we can get very Barthesian and question where meaining resides and we can talk about the reader-as-author, and that's fun and enlightening to do. But in this case we face a fairly simple question: Who typed up the "Life of Justin Hall?" He wrote the stuff he wrote, and someone else wrote the rest.
Sound and fury signifying...
I find myself even more hung up on the notion of the "narrative" of Justin being spread here and there across the web. Seems like a nice theoretical construct, but in practical terms, is it really a narrative at all? I wonder who will read it -- or at least significant chunks of it. If folks merely bump into random pieces of it here and there is there really any point to us talking about the narrative of this man's life as though it were a cohesive, recognizable thing? Once again, it makes for provocative theory, but is there a real application? I don't foresee many readers taking the time to hunt down discerete threads of a "narrative" on multiple web sites.
As I understand Walker's depiction of feral hypertext, I think it will remain on the margins, practiced and understood by a handful of tech-savvy and literarily-adventurous souls.
Posted by at 8:08 PM | Comments (0) | essay1
Category "essay1"
Hypertext gone wild
It looks as thought the author is about to die. Again.
That’s one conclusion you could draw from Jill Walker’s intriguing article, “Feral Hypertext: When Literature Escapes Control.” She portrays a world wide web about to burst out of control – at least in terms of fiction writing. Her observations throw light on the probable future of non-fiction on the web, too. What becomes of the already-beleaguered “news media?”
Author? Which author?
As Walker sees it, traditional concern over “controlling” a fiction text is on the wane; web fiction will increasingly have multiple authors and the control that any one of them can exert over the final product will be limited.
Final product? There is none, under this model. Who’s to say that a text is “finished?” The work will always be in-progress, and the list of authors might keep growing.
The work? That’s another concept that Walker says may fade. Hypertext allows writers to spread their output over dozens (or more?) of web sites. No longer are writers confined to the well-defined forms of the literary world. In Walker’s telling, the very idea of genres like Short Story, Autobiography, Essay and Poem are unnecessary for adventurous web writers.
Never-ending life story
Walker tells the story of Justin Hall. (p.6) He started telling his life in hypertext back in 1993 on a single web page. He eventually moved his chronicle to a blog. For 12 years he recorded his life with near-daily entries. But he quit in 2005. That is, he quit maintaining a central repository for his writing; he still writes on the web all the time. But threads and fragments of his writing are scattered hither and yon.
No more central “author,” since his writing doesn’t always appear under his name. No more identifiable “work” since there’s no one spot to find what Justin Hall wrote about his life this month.
Walker says the erosion of the idea of “author” makes some people unhappy.
Hoaxes, spams and scams abound on the internet, and often the reason that people get so upset by these cases is precisely that the author function has begun to slip. We can no longer trust that the person who claims to be the author of a text is its true author, as is evident from the Kaycee Nicole hoax and its ilk. (p.3)
Hoaxes were around long before the internet. The Piltdown Man charade didn’t rely on email or blogs or IM.
A sucker born every minute
Still, it’s distressing to go to Amazon.com and find people as recently as 2004 writing glowing reviews of A Rock and a Hard Place by Anthony Johnson. It’s been years since an expose in The New Yorker (here’s a bit of the article) revealed that the author doesn’t exist: this autobiography of a 14-year-old boy and his horrific early childhood is phony. But here’s a reader on Amazon posting a review on October 30, 2004:
Tony's story is absolutely terrible. His abuse is almost unfathomable. For this reason a lot of people can't tolerate it. They need to believe his story is fake…. I emailed with Tony and I'm pretty sure it was him. It was a couple of years ago. Does anyone know if he's still alive? When the book ended, he was suffering from full blown AIDS and had just had his left leg amputated because of the disease. There's a good chance he's no longer alive. Tony, if you are still alive, please believe that I found your story TRULY inspirational.
I have to admit, though, that The New Yorker piece has been collected in a book composed entirely of media hoaxes – and they didn’t all rely on the web for their success. And while it’s tempting – yes, I’m tempted here – to say the buzzing back and forth of web hoaxes, coupled with the general untrustworthiness of online information, has something to do with the condition of modern journalism, Jay Rosen at New York University doesn’t believe it.
Journalism schmournalism
Rosen presented a paper at the “Blogging, Journalism and Credibility” conference in Amherst in January of 2005, and in it he argued that news consumers “don’t buy” the old notion that the “press” is more credible than other information sources.
In 1988, 58 percent of the public agreed with the self-description of the press and saw no bias in political reporting, according to the Pew Research Center. (And that was regarded as a dangerously low figure.) By 2004, agreement on ‘no bias’ had slipped to 38 percent. ‘The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press was, to me at least, worth holding onto," wrote Howard Fineman of Newsweek, Jan. 13. ‘Now it's pretty much dead, at least as the public sees things.’
So maybe there’s no credibility to erode.
Posted by at 4:51 PM | Comments (2) | essay1
Category "essay1"
October 28, 2005
cloudy water
I have this odd feeling.
The more I read blogs
the less I know
what blogs are.
It's not a bad thing
It's a new thing.
I mean, blogs are new. Folks are messing around: diaries, political commentary, citizen journalism from war zones, baby photos, e-novels, favorite recipes. All this and so much more under the banner of BLOG.
This will get sorted out -- we'll have more names soon. Bloggers will take on specific identities. (I mentioned "citizen journalists." That's just one of the labels to pop up for a sub-genre of BLOG.)
Confusion in Norway
I was interested to see even the pros get flummoxed by the confusion over what a blog is. Jill Walker announced on her blog that she tried a new open source browser called Flock.
About an hour and a half later she was back on her blog with a not-so-happy critique of Flock. She's displeased at the mixing of public and private, personal and professional that a tool like Flock produces.
It takes me back to this: What is a blog?
It's not all new
Let's get real. People have always written stuff that crossed genre barriers, or straddled them. Nothing new. But most of that writing was filed away in manilla folders or sitting safely in a spiral notebook on the top book shelf in the spare bedroom.
We try to do the same on the www. We have a professoinal face on the corporate www site; we let our hair down on the personal blog. But the www ain't as secure as that dark spot on the top book shelf. Things have a way of getting found. And linked to.
So here's Jill, an avid poster of all manner of material to the www, trying to figure out how to keep here online life comfortably partitioned: this is for the family; this is for the students; this is for...me?
Posted by at 2:27 PM | Comments (1) | essay1
Category "essay1"
October 23, 2005
I might need a bigger screen
I’ve been clicking around at Rhizome. Here’s one thing I think: if I were a studio artist I might be pretty psyched about the possibilities. Get your work out there in front of a bigger (much bigger) audience, and all that.
But overall, here’s another thing I think: the WWW has to be more than transplanted work from other media. Of course, of course people are going to bring their previous ideas to the web. That’s a well-established pattern. (I swear I’ve prattled on about this before. Somewhere.)
In 1920 people on the radio did what they’d previously done A) on the stage, or B) on the printed page. In 1950, people on TV did what they’d previously done A) on the radio, or B) on the stage.
We’ve seen this all play out before. Folks have to feel their way along in a new medium. What I look forward to is web-specific art.
I think back to Scott McCloud once again. I found his comics, like ZOT!, to be truly inspired. Sure they’re an old form, but he made them feel at home on a web page. In fact, that strip reads better on a web page than it would in a magazine or a book. The two streams of storyline, running vertically, would be hard to pull off in a book; the page turns would mess it up.
And some media make the transfer to the WWW better than others -- at least to my untrained eye.
Just look at a photograph from Derek Powazek’s page, Ephemera.
I’ve heard photographers moan at great length about the technical limitations of pics on the WWW, but I kind of like online photos.
So, of course, I gravitated to the photography that Rhizome offered. Take a peak at this image from Karen Marshall’s page that I found through Rhizome. It just looks right on my screen.
In contrast, look at non-photographic studio art you find there. I looked at these pieces from the Voyeur Project, and I hope they’ll forgive me, but I don’t think they translate well to the laptop screen.
Perhaps I’m a philistine, or maybe I’m a particular sucker for photography, but I haven’t seen much non-photographic visual art online that grabs me by the lapels and sits me up in my chair.
Posted by at 6:16 PM | Comments (2) | essay1
Category "essay1"
Everybody wants to play
Eric Zimmerman wants to figure out how games can be more playful and have stronger narratives. He doesn’t have well-developed answers, but he points the way in his essay, “Narrative, Interactivity, Play, and Games.” The question arises: how about applying Zimmerman’s ideas in reverse? That is, perhaps we could make stories more playful and more game-like.
Zimmerman says games include these elements: they’re voluntary; they’re interactive; they have rules restricting players’ behavior; they are “artificial,” or clearly separate from “real life;” they have conflict; and, they have a “quantifiable outcome,” meaning someone wins or loses, even if the players all cooperate. Beyond this characteristics, Zimmerman says games also rely on “play.” He defines play as uncertainty and spontaneity within a set of expectations.
Gamey stories
I want to consider incorporating two of those elements into stories. We can make stories more interactive, and we can make them more playful. These two ideas are twined. Since stories by definition have a “teller,” introducing play is likely to involve someone besides the teller. Clearly, the WWW is ripe for playful, interactive storytelling. The hypertext novels that Zimmerman mentions are an early example of cyberspace’s possibilities.
I've heard that before
But this isn’t all brand new. Stories and games have always overlapped. There have always been interactive stories. Think about some guys on the corner playing the dozens, or, more current, some kids “freestyling” at a house party. Consider the tradition of “tall tales” with each storyteller trying to outdo the last. There’s improvisational comedy, with audience members tossing out ideas for the comics to riff on. Reaching farther back, we have to think about societies based on oral tradition. No story is ever completely fixed in form or content -- no matter how faithful the teller tries to be, he delivers a story different from the one he heard.
Go Web, young man
Now let’s move to the future. I can imagine no end of collaborative (maybe even competitive?) storytelling using fairly basic electronic tools. The WWW has already seen collaborative fiction; it’s been home to hypertext novels that move in the direction a reader chooses. And that’s only scratching the surface. The possibilities are thrilling.
A person’s tempted to say that this could change the notion of “story” forever. And it might.
It's always something
But there’s a core element to some stories that won’t fit with games and interactivity. Sometimes people want to take in a story – passively. Sometimes (maybe often) they don’t want to participate. Witness the popularity of TV. Look at lovers of “literature” who want to read a classic text and know that it is the same one that’s been read for generations. Sometimes an audience wants to watch or listen to a storyteller in action – and that’s all. Never will all stories become interactive.
And here’s an ironic twist. Technological change squelches some forms of interactivity and play in storytelling. Before print, all stories always had a degree of play, at least a modicum of interaction. Those qualities are intrinsic to oral storytelling. Printing – and subsequent technologies – have allowed us increasing distance from the storyteller: she might be in Bali, or she might have been dead for 264 years. The notion of an immutable “literary canon” is a creature of print culture.
But there’s a sunny flip-side. Technological change also allows new forms of interaction and play in storytelling. And we haven’t thought of most of them yet.
Posted by at 12:43 PM | Comments (3) | essay1