Category Archives: writing

jonathan lethem: the ecstasy of influence

If you haven’t already, check out Jonathan Lethem’s essay in the latest issue of Harper’s on the trouble with copyright. Nothing particularly new to folks here, but worth reading all the same — an elegant meditation by an elegant writer (and a fellow Brooklynite) on the way that all creativity is actually built on appropriation, reuse or all-out theft:

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul–let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances–is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. Neurological study has lately shown that memory, imagination, and consciousness itself is stitched, quilted, pastiched. If we cut-and-paste our selves, might we not forgive it of our artworks?

incunabula of the week

Last month, when I met the if:book crew for the first time, Ben described the net-native literary forms that have emerged to date as ‘incunabula’. I didn’t know what the word meant. He explained that, in the Middle Ages, when they first started printing books, there were all kinds of experiments which explored print technologies but hadn’t yet settled into a form that made full use of them. Ben suggested that forms of Web writing today are at an equivalent stage.
The word ‘incunabulum’ stuck with me. There’s something endearlingly fragile and tentative about it, as though Net-based forms of writing were a new species of winged things, freshly-hatched and still a bit soggy and crumpled. Since abandoning the notion of writing for print (paper) publication some time ago, though, I find myself reluctant to reinvent the wheel. So I’m very interested in what is emerging on the Net around the axis of technology and (used here in its classical sense, for want of a better word) poetry.
Top of my list at the moment as the Web’s finest emerging art form is alternate reality gaming. I wrote about that here not long ago; since then, I’ve vanished into a currently-playing ARG and will write more on the experience when I can. Meanwhile, this week I’ve stumbled across an interesting cross-section of Web-based stuff and thought I’d do a roundup here.
Disclaimer time. Ben’s already admirably dissected the problems with the Million Penguins project, so I won’t go into that. I also know there is a whole tranche of early experiments with hypertext writing which I’ve ignored. My reason for doing so is that a) I can’t be exhaustive – that’s what your search engine is for. Also, in my experience, hypertext fiction tends to be somewhat sterile and frustrating, recalling the Choose Your Own Adventure novels I read as a child. That said, if anyone knows of any that buck this trend, please send them my way.
Anyway, incunabula. The first is some years old, and is actually an event rather than a single piece of writing: the delightfully geeky Perl Poetry Contest of 2000. In the words of the Perl Journal that reviewed it:
The Perl Poetry Contest is sort of a kinder, less migraine inducing sibling of the Obfuscation Contest. The Obfuscation Contest promotes the creation of vile looking scripts. The Perl Poetry Contest is the other end of the spectrum, promoting the generation of flowing verse, and Perl, to make something beautiful.
Here’s the winner, by Angie Winterbottom:
if ((light eq dark) && (dark eq light)
&& ($blaze_of_night{moon} == black_hole)
&& ($ravens_wing{bright} == $tin{bright})){
my $love = $you = $sin{darkness} + 1;
};
It’s derived from a verse from the Pandora’s Box album ‘Original Sin’:
If light were dark and dark were light
The moon a black hole in the blaze of night
A raven’s wing as bright as tin
Then you, my love, would be darker than sin.
This is only just within my personal geek:lit frame of reference, as I don’t program Perl. But I include it in memory of the first time I heard a techie use the phrase ‘elegant code’, as I remember how struck I was then by the idea that there could be an aesthetics of machine code. I’d imagined that coding was purely functional and as such more about engineering than art; lately, I’m beginning to suspect that coders play an equivalent role in the online space to the one print authors play/ed in the literary canon. Poetry written in machine code sits elegantly across the literary/aesthetic and technical spaces in a way very suggestive of this accession of coding to the status of meta-literature.
My second incunabulum of the week comes from Everything2, a relatively open-access online writing space (see the Wikipedia entry for more info). The structures of this site merit further examination, particularly in contrast with the Million Penguins fiasco. But in the interests of brevity, for the time being here’s an entry from user “allseeingeye”: a poem about online gaming with the glorious title “im in ur base killin ur d00dz“.
I won’t go into the layers of memetic accretion around this phrase (try Encyclopedia Dramatica or urbandictionary if you really need to know). What enchanted me about the piece is that it uses a mixture of Everything2’s hard links, geek and gaming slang, and relatively traditional free verse to create something in which form and function, tradition and new technologies, “high” and “low” cultures merge most intriguingly. The writer’s genderless username addes extra ambiguity to the elision of gaming and eroticism in a way that’s very evocative of how of heightened emotion plays out in disembodied online spaces.
There’s also something thought-provoking about the fact that Everything2’s hard links are, like Wikipedia, often unfinished. If you click on one and find it incomplete, the page invites you to create an account and then add the page. When you read a poem that’s full of these sometimes-unfinished links, it’s a bit like a reverse version of The Waste Land. The difference is that where Eliot’s piece functions as an accretion of quotations that refer backwards through the history of the canon, this functions as a speculative accretion of things that may become quotations, and refers forwards to a canon not yet created.
Incunabulum number three is Batan City, a MediaWiki-based imaginary city. It was started by Paul Youlten, founder of the site formerly known as Yellowikis, a wiki-based business listings directory that sparked a legal challenge from the yellow pages industry, and now at SocialText. When Paul sent a story to a friend of his, she responded not with a commentary but with another story. The result is starting to accumulate online. There isn’t much there yet, but the convention appears to be that the “city” accumulates individually-authored stories around a central fictional place. I’m very interested in what works and does not work in wiki-based fiction (providing no structure at all, for instance, really doesn’t, as Ben pointed out a few days ago; here we have some basic structure and an invitation first to submit a story and then to spread the word to other writers. I look forward to seeing how it evolves.
Incunabulum number four is Troped, a blog-based ongoing narrative. I came across this when its author commented here in if:book, and have been dropping by there every few days to try and get a feel for what it’s up to. The format is short, not always obviously interrelated stories, usually updated every day or so. I’ll admit I haven’t been following it for long or in depth, but so far what leaps out is not a strong story, but the sense of an experiment in time and form. Individual entries, each with the feel of a mini-short-story, read down the page; but because it’s posted in blog software the chronology of the whole reads in the opposite direction. That is, the first entry in narrative terms is the last you come to in formal terms, but the direction of the entries themselves goes the other way. In addition, the author/s (perhaps unconsciously) echo/es this temporal paradox with a slightly odd use of tenses within the stories (“Jameson laughs. He preferred to just use the shop as a place to dicker around–someplace other than his house“), which adds a layer of temporal confusion. So to date I haven’t got into this one. But as a piece testing the limits and possibilities and mute formal insinuations of net-native writing delivery mechanisms, it’s certainly worth a look.
So, a mixed bag. Perl poetry experiments with the constraints of language, flirting with machine code in a way that subverts the usually functionalist preconceptions that lay non-coders such as myself tend to have about computer languages. The killin ur d00dz piece hard links within its writing community to foreground the dynamic and collaborative emergence of Web-specific jargons, even as it captures the intense experience of one individual. Batan City is a tentative (though, perhaps luckily for its creators, less populated than the Penguin effort) attempt to reconcile open editing with individual authorship of story elements, that uses the twin structures of a fictional place and an alphabetised list to structure the entries it invites. And Troped tests the interrelation between online self-publishing software and narrative temporality.
What all these pieces have in common is a concerted attempt to do more than upload the conventions of print text (boundedness, single authorship, linearity) into an environment that encourages in many ways the inverse of these traditions. They all have limitations, but all are pushing at the boundaries of what the new technologies make possible: multiple or anonymous authoring, new languages, strange temporalities and explicit acknowledgement of the intertext.

ecclesiastical proust archive: starting a community

(Jeff Drouin is in the English Ph.D. Program at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York)
About three weeks ago I had lunch with Ben, Eddie, Dan, and Jesse to talk about starting a community with one of my projects, the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive. I heard of the Institute for the Future of the Book some time ago in a seminar meeting (I think) and began reading the blog regularly last Summer, when I noticed the archive was mentioned in a comment on Sarah Northmore’s post regarding Hurricane Katrina and print publishing infrastructure. The Institute is on the forefront of textual theory and criticism (among many other things), and if:book is a great model for the kind of discourse I want to happen at the Proust archive. When I finally started thinking about how to make my project collaborative I decided to contact the Institute, since we’re all in Brooklyn, to see if we could meet. I had an absolute blast and left their place swimming in ideas!
Saint-Lô, by Corot (1850-55)While my main interest was in starting a community, I had other ideas — about making the archive more editable by readers — that I thought would form a separate discussion. But once we started talking I was surprised by how intimately the two were bound together.
For those who might not know, The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is an online tool for the analysis and discussion of à la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). It’s a searchable database pairing all 336 church-related passages in the (translated) novel with images depicting the original churches or related scenes. The search results also provide paratextual information about the pagination (it’s tied to a specific print edition), the story context (since the passages are violently decontextualized), and a set of associations (concepts, themes, important details, like tags in a blog) for each passage. My purpose in making it was to perform a meditation on the church motif in the Recherche as well as a study on the nature of narrative.
I think the archive could be a fertile space for collaborative discourse on Proust, narratology, technology, the future of the humanities, and other topics related to its mission. A brief example of that kind of discussion can be seen in this forum exchange on the classification of associations. Also, the church motif — which some might think too narrow — actually forms the central metaphor for the construction of the Recherche itself and has an almost universal valence within it. (More on that topic in this recent post on the archive blog).
Following the if:book model, the archive could also be a spawning pool for other scholars’ projects, where they can present and hone ideas in a concentrated, collaborative environment. Sort of like what the Institute did with Mitchell Stephens’ Without Gods and Holy of Holies, a move away from the ‘lone scholar in the archive’ model that still persists in academic humanities today.
One of the recurring points in our conversation at the Institute was that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is “my reading” of Proust. It might be difficult to get others on board if their readings — on gender, phenomenology, synaesthesia, or whatever else — would have little impact on the archive itself (as opposed to the discussion spaces). This complex topic and its practical ramifications were treated more fully in this recent post on the archive blog.
I’m really struck by the notion of a “reading” as not just a private experience or a public writing about a text, but also the building of a dynamic thing. This is certainly an advantage offered by social software and networked media, and I think the humanities should be exploring this kind of research practice in earnest. Most digital archives in my field provide material but go no further. That’s a good thing, of course, because many of them are immensely useful and important, such as the Kolb-Proust Archive for Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Some archives — such as the NINES project — also allow readers to upload and tag content (subject to peer review). The Ecclesiastical Proust Archive differs from these in that it applies the archival model to perform criticism on a particular literary text, to document a single category of lexia for the experience and articulation of textuality.
American propaganda, WWI, depicting the destruction of Rheims CathedralIf the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive widens to enable readers to add passages according to their own readings (let’s pretend for the moment that copyright infringement doesn’t exist), to tag passages, add images, add video or music, and so on, it would eventually become a sprawling, unwieldy, and probably unbalanced mess. That is the very nature of an Archive. Fine. But then the original purpose of the project — doing focused literary criticism and a study of narrative — might be lost.
If the archive continues to be built along the church motif, there might be enough work to interest collaborators. The enhancements I currently envision include a French version of the search engine, the translation of some of the site into French, rewriting the search engine in PHP/MySQL, creating a folksonomic functionality for passages and images, and creating commentary space within the search results (and making that searchable). That’s some heavy work, and a grant would probably go a long way toward attracting collaborators.
So my sense is that the Proust archive could become one of two things, or two separate things. It could continue along its current ecclesiastical path as a focused and led project with more-or-less particular roles, which might be sufficient to allow collaborators a sense of ownership. Or it could become more encyclopedic (dare I say catholic?) like a wiki. Either way, the organizational and logistical practices would need to be carefully planned. Both ways offer different levels of open-endedness. And both ways dovetail with the very interesting discussion that has been happening around Ben’s recent post on the million penguins collaborative wiki-novel.
Right now I’m trying to get feedback on the archive in order to develop the best plan possible. I’ll be demonstrating it and raising similar questions at the Society for Textual Scholarship conference at NYU in mid-March. So please feel free to mention the archive to anyone who might be interested and encourage them to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu. And please feel free to offer thoughts, comments, questions, criticism, etc. The discussion forum and blog are there to document the archive’s development as well.
Thanks for reading this very long post. It’s difficult to do anything small-scale with Proust!

net-native stories are already here: so are the vultures

A split is under way in the culture industry at present, between ever more high-budget centrally-created and released products designed to net the ‘live experience’ ticket or product-buying punter, and new forms of distributed, Net-mediated creativity. This is evidenced throughout the culture industry; but while ARGs (alternate reality games) are a strong candidate for being understood as the ‘literary’ output of this new culture, there is little discussion of increasing attempts to transform this emerging genre straight into a vehicle for advertising. In the light of my own rather old-fashioned literary idealism, I want first to situate ARGs in the context of this split between culture-as-industry and culture-as-community, to argue the case for ARGs as participatory literature, and finally to ponder the appropriateness of leaving them to the mercies of the PR industry.
the culture industry and the new collaboration
Anti-pirating adverts have been common since video came into wide use. But the other day I saw one at the cinema that got me thinking. Rather than taking the line that copying media is a crime, it showed scenes from Apocalypto, while pointing out that such a spectacular film is much better enjoyed on a huge cinema screen. It struck me as a shrewd take: rather than making ominous noises about crime, the advert aimed to drive cinema attendance by foregrounding the format-specific benefits (darkened room, audience, popcorn, huge screen) of the cinema experience .
It reminded me of a conversation I had with musician-turned-intellectual Pat Kane. Since the advent of iTunes and the like, he said, gigging is often a musician’s main source of income. I had a look at live performance prices, and discovered that whereas in 2001 high-end tickets cost $60, in 2006 Paul McCartney (amongst others) charged $250 per ticket. The premium is for the format-specific features of the experience: the atmosphere, the ‘authenticity’, the transient moment. Everything else is downloadable.
But the catch is that you have to sell material that suits the ‘live’ immersive experience. That means all-singing, all-dancing extravaganza gigs (Madonna crucified on a mirrored cross in Rome, anyone?) and super-colossal epic ‘excitement’ films, full of special effects, chases, explosions and the like. Consider the top ten grossing films 2000-06: three Harry Potters, three Lord of the Ringses, three X-Men films, three Star Warses, three Matrix films, Spider-man, two Batmans, The Chronicles of Narnia, Day After Tomorrow, Jurassic Park 3, Terminator 3 and War of the Worlds. Alongside that there were typically at least two high-budget CGI films in the top ten each year Exciting fantasy epics are on the up, because if you produce anything else the punters are more likely to skip the cinema experience and just download it.
So the networked replicability of content drives a trend for high-budget, high-concept cultural content for which you can justifiably charge at the door. But other forms are on the up. The NYT just ran a story about M dot Strange, who brought a huge YouTube audience to his Sundance premiere. And December’s Wired called the LonelyGirl15 phenomenon on YouTube ‘The future of TV’. It’s not as if general cinema release is the only way to make your name. Sandi Thom‘s rise to fame through a series of webcasts tells the same story.
Here, we see artists who reverse the paradigm: rather than seeking to thrill a passive audience, they intrigue an active one. Rather than seeking to retain control, they farm parts of the story out. As Lonelygirl15’s story grows, each characer will get a vlog: rather than produce the whole thing themselves, the originators will work out a basic storyline and then pair writers and directors with actors and let them loose.
I don’t wish to argue here that this second paradigm of community-based participative creation is necessarily ‘better’, or that it will supplant existing cultural forms. But it is emerging rapidly as a major cultural force, and merits examination both in its own right and for clues to the operation of Net-native forms of literature.
fact or fiction? who cares?
A frequent characteristic of these kinds of networked co-creation is debate about the ‘reality’ of its products. LonelyGirl15 whipped up a storm on ARG Network while people tried to work out if she was an ARG trailhead, an advertising campaign, or a real teenager. Similarly, many have suspected Sandi Thom’s webcast story of including a layer of fiction. But this has not hurt Sandi’s career any more than it killed interest in LonelyGirl15. Built into these discussions is a sense that this (like much ambiguity) is not a bug but a feature, and is actually intrinsic to the operation of the net. After all, the promise underpinning Second Life, MUDs, messageboards and much of the Net’s traffic is radical self-reinvention beyond the bounds of one’s life and physical body. Fiction is part of Net reality.
Literary theorists have held fiction in special regard for thousands of years; if fiction is intrinsic to the ‘reality’ of the Net, what happens to storytellers? Is there a kind of literature native to the Net?
ARGs: net-native literature
Though it’s a relatively young phenomenon, and I have no doubt that other forms will emerge, the strongest candidates at present for consideration as such are ARGs (alternate reality games). Unlike PVP online games, they are at least partially written (textual), and rely heavily on participants’ collaboration through messageboards. If you’re trying to catch up, you essentially read the ‘story’ as it is ‘written’ by its participants in fora dedicated to solving them. They have a clear story, but are dependent for their unfolding on community participation – and may be changed by this participation: in 2001, Lockjaw ended prematurely when participants brought a class-action lawsuit against the fictional genetic engineering company at the heart of the story. Or perhaps it didnt – I’ve seen one reference to this event, but other attempts simply lead me deeper into a story that may or may not still be active.
Thus, like LonelyGirl15 and her ilk, ARGs also bridge fact and fiction. This is part of their pleasure, and it is pervasive: I had a Skype conversation yesterday with Ansuman Biswas, an artist who has been sucked into the now-unfolding MEIGEIST game when its creators referenced his work in the course of casting story clues. Ansuman delightedly sent me the link to the initial thread on the game at unfiction, where participants have been debating whether Ansuman exists or not. Even though I was talking to him at the time I almost found myself wondering, too.
Where ARGs as a creative form diverge from print literature (at least, from modern print literature) is in their use of pastiche, patchwork and mash-up. One of the delights of storytelling is the sense of an organising intelligence at work in a chaos of otherwise random events. ARGs provide this, but in a way appropriate to the Babel of content available on the Net. Participants know that someone is orchestrating a storyline, but that it will not unfold without the active contribution of the decoders, web-surfers, inveterate Googlers and avid readers tracking leads, clues, possible hints and unfolding events through the chaos of the Web. Rather than striving for that uber-modernist concept, ‘originality’, an ARG is predicated on the pre-existence of the rest of the Net, and works like a DJ with the content already present. In this, it has more in common with the magpie techniques of Montaigne (1533-92), or the copious ‘authoritative’ quotations of Chaucer than contemporary notions of the author-as-originator.
the PR money-shot
The downside of some ARG activity is the rapid incursions of the marketing machine into the format, and a corresponding tendency towards high-budget games with a PR money-shot. For example, I Love Bees turned out to be a trailer for Halo 2. This spills over into offline publication: Cathy’s Book, itself an interactive multimedia concept co-written by Sean Stewart, one of the puppetmasters of the 2001 ARG ‘The Beast, made headlines last year when it included product placements from Clinique. So where YouTube, myspace, webcasts and the like appear to be working in some ways to open up and democratise creative activity as a community activity, it is as yet unclear whether the same is true of ARGs. Is it acceptable for immersive fiction to be so seamlessly integrated with the needs of the advertising world? Is the idealism of Aristotle and Sidney still worth keeping? Or is such purism obsolete?
where are the artists?
Either way, this new genre represents, I believe, the first stirrings of a Net-native form of storytelling. ARGs have all the characteristics of networked cultural production: they unfold through the collaboration of a networked problem-solving community; they use multiple media, mixtures of fact and fiction, and a distributed reader/participant base. Their operation, and their susceptibility to co-opting by the marketing industry poses many questions; but the very nature of the form suggests that the way to address these is through engagement, not criticism. So, ultimately, this is a call for writers and artists interested in what the form is and could become: to situate Net writing in the context of why writers have always written, to explore its potential, and to ensure that it remains a form that belongs to us, rather than being sold back to us in darkened theatres with a bagful of memorabilia.

blogging restructures consciousness?

The following story suggests that it does. Last month, Chris Bowers of the progressive political blog MyDD, underwent a small existential crisis brought on by a ham-fisted report on public television about political blogging that bungled a number of basic facts, including Bowers’ very existence on the MyDD masthead. The result was a rare moment of introspection in an otherwise hyper-extroverted medium:

…I admit that the past three years of blogging have altered me in some rather dramatic ways that do, in fact, begin to call very existence into question. I am not referring to the ways that blogging has caused a career change, granted me political and media access that I still find shocking, almost entirely ended my participation in old social circles and presented me with new ones, allowed me to work from home, or otherwise had an impact on the day to day activities of my life. Instead, I am actually referring to an important way in which blogging has altered my very consciousness. After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage–the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.

First off, I’m reminded of something Sebastian Mary was saying last month about moving beyond the idea of “authorship” and the economic and political models that undergird it (the print publishing industry, academia etc.) toward genuinely new forms of writing for the electronic landscape. “My hunch,” she says, “is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.” Little is understood about what the collapse of today’s publishing systems would actually mean or look like, and even less about the actual experience of the new writing — that is, the new states of mind and modes of vision that are only beginning to be cracked open through the exploration of new forms. Bowers, as a spokesman for the new rhetoric (or at least one fledgeling branch of it) shines a small light on this murky area.
OngReading.jpg This also brings me back to Bob’s recent excursion into Walter Ong territory, talking about the possibility of a shift, through new networked forms of creativity, back toward something resembling the collectivity of oral cultures. Bowers and his blog might suggest the beginnings of a case study. Is this muting of the interior monologue, this waning sense of self as a “distinct individual,” the product of a kind of communication that is at once written and oral — both individualistic and collective?
Ong called the invention of writing the “technologizing of the word,” a process that fundamentally restructures human consciousness. In this history of literacy, the spoken word is something that wells up directly from the human unconscious, whereas written language is expressed through artificial (i.e. human-made) frameworks, systems of “consciously contrived, articulable rules.” These rules (and their runes) create a scaffold for the brain, which, now able to engage with complex ideas in contemplative solitude as opposed to interlocution, begins to conceive of itself as an individual entity rather than as part of a collective. Literate cultures are thus cognitively different than oral ones.
Bowers’ confession suggests that this progression is being, if not reversed, then at least confused.
The kind of communication that he and his fellow rhetoriticians have been orchestrating in recent years in the blogosphere — not to mention parallel developments elsewhere with wikis, message boards, social media, games and other inchoate forms that feel as much like public spaces as documents — has a speed and plasticity that approaches oral communication. A blog post isn’t so much a finished opus as a lump of clay that readers and other bloggers collectively shape through comments and discussion. Are these new technologies of the word (and beyond the word) restructuring consciousness?
Bowers concludes:

We political bloggers have spilled a great deal of ink on analytical, meta-blogosphere commentaries, and on how we would like to se the political process be reformed. I think we can do an equally great service–both to politics and to blogging–by spilling a little more ink on ourselves.

retreat to his study / thoughts for ’07

2006 was a big year for the Institute. We emerged as a sort of publishing lab, a place for authors and readers to rethink books in the digital age — both theoretically (in the wide-ranging dicussions on this blog) and practically (in hands-on experimentation). The project that got things rolling on the practical end — and which is now wrapping up its current phase and down-shifting tempo — was undoubtedly Mitch Stephens’ book blog Without Gods. Like many of our experiments, this one emerged not by some grand design but through an offhand suggestion, when we thought we were headed somewhere else.
Two Novembers ago Bob and I were meeting Mitch for lunch at a cafe near NYU to chat about blogging and its impact on the news media (remember that Mitch, though lately preoccupied with the history of atheism, is a professor in the journalism program at NYU). We were preparing to host a meeting at USC of leading academic bloggers to discuss how scholars were beginning to use blogs to enliven discourse in their fields, and how certain ones (like Juan Cole and PZ Myers) were reaching a general readership, bringing their knowledge to bear on media coverage of subjects like Iraq or the intelligent design movement.
At one point during the lunch it came up that Mitch was in the early stages of researching a new book on nonbelievers and the idea was tossed out — I suppose in the spirit of the discussion — that he start a blog to see how the writing process might be opened up in real time, engaging readers in dialog. Mitch seemed intrigued (guardedly) and said he’d think it over.
A few weeks later, back from a fascinating time in LA, I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Mitch saying that he’d been considering the blog idea and wanted to give it a shot. We’d returned from the USC meeting pretty charged up by the discussion we had there and convinced that blogging represented at least the primitive beginnings of a major reorganization of scholarly and public discourse. But we were at a loss as to what our small outfit could do to help. Mitch’s email, if not the answer to all our questions, seemed like a great way to get our hands dirty making a tangible product and would perhaps help us to figure out our next steps. We had a few brainstorm meetings, pulled together a basic design, and Without Gods was born.
A year on, I think it’s safe to say that it’s been a success — actually a turning point for us in balancing the proportions in our work of theoretical pondering to practical experimentation. It’s somewhat ironic that the most substantial thing to come out of the academic blogging inquiry was slightly to the side of the initial question, and conceived before the meeting. But that’s often how things occur. Questions lead to other questions. Without Gods led to Gamer Theory, Gamer Theory led to Holy of Holies, which in turn led to the Iraq Study Group Report. Which I suppose all in some way stems from the academic blogging inquiry and the many tributaries it opened up. MediaCommons is steeped in a belief in the importance of vibrant and visible conversation among scholars in forms ranging from the blog to the networked book — values laid out in the original USC gathering, and developed through our work on Without Gods and beyond.
Now, as hinted before, Mitch has decided it’s time to retreat to his study in order to bring the book to fruition — offline. As he forges ahead, however, he’ll carry with him the echoes — and the archive — of the past year’s discussions.

After a year of mostly daily blogging on this site, I am cutting back.
As most of you know, I am writing a book on the history of disbelief for Carroll and Graf. The blog — produced while working on the book — was an experiment conceived by the Institute for the Future of the Book. It has been a success. I have been benefiting from informed and insightful comments by readers of the blog as I’ve tested some ideas from this book and explored some of their connections to contemporary debates.
I may continue to post sporatically here, but now it seems time to retreat to my study to digest what I’ve learned, polish my thoughts and compose the rest of the narrative. The trick will be accomplishing that without losing touch with those – commenters or just silent readers – who are interested in this project….do try to check back here once in a while. There will be some updates and, perhaps, some new experiments.

New experiments such as “Holy of Holies,” a paper that Mitch delivered last month before an NYU working group on “Secularism, Religious Authority, and the Mediation of Knowledge” (it’s still humming with over a hundred comments). Although blog posting will be sporadic, futureofthebook.org/mitchellstephens will remain the internet hub for Mitch’s book, sections of which may appear in draft state in a format similar to the NYU paper (depending on where Mitch, and his publisher, are at). If you’d like to be notified directly of such developments, there’s a form on the site where you can enter your email address.
Thanks, Mitch, and best of luck. We couldn’t have asked for a better partner in exploring this transitional territory. I hope 2007 proves to be as interesting and as healthy a mix of thinking and doing, for you and for us.

small steps toward an n-dimensional reading/writing space

A few weeks ago, Mitch Stephens came to us with an interesting challenge: to design a social reading environment for a paper he will be presenting this Friday, Dec. 8 at a conference on religion and media at New York University. The paper, “Holy of Holies: On the Constituents of Emptiness”, is now live. This paper draws on the research Mitch has been doing for his book-length study of the history of atheism. It concerns the 1st century B.C.E. episode of the Roman general Pompey’s incursion into the tabernacle of the Second Temple. What he finds there… well, you’ll see. It’s a fascinating piece, which makes some interesting connections between belief systems and media systems, and it’s ready for your comments, annotations and criticims which you can post paragraph by paragraph through the text. It’s a new format that we’re playing with that could give new meaning to the idea of the “working paper.” We’re still fixing bugs and adding new features, but the basic apparatus is there. Take a look.
holyofholiesscreenshot.jpg
Over the past few months, Mitch has been moving out of the research stage and into full-on writing of his manuscript, and as a result he’s been thinking about workshopping larger chunks of text on his blog. This presents something of a quandary, however, as the short, pithy format of the blog, so good at sparking discussions generally, is not very good at dealing with longer expository texts. Earlier in November Mitch posted a draft of his book’s prologue with the hopes of getting substantive feedback from readers. The response was interesting but meager, largely owing to the fact that the discussion (on the blog) was so totally divorced from the actual text (a Word doc download). He had opted not to publish the prologue directly onto the site, since that would have meant breaking it up into multiple posts to create more points for commenting. This struck him as too clunky, especially considering the reverse-chronological order of the blog would necessitate posting the paper back to front. So he went with the download option. With his new paper he hoped to do something better, so he came to the Institute, or the “garage” as he calls it, to see if we could engineer a new approach.
g7atopiascreenshot.jpg We had of course already done this with Gamer Theory. Our goal there had been to create a more richly interactive reading environment than was typically found in things broadly designated as “e-books,” an environment that offered multiple entry points for discussion and which placed reader input on roughly equal footing with the author’s text. This led to the deck of cards structure with comment areas to the side. Networked marginalia you might say, but far from marginal in its impact. As we had hoped/suspected, the discussion became a vital part of the book as a whole.
Now keep in mind that Ken submitted himself to a rigid rule set in writing his book: a uniform number of paragraphs per chapter (25), a strict word limit for paragraphs (250 or less), chapter titles in alphabetical order etc. In many ways, this made our design job easy. Just learn the rules and play the game. But it didn’t leave us with a tool that we could handily apply to other expository texts that are less consistently structured than Gamer Theory.
This experimental paper of Mitch’s is first stab at such a tool. Our solution was simply to give every paragraph (or block quote, or image) its own comment area. The commenting happens, as in Gamer Theory, alongside the text in the right margin but since the text isn’t broken up into cards, the comment area moves with you as you scroll down the page, changing its contents depending on which paragraph you’ve selected. It’s a small step, and although we’re pleased to be inching along toward better social document design, we’re painfully aware of the limitations, both technical and conceptual, that we have still to surmount.
Placing reader contributions alongside a text tends to involve breaking things up into columns, boxes and tabs, all of which are legacies of paper and print (not a crime in itself, but the point of this work is to move beyond simple mimicry of print into genuinely new structures for the electronic screen). In the digital environment, we can do nifty things like make boxes and columns overlap, hide areas of text behind other areas, or place windows within windows with multiple scrollbars, but we’re still thinking in two dimensions. We’re still thinking about the flat page. The question is, how many 2-D spaces can we layer together on a single flat plane before the whole thing collapses? How far can we hack Word Press before we rip open a worm hole that takes us to a reading/writing space where altogether different rules apply?
In October, a few of us went to see a fascinating panel (nominally on the topic of blogging, though it went off in various other directions) at the Hyperpolis conference at Brooklyn Polytechnic. It brought together a terrific lineup of internet theorists: Jodi Dean, Steven Shaviro, McKenzie Wark and Geert Lovink:
hyperpolispanel.JPG
Ken showed Gamer Theory and discussed its successes and failures. On the one hand, he was delighted that we’d managed to build something that allowed readers to get intimately (and socially) involved with the text. On the other, he was dismayed that to do this we had to construct what Jodi Dean described as “a textual fortress,” a hyper-structured reading space with strictly prescribed parameters for reader participation (two types of input were permitted: paragraph-specific comments and general discussion in the forum). This is not to mention the other fortress-like attribute of the site: its brittleness. We built the site according to the blueprint of Ken’s manuscript, which made it prohibitively difficult to adapt to other texts, or even to accomodate revisions of restructuring of the present one.
If these forms are to be adaptable to a wider range of writing endeavors then we’ll need, in Ken’s words, “a new spatial architecture for dealing with text….like a nine-dimensional string theory space. An n-dimensional space is needed.”
I like this way of putting it, an n-dimensional space. And we’re still stuck on two. Social reading, collaborative authorship and multimedia are all introducing new variables, but at best we’re hovering somewhere just shy of 2.5 dimensions in our ability to design for these new conditions. Although… maybe a rich 2.5 is actually what we should be striving for, at least as far as text is concerned. If we venture into 3-D (into Second Life?), don’t we shed that degree of abstraction that is best suited for conceptual thought? 2.5 then, perhaps with flashes of three (like this zooming interface after Jef Raskin) for moving between texts in ways that explore the semantics of spacial relations. We’ll have to keep tinkering…
This is not to say that we’re not optimistic about where this modest experiment with Mitch’s paper might lead. We’re going to continue to develop this format and will be using it, or variations of it, for a number of projects in the near future. We’re also working on something that allows highly flexible line by line, even word-level, commentary. So go read Mitch’s thought-provoking paper, use the discussion areas, and tell us what works and what doesn’t, keeping in mind that this is a rough prototype that we threw together in a very short amount of time.
Kudos especially to Jesse for the beautifully understated design, and to Eddie for making such elegant pretzels out of the Word Press architecture. Thanks also to Jack Slocum, whose work was a great inspiration to us.

do bloggers dream of electrifying text?

I left Oxford four years ago, as a fresh-faced English graduate, clutching my First and ready to take the world by storm. The first things that happened were
1) I got fired several times in quick succession for being more interested in writing than business
2) I wrote the usual abortive Bildungsroman-type first attempt at a novel, and then realised it was rubbish
3) I wrote another one, close but no cigar
4) I stopped trying to ‘be a writer’, and suddenly discovered myself writing more than ever.
But I’ve stopped wanting to write books. Perhaps, in the light of Ben’s post on Vidal and the role of authors, I should explain why.
Part of the problem is that between events 1) and 4) above, I discovered the Internet. I found myself co-editing a collaboratively-written email newsletter that covered the kinds of grass-roots creative and political stuff I wanted to be involved in. I thrashed out swathes of cultural theory in a wiki. I blogged for a while in sonnet form. As a side-effect, I nearly started an art collective in France. I found exciting projects and got involved in them. I’m now working on a startup based on (real and virtual) discussions I had with people I met this way. These days, my writing goes into emails, proposals, and the blogosphere. If I get the yen to write fiction, I do so, in collaboration with friends, on the vintage typewriter in my sitting room.
You could say that I just don’t have time to write a whole book. But it’s not just about time. In the process of learning all these new reasons for writing, I stopped aspiring to be an Author.
To backtrack a bit. In the process of frogmarching me through most of the English literary canon from 10AD to the twentieth century, my tutors put a lot of effort into making me consider the relationship between literary theories and their sociopolitical contexts. So I learned how, in Elizabethan England, the writer’s job was to improve politics by providing aspirational images of political leaders. These days, it looks like sycophancy, but back then they (at least say they) believed that the addressee would be moved by poems describing their ideal self to try and become that self, and that this was a valid contribution to the social good.
Fast-forward a hundred or so years. Print technology is taking off in a big way, and in post-Civil War England, aristocratic patronage is declining, and rhetoric is deeply suspect. So writers such as Pope retroengineered the writings of Shakespeare (and, by implication, their own) to represent an ‘eternal’ canon of ‘great’ writing supposedly immune to the ravages of time. This enabled them to distinguish ‘great’ writing from ‘hack’ writing independent of the political situation, thus conveniently providing themselves with a job description (‘great writer’) that didn’t depend on sucking up to a rich patron under the guise of laus et vituperatio but instead sold directly to the public through the burgeoning print industry.
That, then (if you’ll forgive the egregious over-simplification), is the model of what and who an ‘author’ is. We’ve been stuck with it pretty much since then. It depends on the immutable, printed page, requires authors to turn themselves into a brand in order to make a living by marketing their branded ‘great’ prose to the great unwashed for – of course – the improvement not of the authors but of said unwashed, and supports a whole industry in the production and sale of books.
And then came the Internet. All of a sudden, writing is infinitely reproducible. Anyone who wants to write can self-publish. There are tools for real-time collaborative writing. And yet the popular conception of who or what an Author is still very much alive, in the popular mind at least. The publishing industry, meanwhile, has responded to the threat posed by the Net by consolidating, automating, and producing only books guaranteed to sell millions.
So I found myself, a few years out of university, considering the highly-industrialised modern print industry, in the context of the literary theories and social contexts that have created it. And comparing it to the seemingly boundless possibilities – and attendant threats to intellectual property as an economic model – offered by the Internet. And once I’d thought it through, I stopped wanting to author books.
I’m 27. I write well. I have plenty to say. I ought to be the ‘future of the book’. But I want to introduce myself on if:book by proposing that perhaps the future of the book is not a future of books. Or at least it’s not one of authorship, but of writing. Now, please don’t get me wrong: I don’t think print publishing has nothing to offer. I’m an English graduate. I like the physicality of books, the way you can annotate them, the way they start conversations or act as a currency among friends. But I feel deeply that the print industry is out of step with the contemporary cultural landscape, and will not produce the principal agents in the future of that landscape. And I’m not sure that ebooks will, either. My hunch is that things are going two ways: writers as orchestrators of mass creativity, or writers as wielders of a new rhetoric.
Collaborative writing experiments such as Charles Leadbeater’s We-Think venture begin to explore some of the potential open to writers willing to share authorship with an open-sided group, and able to handle the tools that facilitate that kind of work.
Perhaps less obviously, the Elizabethans knew that telling stories changed the cultural landscape, and used that for political purposes. But we live – at least ostensibly – with the Enlightenment notion that storytelling is not political, and that the only proper medium for political discussion is reasoned argument. And yet, the literary theories of Sidney are the direct ancestors of the modern PR and marketing landscape. Today’s court poets work in PR.
What, then, happens when writers choose to operate outside the strictures of the print industry (or the PR copywriting serfdom that claims many of them at the moment) and become instead court poets for the cultural, social, political interest groups of their choice? What happens when we reclaim rhetoric from the language of ‘rationality’ and ‘detachment’? Can we do that honestly, and in the service of humanity?
I find myself involved in both kinds: writing as orchestration/quality control, and writing as activist tool. But in both cases, I remain unsatisfied by the print industry’s feedback loop of three to five years from conception to publication. So instead, I co-write screenplays, proposals, updates. I write emails to my collaborators; I blog about what I’m up to; I tell stories designed to reproduce virally via the ‘Forward’ button. Perhaps foolishly, I still dream of changing the world by writing. And I want to be around when it happens.

a comment yields fan mail yields an even more interesting comment

Ben’s post about the failure of ebook hardware to improve reading as handily as ipods may have improved listening has generated some interesting discussion. i was particularly taken by one of the comments — by Sebastian Mary and wrote her some fan mail:

To:Seb M
From: bob stein
Subject: bit of fan mail
hello,
i thought your comment on if:book this morning was very perceptive, although i find myself not sure if you are saddened or gladdened by the changes you forsee. we are quite interested in collaborations with writers who are poking around at the edges of what is possible in the networked landscape. next time you’re in the states, come visit us in williamsburg.
b.

to which i got a deliciously thinky response:

Hi Bob
Many thanks for your message!
I’m likewise interested in collaborations with writers who are poking around in what’s possible in the networked landscape.
And in answer to your implicit question, I’m both saddened and gladdened by the networked death (or uploading) of the Author. I’m saddened, because part of me wishes I could have got in on the game when it was still fresh. I’m gladdened, because there’s a whole new field of language out there to be explored.
I’m always dodging questions from people who want to know why, if I’m avoiding the rat race in order to concentrate on my writing, I’m not sending substandard manuscripts to indifferent publishers twice a year. The answer is that I feel that in an era of wikis, ebooks, RSS feeds and the like, to be trying to gain recognition by copyrighting and snail-print-publishing my words would be a clear case of failing to walk the walk. It’s like Microsoft versus Linux, really, on a memetic level. And I’m a firm believer in open source.
So what would writers do, if they can’t copyright themselves? What do I do, if I don’t copyright myself? We don’t live in an era of patrons any more, after all – and we’ve got to pay the rent.
But I don’t think, if we’re giving up on the industrial model of what a writer is (the Author, in the Barthesian sense) that we have to go back to the Ben Jonson model of aristocratic patronage. Rather, I’d advocate moving to a Web2.0 model of what writers do. Web2.0 companies don’t sell software: they provide a service, and profit from the database that accrues as a byproduct of their service reaching critical mass. So if, as a writer, I provide a service, perhaps I can profit from the deeper insights that providing that service gives me.
So what does that look and feel like, in practice? It’s certainly not the same as being a copywriter or copy-editor. It means learning to write collaboratively, or sufficiently accessibly that others can work with your words. It’s as creative as it is self-effacing, and loses none of its power for being un-branded in the ‘authorial’ byline sense. In the semiotic white noise of an all-ways-self-publishing Web, people who can identify points of shared reference and use them to explain less easily communicable concepts (Greek-style rhetoricians brought up to date, if you will) are highly in demand.
I think writing experienced a split. I’d situate it in the first half of the 18th century, when the print industry was getting into gear, and along with it the high-falutin notions of ‘literary purity’ and ‘high art’ that serve to obscure the necessarily persuasive nature of all writing. So writing that was overtly persuasive (with its roots in Aristotle, via Sir Philip Sidney) evolved into advertising, while ‘high art’ writing (designed to obscure the industrial/economic aspect of print production even as it deifies the Author for a better profit) evolved into Eliot and Joyce, and then died into the Borders glut of 3 for 1 bestsellers.
In acknowledging and celebrating the persuasiveness of a well-written sentence, and re-embracing a role as servants, chronologers and also shapers of consensus reality, I think contemporary writers can begin to heal that split. But to do so we have to ditch the notion that political (in the sense of engaged) writing is somehow ‘impure’. We have to ditch the notion that the practice and purpose of writing is to express our ‘selves’ (the fundamental premise of copyrighted writing: the author as ‘vatic’ individual). And we have to ditch the notion that our sentences should be copyrighted.
So how do we prove ourselves? Well. It’s obvious to anyone who’s spent time on an anonymous messageboard that good writers float to the top, seek one another out, and wield a disproportionate amount of power. By a similar principle, the blogerati are the new (actual, practical, political and financial) eminences grises.
It’s in actually being judged on what your writing helps to make happen that writers will find their roles in a networked world. That’s certainly how it’s shaping up for me. So far, it’s been interesting and scary, to say the least. And these are by no means my last words on it (I’ve not really thought about it coherently before!).
So I’m always happy to hear from others who are exploring the same frontiers, and looking for what words mean now.
Hope Williamsburg finds you well,
Best
Seb M