The murmur of the snarkmatrix…

Jennifer § Two songs from The Muppet Movie / 2021-02-12 15:53:34
A few notes on daily blogging § Stock and flow / 2017-11-20 19:52:47
El Stock y Flujo de nuestro negocio. – redmasiva § Stock and flow / 2017-03-27 17:35:13
Meet the Attendees – edcampoc § The generative web event / 2017-02-27 10:18:17
Does Your Digital Business Support a Lifestyle You Love? § Stock and flow / 2017-02-09 18:15:22
Daniel § Stock and flow / 2017-02-06 23:47:51
Kanye West, media cyborg – MacDara Conroy § Kanye West, media cyborg / 2017-01-18 10:53:08
Inventing a game – MacDara Conroy § Inventing a game / 2017-01-18 10:52:33
Losing my religion | Mathew Lowry § Stock and flow / 2016-07-11 08:26:59
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless – Sitegreek !nfotech § Towards A Theory of Secondary Literacy / 2016-06-20 16:42:52

A Doll Cabinet in Iowa
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Iowa.gov

In the Iowa statehouse, there’s this doll cabinet. Amid the political regalia surrounding it, the cabinet stands out, filled as it is with dozens of dolls, each with its hair immaculately styled, each dressed in a gorgeous gown, all bearing the exact same porcelain face.

The figurines reflect a tradition begun by former Iowa first lady Billie Ray in celebration of the state’s centennial in 1976. She wanted to honor Iowa’s past and future governors’ wives with commemorative dolls, molded in Ray’s own image. Each of Iowa’s 43 first ladies is represented, dressed in a Barbie-sized version of the first lady’s inaugural gown and identified (in most cases) with a small placard carrying the governor’s name — “Mrs. Robert Ray” or “Mrs. Samuel J. Kirkwood.” So in the same place where Hillary Clinton and Carly Fiorina were just furiously campaigning to become the first female President of the United States, several dozen women share the dubious honor of being distinguished solely by a hairstyle, a dress, and a man’s name.

I often wonder how that doll cabinet will honor Iowa’s first first spouse who isn’t white, or a woman. This hasn’t been a consideration previously; all the governors and their spouses so far have helpfully fit the pattern. But demography, along with a multi-generational pivot in American gender dynamics, have rendered that status quo shatteringly delicate. One day they’re either going to have to stuff the likeness of Mrs. Robert Ray into a man’s suit, paint that porcelain doll brown, or rethink the entire exercise.

That doll cabinet is already a museum piece, even if it doesn’t know it yet. You can look at it and see the era it represents becoming suddenly untenable. I’ve come to think of that type of moment — when you can mark the instant before and after something slips into history, just as it’s happening — as rare and intensely valuable.

A dozen years ago, Robin and I shared one of those moments. Over the course of a few weeks in early 2004, we came to realize that our then-present experience of media and technology was fast becoming an anachronism, and that there were a lot of people—journalists in particular—who weren’t aware of that. We imagined ourselves looking back on that era before tiny, powerful computers colonized every corner of the world, and marveling at how strange and foreign it would already seem just ten years later. We shaped these imaginings into a rough little movie that is still one of the most popular things I’ve ever had a hand in making, and I credit some significant part of its resonance to the way we flipped the lens — projecting not forward from our past experience, but backward from the future.

To know the future … that’s the dream, right? But it’s a dream that makes sense only if the future is merely revealed, rather than being constructed bit by bit from the traces of the present, which we still have the ability to shape. Let me argue instead for seeking future history — the ability to consider the present through the lens of the future, to find imminent anachronisms hidden in plain sight. What do we take for granted today that will come to seem remarkable tomorrow? What will the history books say about us?

A few months ago, my friends Andy, Amanda, and Amy, and I decided to build a weekend around these questions. And now I’m seeing future history everywhere.

Like all right-thinking people, I’ve been infected with Hamilton fever. The theme of the show that resonates most loudly is the obsession of all the central characters with their place in history. After one recent replay of the score, I found myself tearfully re-reading Washington’s farewell address, a message sent across the ages, to us. Of course, nearly every Presidential farewell has that time-capsule quality — it’s the last best chance for a President to spin his legacy. But fast-forward through more recent ones, and Washington’s stands out all the more. Other Presidents are aware of the watchful eyes of history, but they spend most of their parting speeches dwelling on the recent past — what they saw, what they did, why they did it. Consequently, moments in these speeches can seem parochial or short-sighted, just decades later. “There hasn’t been a failure of an insured bank in nearly 9 years,” Truman says. “The Persian Gulf is no longer a war zone,” Reagan says. We’re “on track to be debt-free by the end of the decade,” Clinton says.

Washington, though, scours his Presidency for lessons that would reverberate across centuries: Cherish your union, he tells us. “It is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize.”

It’s not just lofty Presidential speeches; tiny gestures can mark a break with the past. When Tom Vilsack ascended to the Iowa governor’s mansion, his wife Christie broke slightly with tradition: she elected to have her doll identified by her own name in the cabinet. “I’ve never called myself ‘Mrs. Tom Vilsack,’ ever,” she said. Iowa’s next first lady echoed Christie Vilsack’s choice; her doll is called “Mrs. Mari Culver.”

In 2012, Christie Vilsack tried to change another longstanding Iowa tradition: she ran for Congress. Not only had a woman never been governor of Iowa in 2012, no woman had ever represented the state in either the House or the Senate. “We really have a wonderful history,” the state’s Democratic Party chair said when Vilsack announced her exploratory committee. “With this one problem.”

Vilsack’s run failed; she was defeated by Steve King in 2012. But then something happened, just last year. A streak unbroken since Iowa entered the union in 1846 — nearly 170 years in which a long succession of men exclusively represented Iowa in Congress — ended. Joni Ernst, the daughter of another Mari Culver, became Iowa’s first ever Congresswoman. (Initially, I thought she was the daughter of the same Mari Culver who was Iowa’s first lady. But no, Joni’s mother is Marilyn Culver, not Mariclare Culver, so this post was wrong.)

For a weekend in Baltimore in April, we’re going to look for moments like this, and scour our own experiences for ideas and lessons that will endure. We’ll make a time capsule, and we’ll end with a prom; we couldn’t think of two better ways to bring a far-seeing lens to the present. It will be massive fun and I hope you join us if you can. But most of all, I want to know: What do you see around you today that will come to seem remarkable?

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Unforgotten
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I’ll admit it, I didn’t want 2015 to pass without at least saying hi to you, Snarkmarket. The proximate nudge for this particular greeting is Hossein Derakhshan’s Guardian essay about how the internet had changed for him when he was freed from prison in Iran, an edited, updated version of his post from earlier this year at Matter1:

The Iranian blogosphere was a diverse crowd – from exiled authors and journalists, female diarists, and technology experts, to local journalists, politicians, clerics, and war veterans. But you can never have too much diversity. I encouraged conservatives inside Iran to join and share their thoughts. I had left the country in late 2000 to experience living in the west, and was scared that I was missing all the rapidly emerging trends at home. But reading Iranian blogs in Toronto was the closest experience I could have to sitting in a shared taxi in Tehran and listening to collective conversations between the talkative driver and random passengers.

There’s a story in the Qur’an that I thought about a lot during my first eight months in solitary confinement. In it, a group of persecuted Christians find refuge in a cave. They, and a dog they have with them, fall into a deep sleep and wake up under the impression that they have taken a nap: in fact, it’s 300 years later. One version of the story tells of how one of them goes out to buy food – and I can only imagine how hungry they must have been after 300 years – and discovers that his money is obsolete now, a museum item. That’s when he realises how long they have been absent.

The hyperlink was my currency six years ago. It represented the open, interconnected spirit of the world wide web – a vision that started with its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. The hyperlink was a way to abandon centralisation – all the links, lines and hierarchies – and replace them with something more distributed, a system of nodes and networks. Since I got out of jail, though, I’ve realised how much the hyperlink has been devalued, almost made obsolete.

It’s a familiar complaint. Blogs like this one are speakeasies now, not raucous pubs. I don’t actually know if fewer people are “reading blogs” or if it’s that the web has grown so much larger that the boutique communities of yesteryear merely feel less significant. But I will say, I find enduring and immense value in this place, in the fact that you’re here, reading these words, however you’ve found them. Speakeasies can be marvelous spots.

For my birthday this year, my beloved Bryan took me to a performance called “Then She Fell,” staged in a humble building in a quiet part of Williamsburg, late-ish on a Sunday night. Bryan and I, along with 13 other guests and a cast of actors almost as numerous, spent the next two hours together walking through a delightful and thought-provoking story loosely based on Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland. A few of us had a tea party with the Mad Hatter and the White Rabbits and the queens. I was pulled into a brief but intense conversation with Alice about true love and the value of obedience. The two hours I spent enacting my part in this play were two of my favorite hours of the year, but this, essentially by definition, could not be an experience for “everybody.” It was a performance for and with a couple dozen people, and that very smallness and intimacy was its essence.

So it is with this, and you.

I’ve marked my years through Snarkmarket. It’s been ten years since the second, and last, version of EPIC, a.k.a. the Googlezon video.2 Ten years ago, I recorded a reminder to myself on Snarkmarket to go check out what was in Howard Dean’s sealed records from his time as governor of Vermont.3 A decade hence, I trust this leaky rocketship will still be cruising somewhere beyond Pluto, and that you’ll be here, watching. I promise to pour us a drink.

May 2016 bring you more life than any year before it. And if it is now long past 2016 for you, may the worst of your years lie long in your past, and may the best of them lie ahead.


1 At Matter? On Medium? I’m self-conscious about my prepositions and my objects.

2 The occasion didn’t go entirely unremarked-upon, happily; the Internet loves few things more than an anniversary peg.

3 I did remember to check on this last year, after Dean’s archives opened to the public. From the accounts of local reporters who trawled through the records, there was really nothing revelatory in the files. Perhaps one day when I’ve got lots of spare time, I’ll make a fuller accounting.

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‘he deserves another shot’
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DayZ is a zombie-themed video game, one of the most popular entries in a recent streak of revenant-driven survival horror titles that shows no sign of ending anytime soon. This particular game began its life in 2009, when an Army officer trainee modded another game to help him prepare for training exercises. His mod snowballed in popularity, has been remade and released as a standalone game, and can now boast imitators of its own (such as 2013’s Rust).

It’s been true for a while now that video games are able to provoke a type of fear experience that no other medium delivers. Playing a survival horror game is much scarier than reading a book or watching a movie with equivalent plots and themes. We play these games to experience feelings that are difficult to recognize as pleasure or enjoyment.

The thing about good zombie fiction … is that the zombies are never the most horrific thing. Zombies don’t typically have the capacity for complex thought — they don’t execute stratagems, play politics, torture people. All they do is feed. The true horror in any zombie story worth its salt is what other people do when faced with the zombie threat. Zombies are merely relentless; humans can be sadistic.

Dayz is a zombie game in which the player’s main antagonists are actually other people, which makes it unnervingly compelling:

Any satisfying gameplay requires working together, but the alliances are informal and can be dissolved at a moment’s notice, plunging the player back to the opening beach. Any institution — even one as meager as Freeside’s trading post — is under constant threat of attack from roving bandits. On forums, players describe being forced into slavery by marauding gangs. One popular video shows two players boarding a bus, supposedly bound for a camp in need of workers, then being forced to fight to the death.

The best chronicle of the weirdly poignant and disturbing human behaviors DayZ brings out in its players might be Christopher Livingston’s Tumblr hey are you cool (that phrase was the first thing Livingston heard from another player). Here, via Rock Paper Shotgun, is a peek into a hostage situation Livingston happened to overhear in the game:

You are dead.

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Worldbuilding and world-extending: Discoveries and questions
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I kicked off this week with a big, messy post about, basically, fan fiction. Now that I’ve talked it through a bit with my incredible fellow seminarians, I think my questions boil down to: What are the aspects of a creative text that are most conducive to fostering fan fiction? and How do those attributes translate to nonfictional domains?

Here are the boundaries I’ll draw around my curiosity:

  • I’m more interested in creative responses to discrete creative works (e.g. this in response to this) than I am in creative stuff made with creative tools (e.g. this built with this). That is to say, I’m less interested in the general phenomenon of people building things with games or tools that are about building things (e.g. what makes Legos so conducive to worldbuilding?).
  • I’m more interested in the wealth (in all dimensions) of responses a work produces than in the inherent creativity of the work itself — the world built on top of or in response to a thing, rather than the world of the thing.
  • I’m (ultimately) most interested in how these attributes of creative works apply outside the most familiar domains of fan fiction such as fantasy fiction, Star Wars, etc. I’m curious, for example, how one makes nonfiction that produces fan-nonfiction.

Some familiar examples of the types of creative responses that strike me as fitting into my framework of what I’ll call “world-extensions” are modding (EG), fan fic (EG), and cosplay (EG).

Some of the more unfamiliar examples that strike me as possibly alike enough to cluster with these things are:

  • An interplay of visual artworks, like the Picasso and American Art exhibit, and particularly the range of artistic extensions of / responses to “The Studio.” (Including Picasso’s own extensions of that artwork.)
  • Op-eds and punditry in major national newspapers and the sort of mirror-world that pundits fashion in concert with one another. (Thanks, Robin!)
  • Parody Twitter accounts, like @MayorEmanuel.
  • Wikipedia.
  • Memes.

Lastly, here are some of the nascent hypotheses I’m forming about aspects of a work that can help bring about world-extending:

  • Expansiveness and/or continuity: The world should feel big and open enough that folks feel there’s room to play with it.
  • Strong, recognizable systems: The rules and boundaries of the world should feel solid enough to provide a common structure to any world-extensions.
  • Focus and blurriness: It seems important that there are areas of the world drawn in fairly vivid detail, but also aspects of the world presented only suggestively. Things to grab onto, and things to fill in.
  • Fandom: This kinda goes without saying, but the work needs to have enough attractions that a critical mass of folks will fall in love with it.

There are a few other dimensions I haven’t reached the hypothesis stage for:

  • What’s the effect of otherworldliness? Are works of fantasy more conducive to world-extending than works based more solidly in reality?
  • How much of world-extension is related to things such as age and gender? We all seem particularly interested in extending worlds when we’re young; does the desire dissipate as we get older and busier?
  • What about the degree of user/reader/watcher/listener investment in the text? To inspire fan-fiction, is there possibly a sort of attentional summit that, once ascended, begins to tunnel the person deeper and deeper into the world of the text?

Today and tomorrow, I’ll be crashing the #worldbuilding tag on Twitter to explore some of these questions. Do join me!

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Worldbuilding: Mutual Acts of Creation #SnarkmarketSeminar
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This entry begins my week in the Snarkmarket Seminar, but even if you’re not a seminarian, you should feel welcome to comment here!

Transcript:

Hello. I’ve dubbed my lecture in our ongoing Snarkmarket Seminar “Worldbuilding: Mutual Acts of Creation.”

Before we continue, I’m going to ask you to play a game called Parameters, for at least 20 minutes, or until you beat it, whichever you prefer. I’ll warn you that the game is pretty cryptic, so you’ll probably need to click around for a while until you start to get the feel of things. But I’d ask that unless you completely hate the experience, you give it about 20 minutes before you give up. Here’s the link.

You can play for as long as you’d like, and truthfully, you don’t have to play to engage with the questions and ideas I’ll be presenting here. But I think it’ll help. So I’ll pause now, and wait for you to return.

How was that? Was it fun? I genuinely want to know, so if you’d pause one more time and take a quick survey — which you’ll find here — I’d appreciate it.

In case it’s not clear, Parameters is basically a spreadsheet. That’s reductive, of course. There’s a lot more to it than your average spreadsheet. And clearly plenty of thought went into the feeling of the game-ish aspects of it, the way the money and experience come bouncing out of the boxes all random and fun, the little animation of attacking the boxes with your mouse and watching the colors recede and rebound as you click.

But a determined developer with some time, elbow grease and Google Apps Script could probably create something reasonably close to Parameters in a Google Spreadsheet.

When I play Parameters, though, I recognize it as a deconstructed version of every role playing game I’ve ever played. So let me talk about role playing games — RPGs — for a second.

This is the opening scene to the game Skyrim — a pretty recent RPG. I’m just going to shut up for a second and let you watch it.

To me, this is kind of gorgeous and cinematic — slowly waking up to this wintry world, bound in the back of a wagon. As a player of the game, you have very little agency at this point. You can look around, but that’s about it. As the first 10 or so minutes of the game progress, they’ll start taking off the training wheels and unveiling more and more of the game’s controls bit by bit. This allows you to get a handle on the game’s basic mechanics and storyline before they send you out into this incredibly detailed world.

But once that tutorial is done, part of the majesty of the game is how thoroughly rendered it all is. Every tree, every mountain, every path that you’ve glimpsed during this little opening segment is a part of the world you’ll be able to visit and interact with. Many of the plants you pass along the side of the road during this opening wagon ride are actually available to harvest later if you’d like.

Skyrim is so extraordinarily detailed, you could actually sort of live in this world if you wanted to. You could buy a house, make a living for yourself hunting animals and selling their pelts to merchants, find a partner, get married. But so that you don’t get overwhelmed with all of that at the start, they introduce you to that world this way, bound by your digital hands, encountering one by one all the incredible varieties of things you can do.

It’s a pretty sharp contrast with Parameters, isn’t it? That opening screen written in Japanese wasn’t really that much more helpful to me after I found the “English” button. It’s hard for me to think of two more different introductions to a game than these.

Yet Parameters is essentially Skyrim boiled down to its basic essence. I’m being very reductive when I say that, but on a fundamental and important level, it’s true.

The fundamental structure of both of these games goes back to Dungeons and Dragons, and probably even before. You’ve got your hit points, your stats like attack power and defense power and endurance, you earn experience and gold by plundering caves and fighting enemies (or in Parameters’ case, yellow boxes). Parameters even presents the classic RPG phenomenon known as grinding, where in order to defeat more advanced enemies, you spend time hunting down and earning experience from lesser foes.

So when I first found myself playing Parameters and getting the basic concepts, I quickly started imagining that RPG world. I saw the boxes as monsters and the locked black tiles as caves. I pictured the big box at the bottom of the screen as a dragon. The squares that let you pay to up your stats or purchase keys I saw as your classic merchants. All of these basic elements that you’d find in Skyrim or a Final Fantasy game or any other RPG are present in this game that’s basically a spreadsheet, and being familiar with this language, I found myself visualizing it in my head.

This brings me at last to what I’m most interested in: that imaginative act.

My thesis is that works like Parameters and so many other texts similar and not involve two mutual, symbiotic creative acts — the world constructed by the author, and the world constructed by the reader.

By reader, of course, I also mean user, listener, watcher … this is “reader” in the sense that Beck might have meant it in his recent un-album “Song Reader,” which I’ll come back to in a minute.

What I’m most particularly interested in is that second act of creation, the world the reader creates.

Had I the talent and know-how, I could probably even take the world that Parameters inspires in my head and actually make a game engine that actually renders that big ol’ box at the bottom as a moving, fire-breathing dragon.

And then I would have created Skyrim.

But of course users actually do this with Skyrim! The game inspires them to build these hugely time-intensive, significant worlds on top of the worlds the game’s developers have already constructed. They’re called “mods.” There’s a mod for Skyrim that even turns the world of the game into the world of Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s series of fantasy novels.

That type of creation — modding Skyrim — is basically a form of fan fiction, which is the most obvious manifestation of this creative act I’m talking about. And this is one of my first and biggest questions: What are the conditions that best inspire fan fiction? Why do things like Skyrim and Game of Thrones provoke people to spin out these stories into these enormous extended universes? How does a creative work inspire so much creativity in its audience?

I’m interested in the fact that Parameters sparks this vivid world in my head, but I have no real desire to further manifest that in any essential way. It would seem that the difference between something like Parameters and something like Skyrim in terms of inspiring further output is that Skyrim gives you the foundation of this incredibly rich and detailed world. You don’t need to build the engine to turn the box into a giant dragon, the game’s engineers have already spent significant effort on doing that for you.

But then I think about Scott McCloud and his simplicity theory for comics, which suggests in part that the more room the author leaves us to imagine something, the more we can and do imagine, and so the more we can project ourselves into a world. He points out that our brains are hardwired to scan the world for this pattern: two dots in a circle. And that for most of us, we can’t see that pattern without imagining a face. This is why McCloud says he draws himself so simply: to help his readers with their worldbuilding. To give them more freedom to imagine him, and therefore to empathize with him.

It feels like this idea clashes with what happens with worlds like those of Skyrim and Game of Thrones, worlds so detailed, they’d ostensibly leave the reader little space to imagine on their own. We’ve seen Skyrim’s depth, but let me talk about Game of Thrones for a second.

This is one of those fantasy universes so richly drawn that the show’s producers have actually hired a nonprofit called the Language Creation Society to manufacture one of the languages used on the show. There’s a blog about making this language, named after the language itself: “Dothraki.” If you’re a nerd like me, this blog is actually sort of fascinating, delving into how the fictional history of George R. R. Martin’s fantasy universe would likely have unfolded linguistically, based on what we know about how languages evolved in our world. I’m going to quote a snippet:

According to ancient lore, the Ghiscari Empire fell some 5,000 years prior to the time of action in A Song of Ice and Fire. The empire warred five times with the Valyrian Empire, ultimately falling each time because the Valyrians had dragons. After the fifth war, the Valyrians decimated the old city of Ghis, burning down the buildings and salting the earth so that none would ever return.

So what happened then? Well, Ghiscari had been the language of the empire. As the diaspora spread, the Valyrian Empire took over (until its untimely fall several thousand years later), and the High Valyrian language supplanted the Ghiscari language.

Naturally, what would have happened is that the residents of Slaver’s Bay who spoke Ghiscari would have gradually moved over to High Valyrian, creolizing it along the way. It seems likely that an aristocratic class would have maintained a working knowledge of actual High Valyrian to use with emissaries from the Valyrian Empire, but the day-to-day language would have evolved in a way similar to French or Spanish (i.e. not like either of those languages, but evolving in the way that those languages evolved from Latin).

The post goes on to share some of the Dothraki dialogue that would show up in the Game of Thrones Season 3 premiere.

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This is how many worlds have been spun out of that first giant world created by George R. R. Martin. A blog based on a language based on a show based on a series of books — each thing a whole lovely world of its own. This all suggests that rendering a world in extraordinary detail doesn’t seem to prevent others from building worlds of their own on top of it.

So there’s another question for you: what is the relationship between how detailed a world is and how much worldbuilding it inspires?

I’m interested in stories that cause their readers to build worlds because I’m interested in endlessness — for a long time I’ve been obsessed with stories that beget stories and worlds that don’t have boundaries. If you’ve been with Snarkmarket since the beginning, you probably recognize this as a theme of my thought.

I once thought it would be really fun to get a job managing the digital components of the show Gossip Girl, because of the worldbuilding potential there. I said:

Here you’ve got a television series that purports to be fully post-media — the central conceit of the show is the title character’s blog, which all the show’s characters interact with constantly from a stunning variety of mobile devices. Although it struggles for Nielsen ratings, it was picked up for a full season allegedly because of its popularity on iTunes (indicating where the series’ audience is). And importantly, the show’s entire telos is allowing its audience to eavesdrop on the lives of a glamorous subculture.

If any television show could have led the way for an immersive, cross-platform handoff between the boob tube and the cybertubez, Gossip Girl is it. We should be able to sign up for text alerts from G.G.’s blog, pinging us with the scandalous goings-on of the show’s principals. Whenever all the characters in the show are reading a missive from Gossip Girl on their cell phones, we should be able to read it on ours! There should be a Gossip Girl version of the Gawker Stalker, mapping the travels of Manhattan’s elite across the Upper East Side! The show’s website should be a dizzy wonderland of interactive innuendo, filled with voices (some, of course, claiming to be from the show’s fictive universe) commenting on the antics of the characters, all helping to compose and extend the show’s mythology.

So far I’ve only really discussed fictional texts, but of course I’m interested in things other than fiction. I might even be mainly interested in things other than fiction.

I think there’s something about texts that demand a lot of a reader — texts that require an investment just to enter the world of the text. It might be that that investment, once committed, is itself a spark to start creating. Parameters and Game of Thrones are both like this, in different ways. In Parameters, the demand is the opacity of the rulesystem; you have to spend some time just figuring out how it even works. In the case of Game of Thrones, it’s the very extensiveness of the world that makes it demanding, particularly if you’re actually talking about the books. But even the television series will stretch out over dozens of hours.

But then there are texts that require creation to even get into the game, like Beck’s “Song Reader,” which I mentioned earlier. This is Beck’s most recent collection of music, only it’s not actually an album, it’s a book of sheet music.

“Song Reader” fascinates me because it combines a pretty old phenomenon with a very new one. At one time, this type of thing was the entire music industry. Before records existed, artists didn’t release recorded music, they released sheet music. A piano was as ubiquitous a fixture in middle class homes as a speaker system or radio would be today. When a new song was released, you’d buy the sheet music, run home, and play it with your friends and family — a thousand little concerts happening in a thousand little homes.

But today, we’ve got this enormous, super-popular infrastructure not just for playing these songs, but for sharing them worldwide. Each of those thousand little concerts is likely to get uploaded to YouTube. You can’t really call them “cover versions,” ‘cause there’s no original, per se. So this, this right here, this YouTube query for the song “Old Shanghai,” is basically the equivalent of the single. This strikes me as a sort of worldbuilding as well.

Of course, several video games work this way, such as Minecraft and SimCity. They’re games that are actually canvases for creation. They’re more toys than games, even, like Legos or dolls. I think any creator can learn a lot from these things. But for the purposes of this discussion, I’m most interested in texts that are both discrete creative works in themselves and tinder for the creativity of others.

Another question: is worldbuilding always valuable? I wonder about works whose creators actually sort of resist the act of worldbuilding. Mark Rothko, for example, asked viewers of his art to consider his works as complete, self-contained entities, not as landscapes or references to things outside the canvas. But whenever I see one of Rothko’s large, suggestive canvases, I almost can’t help imagining it as a window into a world. To do that, I have to consciously try to shut down the impulse in my head to read it as a landscape, to just dial it back to colors, textures, moods, and scale and that actually sort of disrupts my experience of the art. Let me build a world out of this, I want to tell Mark Rothko. But of course, he can’t prevent me, so I do.

Journalists — particularly investigative journalists — are in the business of worldbuilding, whether or not they realize it. They’re trying to discover and connect facts in order to create a model of our own world, to understand it better.

Just this week the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (by the way, this is basically a shameless plug for their work; I’m on the board) released a massive investigation in partnership with news organizations across the world giving us a look at the shadowy domain of offshore tax havens. This is a corner of international society that operates in near-total darkness. Wealthy individuals tend to pad their offshore holdings with layers upon layers of intermediaries and puppet companies. Much of this is perfectly legal behavior to protect giant wads of capital, but some of it is intended to obfuscate laws and cloak illicit businesses. Because it all happens in this shadow corner of the world, it’s very difficult to figure out what’s what.

Like many investigative projects today, this one has at its center a gigantic database, one that actually dwarfs the US State Department cables released by Wikileaks. So investigative journalists from all over the world partnered to take this data and construct it into a faithful and quite detailed model of reality.

When we crowdsource an investigation like this one, releasing a giant data set and ask people to play with it, what I think we’re asking them to do is build a world with us, to participate in the mutual acts of creation. To create fan nonfiction.

So there’s the essential question: How do authors of all kinds inspire readers of all kinds to build worlds? What are the magic ingredients of a creative work that let it yield more creative works?

As you can tell, I’m leaving you with nothing but questions. But I haven’t yet questioned my premise itself. Is what I’m calling worldbuilding actually just creativity — is it just that creativity begets creativity? — or are these actually overlapping but distinct concepts? And if there is a difference between worldbuilding and creativity, is it merely that some of the worlds we create manifest themselves as works of their own rather than just sounds and images in our heads? So then how do you create something that cultivates that leap from the imagination to the canvas?

Thank you for playing, watching, listening and reading. I’ll see you in the comments.

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Announcing the Snarkmarket Seminar
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Update: Discovered I needed to wait an extra week to book the hotel rooms because of how far out it is. We should be able to confirm signups this week. – MT

Snarkmarket is nine years old today. At this point, I think of Snarkmarket as less of a blog and more of a collective of incredible people with similar (and often wonderfully divergent) fascinations who’ve happened upon each other at the right time. Years after the height of this blog’s activity, I still meet folks who introduce themselves with the question, “Hey, aren’t you Matt from Snarkmarket?”

In 2013, we want to try something that ties together many of the fascinations of this collective. We’ll be seeking about 30 fellow travelers to join us in a year-long, self-assembling digital seminar on media. Everyone will be a lecturer and everyone will be a participant in a series of weekly discussions focusing on a particular text or set of texts. It’ll culminate in a weekend of creation and collaboration in St. Petersburg, Fla., where Snarkmarket began.

First, we have to figure out who’s in. The price of admission will be a hotel room reservation at a hotel in St. Petersburg (official venue TBD) the weekend of November 2nd and 3rd, 2013. We’ll take care of actually booking the rooms. Next week, we’ll post more information on claiming a spot in the seminar. If you want to be in the loop when we do, shoot me a quick email at seminarkmarket@emailmatt.com.

Second, we have to create the syllabus. Starting Sunday, January 6th, we’ll have a weekly discussion led by a different seminar participant, focusing on a different set of texts. During the month of December, each participant will volunteer the text (or texts!) they want to discuss during their week at the virtual podium. It can be anything, of any vintage – a video, a book, an essay, a story, a game, an artwork – just as long as it says something fascinating to you about media today. Once we’ve identified the full set of texts, we’ll arrange a lecture calendar (with a few breaks for holidays and whatnot).

Weekly discussions get underway the week of January 6th. We’ll try to find a regular day and time that’s agreeable to as many members of the group as possible. The day after each discussion, the next participant at the virtual podium will introduce us to their text with a post telling us why they find it fascinating. Our weekly homework assignment is to participate in the comment thread about this post (you’re not getting graded on responses, so they can be short; “I’m not sure I saw the same resonances you did in this video” is a perfectly legitimate reaction).

In September, we’ll break to work on our final “papers.” These can obvs take any form you wish. They’ll be due by Sunday, October 20th. No more weekly discussions during this time.

Last, we gather in St. Pete. What will happen there, no one can know. We promise only wizardry and delight.

The last time we embarked on a grand adventure together, we wrote a book that’s still being talked about today. I’m beyond excited at the prospect of spending a year in study with this community, learning and sharing alongside one another. I hope you’ll join us.

Happy birthday, Snarkmarket. And happy birthday, Tim!

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My [annotated] big idea: We need a TiVo for ideas
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(cc) Today is a good day / Flickr.

I’m at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I’m one of a host of speakers given a couple minutes to deliver a “big idea.” Here’s the idea I went with, lightly expanded and annotated:

I’d like to get a little meta about big ideas. As a journalist, I think a lot about how we develop and communicate big ideas (“big” in this context meaning “complex,” “weighty”). At NPR, we have no end of nuanced, complicated matters to unravel, and I’m convinced that the transition to digital will end up being a huge asset in this task, not a hindrance. But we need to advance in our understanding of how narrative can work online.

“Big” ideas, examined closely, tend to resolve into a series of little ideas accumulated over time. So here’s my argument: To make our big ideas real, we need to develop better mechanisms for collecting and organizing all our ideas.

Take TV as an illustration. Until the VCR began to go mainstream in the mid-’70s, television episodes were essentially self-contained events. With few exceptions, shows had to frame each episode for a potentially new audience, one that wasn’t necessarily attuned to the show’s continuity.

As VCRs took hold, narratives on TV – ideas on TV – could become more complex. Because viewers could catch up on a series’ essential plot elements on videotape, it was easier for them to follow story arcs and keep track of important developments. Formula-driven shows like Dragnet (pre-VCR) gave way to complex dramatic narratives like Hill Street Blues (post-VCR).

As VCRs gave way to the TiVo (the DVR) storytellers could offer even more complex arcs for audiences, paving the way for narratives of truly literary complexity and heft, such as the Wire. As we move deeper into streaming, and TV episodes sit increasingly alongside YouTube clips, “shows” will become yet more nuanced networks of ideas.

Now think about the structures we’ve used to collect ideas on the Internet. Start with the RSS reader, the Internet’s VCR of ideas – fussy, difficult to program, but it too let us follow story arcs and keep track of important developments. And it was good enough to foster complex serial narratives like Talking Points Memo’s investigation of US attorney firings.

A lot of folks say they’ve moved past the RSS reader. It’s not uncommon to hear us media types say “Twitter’s my RSS reader now.” But tweets and hashtags have obvious drawbacks for communicating complex ideas. I can say, “We need a TiVo for ideas.” I can point you to the hashtag “#tivoforideas.” Hashtags, as we’ve seen, can have tremendous power for collecting ideas at a moment in time. But partly because tweets are ephemeral – they quickly fade beyond search and memory – hashtags are poor vessels for binding ideas over time.

Hence my big idea: We need to develop simpler and more powerful ways of collecting and following concepts across time. There’s much to learn from – hashtags, Storify, Wikipedia, Tumblr. But I suspect what we’re aiming for is a standard, not an app, a common convention, not a website. I want to be able to say, “Track the #tivoforideas conversation,” and watch this domain of thought develop over time as multiple thinkers add their input, and little ideas coalesce, gradually, into big ones.


Related thoughts:

  • This, of course, ties in very much with the body of thinking I and others have been doing about the future of context.
  • First Paul Ford and then Megan Garber have delivered powerful essays on the evolving nature of ideas in an era where streams have surpassed stories (e.g. Twitter replacing the RSS reader). I think about these two pieces all the time. Chase them with a reading of Megan’s essay on TED, ideas and authorship.
  • PJ Onori started a similar conversation a little while ago at Adaptive Path, very much worth connecting to this one. (Thanks, @absi!).
  • I still haven’t written my grand treatise about the nature of quest narratives and how that format enables grand ideas to develop, but you might find it interesting to click through these slides of a presentation I gave on the subject:
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Snark by Snarkwest: 100 Years of Awesomeness
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Snark by Snarkwest: Let’s Get Lost – Surprise in the Social Media Age
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Snark by Snarkwest: It’s Not News, It’s Business
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