Collaborations

Worldbuilding: Mutual Acts of Creation #SnarkmarketSeminar

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.

There are 46 comments on this post.

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.

 

Announcing the Snarkmarket Seminar

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!

 

The generative web event

Last week, a bunch of digital humanists got together at the Center for History and New Media to make a new tech tool that the broader academic AND nonacademic communities could use for their work. The catch: they had to conceive, design, and ship the thing in JUST one week. And as anyone who’s spent any time hanging out with university people, the pace is usually pretty glacial compared to the commercial world, even/especially for tech.

They called it “One Week | One Tool,” with a great subhead in the deck: “A Digital Humanities Barn-Raising.” You can see the sweet team that put it together here. And CHNM has a great track record with these kinds of projects: Zotero and Omeka alone are free, open-source world-class products that have made life in the research and curatorial feeds way easier.

Now about half these people working on One Week | One Tool are in my Twitter feed, and they spend a lot of time talking to each other, so as this was unfolding, I read about this event non-stop. People wrote blog posts about it. Folks (especially those of us who were on the periphery) made puns and cracked jokes. It was an ongoing communal broadcast that you could follow on the #oneweek hashtag if you wanted the full dish. It was very, very similar to the excitement around the 48HrMag (now Longshot Magazine) project when it was first announced, albeit within a slightly smaller, maybe more homogeneous community.

But, importantly, with all that information circulating, nobody said anything about what the tool actually was. There were even enigmatic teaser tweets, like “Just used the new #oneweek tool for the first time; works great!” It wasn’t LeBron-taking-his-talents-to-South-Beach suspense, but at a certain point, more and more people were waiting to find out what the heck the thing was. They even launched a video stream to make the announcement. I don’t know if they tried to get ESPN to donate some time and sell commercials for charity, but who knows?

And sure enough, it became big news. Everybody who’d been following it live-tweeted the news once they’d gotten it. (Some people even begged their Tweeple to post it, since they couldn’t watch the video broadcast.) It got written up in ReadWriteWeb, the Chronicle of Higher Educaton, and the Atlantic, among other big-for-DH venues. 

And they put together a great open-source tool: Anthologize, a WordPress plugin that helps you take online content like blog posts and collect, edit, design, and format them into a book — for either digital or print. Solid software, with obvious utility for lots of people, not just academics. (Although part of me quietly wonders if the CHNM’s last big project, “Hacking the Academy,” motivated the choice, since that explicitly was an effort to turn a whole bunch of scattered blog posts — again, all written and/or curated in one week — into a book.)

Now this is the part on Snarkmarket where, usually, I would try to explain what I think all of this means — for you, for us, for media, for journalism, for education, for the children. And this time, I’m deliriously happy, because I think we’ve already done it. I can just take two posts+comment threads from the Snarkmarket archive and blockquote the hell out of them. (And as everyone knows, me and blockquotes are totally BFFs.)

Here are some highlights from Robin’s still-uber-potent “The future of media? Bet on events”:

So far we’ve got this TED/Phoot Camp media-making work­shop spear-gun. Now, bolt on deadly addi­tions from Iron Chef and the Long Now Foundation’s debates. Now we’ve got a laser sword media prod­uct that is:

* Live. It’s an event that hap­pens at a spe­cific time and place in the real world. It’s some­thing you can buy a ticket for—or fol­low on Twitter.
* Gen­er­a­tive. Some­thing new gets cre­ated. The event doesn’t have to pro­duce a series of lumi­nous photo essays; the point is sim­ply that con­trib­u­tors aren’t oper­at­ing in play­back mode. They’re think­ing on their feet, col­lab­o­rat­ing on their feet, cre­at­ing on their feet. There’s risk involved! And that’s one of the most com­pelling rea­sons to fol­low along.
* Pub­lish­able. The result of all that gen­er­a­tion ought, ide­ally, to be some­thing you can pub­lish on the web, some­thing that peo­ple can hap­pily dis­cover two weeks or two years after the event is over.
* Per­for­ma­tive. The event has an audience—either live or online, and ide­ally both. The event’s struc­ture and prod­ucts are care­fully con­sid­ered and well-crafted. I love the Bar­Camp model; this is not a BarCamp.
* Ser­ial. It doesn’t just hap­pen once, and it doesn’t just hap­pen once a year. Ide­ally it hap­pens… what? Once a month? It’s a pat­tern: you focus sharply on the event, but then the media that you pro­duce flares out onto the web to grow your audi­ence and pull them in—to focus on the next event. Focus, flare.

I wrote this in the comments:

I like posi­tion­ing the generative-web-event as being some­where between a sem­i­nar, a TV show, and a magazine. 

Like a sem­i­nar, or work­shop: it’s brainy, and col­lab­o­ra­tive, aimed at cre­at­ing knowl­edge, not just recit­ing it;

Like a TV show: it’s live! It’s hap­pen­ing now! Or, rather — it was hap­pen­ing then. We’re going to show you some­thing that’s going to gain and cap­ture your attention;

Like a mag­a­zine: you’re not cap­tur­ing a ran­dom viewer, who is just try­ing to tune in to what­ever catches their atten­tion at that moment. You’re con­nect­ing with sub­scribers, and try­ing to gain and hold their atten­tion. Too much of the web, of social media, is like flick­ing through the chan­nels, with too much of the bad aspects of that and not enough of the good.

And Shamptonian asks:

Regard­less of the tools, meth­ods and processes involved, I keep wrestling with the exis­ten­tial ques­tion of “what is the ulti­mate pur­pose of this media?”

Are we gen­er­at­ing it:
1. For profit?
2. For atten­tion?
3. For edu­ca­tion?
4. For help­ing human­ity?
5. For the evo­lu­tion of civilization?

I have no answers :) I think I’m just grow­ing weary of hav­ing to assign pur­pose to art, and the increas­ing belief that the forms of [artis­tic] media (poetry, lit­er­a­ture, paint­ing, pho­tog­ra­phy, video, etc.) are less mean­ing­ful, less mar­ketable, less ‘social’, if they do not have a broader intent.

Actually, that whole comment thread is one of my favorites ever: it features a goodly chunk of the all-time Snarkmatrix comment all-stars, and we talk about the awesomeness of the Snarkmarket ampersand, the non-value of farts in windowless rooms, and even spawned what’s still my favorite mass-culture media idea, “Lego Hamlet.” Read it, or read it again.

Now, Robin started out his events post thinking about events for profit, but clearly, as Anthologize proves, you can also get a lot of mileage for events that look to educate and help humanity AND — maybe most importantly — generate attention. Here’s Robin again:

A specter is haunt­ing the inter­net, and I think it’s even scarier than the chal­lenge of get­ting peo­ple to pay money. It’s the chal­lenge of get­ting them to pay atten­tion. I think it’s only going to get worse—which is to say, bet­ter, because we as inter­net users and blog read­ers and tweet slingers will have more cool, weird, inter­est­ing stuff to look at all the time, and it will just keep com­ing faster and get­ting cooler and frag­ments and—ack!

So what kinds of cultural objects historically have gotten people to pay attention? Well, I wrote about this last month:

The way our cul­ture works, depend­ing on what field you’re oper­at­ing in, cer­tain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) gen­er­ate more cul­tural focus than oth­ers. Shirky gives an exam­ple from paint­ing: “Any­one can be a painter, but the ques­tion is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ Peo­ple are always look­ing for these high-cost sig­nals from other peo­ple that this is worth­while.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in com­edy, it might be an hour-long album or TV spe­cial; I’m sure you can think of oth­ers in dif­fer­ent media. It’s a high-cost object that broad­casts its sig­nif­i­cance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work…

It’s no sur­prise, then, that he Big Dig­i­tal Shake-Up in the way cul­tural objects are pro­duced, con­sumed, sold, dis­sem­i­nated, re-disseminated, etc. is shift­ing our con­cepts of both author­ship and the work in many gen­res and media. What are the new sig­nif­i­cant objects in the fields that inter­est you? Pom­plam­oose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and com­mu­nity cre­ated by it; and Andrew Sul­li­van some­how man­ages to be the “author” of both the book The Con­ser­v­a­tive Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when some­one else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writ­ing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get peo­ple on blogs talk­ing about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and inter­views about it, so there’s some­thing besides the Ama­zon page to link to. 

I put forward a guess at the end of that post, which is a partial answer to that question. One new kind of media that’s starting to function as a work is a blog. Not, in most cases, a blog post — but a blog. If the New York Times decides, “hey, we’re going to start and host a blog all about parenting” — that blog becomes a Work. It produces ongoing cultural focus, and not just because it’s in the New York Times. Some posts get more attention than others, especially if they cross over into a long-form venue, but writing that blog, sticking with it, being its author, creates focus, readership, and a long accumulation of content. And I’m sure Lisa Belkin (who already wrote a book about parenting) will get another book out of it.

But the other new, emergent work, which might be more radical, is the generative web event. 48HrMag, One Week | One Tool, Robin’s novellas, and maybe even the New Liberal Arts (especially if we put together another edition) are all ancestral species of this new thing — the children of TED and Phoot Camp and Long Now and Iron Chef, and the parents of whatever’s going to come next.

 

Snark By Snarkwest: Kindle 2020

The iPod wasn’t the first digital music player, but that doesn’t really matter; when it was introduced in 2001, it was the first digital music player that made ordinary tech-inclined (but not necessarily tech-savvy) consumers pay attention.

I graduated from college that year, so I remember that time very well. Let’s review; Napster had been shut down. I didn’t own a DVD player. In fact, I didn’t even have my own computer. (I bought both that December.) I didn’t have a cellular phone, but some of my friends did. (In fact, I didn’t get one until 2005.) I had never used wireless internet, ever. I had bought an APS camera two years before, on study abroad. (Digital cameras cost about a kajillion dollars.) Instead of writing a blog, I kept email lists of everyone I knew and periodically quasi-spammed them with prose poems, Nietzsche quotes, outlines for essays on Bulworth (“The key to understanding Bulworth is that it’s not very good”), and news about my life. Oh, and I used telnet for email.

The time hardly seemed propitious to launch a device that would effectively break wide open handheld digital media. But that’s what happened.

It’s worth remembering this, because we’ve now had eight years of the iPod, iTunes, and the Apple Store, during which we’ve had to clear all of these technical and commercial and psychological and social hurdles to get to the devices that most of us carry around (in one version or another) every day.

What does this year’s model of the iPhone (already almost three years removed from the announcement of the first version) have in common with the first iPod? It fits in your pocket; and maybe — maybe — you still put stuff on it from your computer — to update the firmware, if nothing else.

That’s eight years of the iPod. I’m glad I saw it, because 21-year-old me wouldn’t have believed it. All the more so because none of what happened is in retrospect at all ridiculous.

Now let’s imagine twelve years of the Kindle.

Now the Kindle in 2020 might not even be the Kindle anymore. Maybe Sony or Apple or Google or Microsoft or someone we don’t even expect might shoulder Amazon aside and take center stage, or readers will be more like the smartphone market right now, with a handful of solid competitors egging each other on.

But the Kindle now, like the iPod eight years ago, is the first electronic reader that most of us tech-inclined but not tech-savvy users have paid much attention to. It’s already gotten better, it’s already spurred competition, and the chances are good that we’re going to see some significant advances in these devices before the end of the year.

In twelve years, we know electronic readers will do more, store more, work faster, look cooler, and offer more things to look at then it does now.

But what don’t we know about the Kindle 2020 yet?

Robin, Matt, and I — yes, all three of us — have proposed a presentation for South by Southwest Interactive where we — and some other supremely smart people — are going to try to figure out just that.

Here are some basic questions:

  • What kind of devices will we use to read?
  • What formats will be used to deliver documents?
  • What kinds of documents will be “read” — text, image, video, audio, hybrids?
  • How will documents be written and produced?
  • How will documents be bought, sold, and otherwise supported?
  • How will contributors be compensated?
  • How will reading work in different industries?

And here, I think, are — for me, at least, some more interesting ones:

  • What could turn an electronic reader into a totally NECESSARY device — like a mobile phone, or iPod?
  • What features will the reader of 2020 have that nobody’s even talking about yet?
  • What are we going to use it to do that nobody uses anything to do now?
  • What’s going to be your favorite thing to read on it?
  • Forget your favorite thing — what are you going to use it to do over and over again, whether you like it or not?
  • How are you going to write with it?
  • Who’s going to have one? How are they going to pay for it?
  • How do we share what we read?
  • What will we still want but not get?
  • Here’s the big one: how might it change the entire FIELD of media consumption, handheld devices, computing, reading, etc… Will everything restructure itself around the reader? Or will it be a fun, handy curiosity, plotting its own logic while everything else goes along unchanged?

Beginning today, you can vote to help get this panel accepted to South By Southwest. I am way excited. First, I am a nerd for all things related to the written word. Second, Robin and Matt are the most talented futuronomists I know.

Finally, in addition to being awesome, Austin is (oddly enough) geographically centered for the three of us. If you look at our locations (Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco), Austin is the country’s fourth column, which (I think) bestows it with Penumbra-like magical powers.

Between books, papers, and screens, I think we might just have this covered. But see, this is where we start to worry about our own blind spots or idiosyncratic enthusiasms, not because we want to lose them, but because we need to put them in context.

So we don’t just need your vote. We need to know what you know. And we’re willing to use the patented Snarkmarket figure-four leg-lock — by which I mean, your comments in the thread below — to get the conversation started.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but that’s not really true; some people remember the past better than others. The future, however, really is 20/20 (especially in 2020). Right now, we all know just as much about the future of reading as everyone else.

The only difference is that we — you and I — are focused.

What do you see?

 

BLDGBLOG Book Contest: Snarkmarkitecture

It has been indicated, correctly, that I am in possession of two (2) copies of The BLDGBLOG Book. How this came to pass, only Etaoin Shrdlu knows. But two copies is clearly too many for one man; the double-dose of enthusiasm and imagination threatens to consume me.

Therefore, a contest: SNARKMARKITECTURE.

The premise is simple. Imagine Snarkmarket as a physical space. What is it? Where is it? What does it look like? What does it feel like to walk through or around it?

I’m intentionally leaving this open-ended—maybe it’s a gleaming HQ, maybe it’s a storefront, maybe it’s a feral house of Detroit. Maybe it’s like one of those taco trucks…

Leave your pitch in the comments. Focus on creativity and brevity. It can definitely just be a sentence or two—though, by all means, if you want to Etaoin Shrdlu it up, I’m not going to stop you.

The contest ends Sunday, August 9 Monday, August 10 at midnight EST. (Update: I wanted to accommodate non-weekend-readers.) I’ll choose my favorite comment and send its creator a copy of The BLDGBLOG Book. (Be sure to use a real email address in the comment form so I can contact you if you’re the winner!)

Snarkmarket co-bloggers are not eligible to win but they are required to enter.

Snarkmarket as a physical space. Go for it.

 

Write Like It’s 1856

Writing up the new Oxford Historical Thesaurus, Jason Kottke laments the lack of an advertised online version: “what a boon it would be for period novelists to able to press the ‘write like they did in 1856′ button.”

So, being a total dork, and already in love with the not-even-shipping OHT, I tweet:

I want a “write like they did in 1856″ button!

and then:

Actually, not a “write like ANYBODY in 1856″ button. I want a “write like Flaubert” button. (Quiz: what writer in 1856 would you choose?)

This is harder than it sounds. 1856 might have seen just about the greatest confluence of writers ever. Do you want to write like Flaubert, Baudelaire, or Hugo? Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Melville or Whitman or Dickinson? The Rosettis, the Brownings, or George Eliot? In nonfiction, you could write like Darwin, Marx, Carlyle, Mill, Schopenhauer, Lincoln, or Emerson.

All that said, I’m sticking with Flaubert. That’s the year he finished and serialized Madame Bovary. (The next year, he went on trial for obscenity, and won, on the grounds that he wasn’t a pornographer, but a genius. This changed everything for modern literature.)

Gustave’s my guy. Who’s yours?

P.S.: On the Oxford University Press page for the historical thesaurus, it includes a link for an online version — it’s almost certainly going to be subscriber-only, and the link ends up with placeholder info for now. But it will happen.

 

The New Liberal Arts and the New Professors

So I’m writing a short essay for a forum on the future of scholarship and the profession at The Chronicle of Higher Ed, I think on the New Liberal Arts.

Like you, i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about WHAT the NLA should be, but relatively little on how that would change colleges, universities, and the lives, research, and careers of professors.

So… What should I say?

 

Snarkmarket Reading Survey

Something Walter Benjamin said has interested me for a while now:

If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisements force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.

— One Way Street (1928)

If Benjamin’s right, then this is a reading revolution that’s still underway — expanding from film, advertisements, and newspapers to television, computer, and telephone screens. Even though we’re using all these different devices, they just might be participating in this dyad of vertical vs. historical reading.

I’ve become something of an amateur anthropologist of how people read — watching people read books or papers or from their phones or laptops in public places — but I’m curious: how do you read?

* What kind of device(s)?

* Where is your body?

* Where is your reading material?

* How do you prefer to read?

* How do you read most often?

* Where/how is it hardest for you to read?

* What are your reading surfaces — desks, tables, a bed, your own body?

* Do you use any prosthetic aids — glasses, something to raise your laptop upwards?

* How did you read as a child? Ten years ago? What’s changed?

Send pictures or movies even! Images of reading!

 

Ink: Flock/Songbird For Writing

I gave a presentation to my students today on writing and research tools, doing what I always do — apologizing for the limitation of every single thing that I showed them. Zotero is pretty good at building a research database — but you can’t use it to write. MS Word 2008 is a champ for layout and even does a good job at formatting bibliographies — but it sucks for organizing research or pulling data from an application. Scrivener is a good place to organize research or notes and build drafts — but it turns PDFs into pictures and doesn’t really handle citations. Yep and Papers are great PDF organizers, but not much else. (I didn’t even want to get into DevonThink.) But Papers builds in a WebKit browser, so you can do research and navigate into online databases and plug anything you find right into your library.

This feels like the big conceptual leap. We’re finding our information on the web. We’re writing our documents on the web. We’re storing our data on the web. We’re using the web to collaborate on docs. But while online storage and collaboration are winners, AJAX writing apps kind of suck. They’re low-powered exactly where we need the full power of a rich client. We don’t just need more formatting and layout options; we need to be able to manage databases, for research and reading material, and lots of interconnected projects that bridge online and offline work.

What I want is just what my title says: a specialized browser-based client devoted to writing.

Read the rest of this entry »

 

Snarkmarket’s Best of ’08

In case you missed the comments to this thread, we’re soliciting your nods and votes for the best interviews and speeches of ’08.