Lately I've been reading a lot of essays about technology, preparing for my "The Age of Information" theme that I"ll be launching this fall in my composition class[es?]. The primary texts I've selected are:
Technopoly - Neil Postman
The Gutenberg Elegies - Sven Birkerts
The Dumbest Generation - Mark Bauerlein
The Pirate's Dilemma - Matt Mason
Convergence Culture - Henry Jenkins
My primary goal with these texts is to design a course content that invokes introspection on some level relating to the technology that we all take so easily for granted. Back in 1995, Sven Birkerts warned his readers in the essay, "The Idea of the Internet," that taking the technology of the internet for granted would be a huge failing for our culture. Not only does the internet remove us from conventional definitions of communication (I'm paraphrasing Birkerts paraphrasing Derrida here), where the communication takes place between two physical people in an exact location at an exact time, but its top-level appearance abstracts the complexity lying underneath. For example, prior to the internet, a person was only reacheable via phone (most likely landline/fax) or in person. If that person wasn't home, I couldn't establish communication. Now, I can email a video of myself to someone's phone. I don't have to know where the other person is, nor does that person have to have his phone on when I send the communication--the idea of concrete time and place are effectively removed from the schema for communication. Furthermore, since the internet is so abstracted, without considerable computer skill, it's VERY hard to ensure that your communication is being delivered only to the person or people it's intended for. Consider the notion of a embarrasing email forwarded on to an entire organization, or the Bush administration's extensive wiretapping. Specificity of communication is also no longer restricted to exact recipients. Therefore communication as a whole has changed, yet few of us (if anyone) truly acknowledge this shift, or seem to care.
Consider this: How many 18 year old college freshmen post their drinking sex party pics up on facebook? Lots. Now consider this: A large number of HR firms these days make it a regular habit to Google EVERY SINGLE APPLICANT BEFORE SELECTING THE INTERVIEW SLATE. Guess who doesn't make the slate? Titsy McGee and Joe Pukeface.
While I can drive on in this vein for a while, all of this reading has been jarring up my notion of fiction and how it's to be consumed. A good chunk of my essay for Issue 1.1 of Ontologica has to do with the notion that contemporary realism, the dominant literary movement of the day, is driving fiction into the ground because contemporary realism offers little if anything over any other form of media, and in many cases, is very easily interchangeable with other forms of meda. And while this notion of media convergence, as cited by Henry Jenkins is inevitable, I can't help but think there has to be a better way to cross-pollonate fiction with other media without diluting the form. I think it bears importance to mention that I'm primarily concerned with Literary fiction, since the Literary genre seems to claim to have some sort of presigious clout over the other, more lucrative forms of fiction. I'm bothered by the notion that Literary fiction, for all it's clout cannot compete with other genres, and fares even worse in competition to other media. And at the same time, I'm not ready to just write off America as being too dumb to consume Literary fiction.
In Convergence Culture, Jenkins traces shifts in TV Series' plot formatting from Episodic , to Character driven, to season long arcs, to World Creation. Looking at these terms, you hear a lot about Character Driven fiction in MFA programs and other writing groups--it's definitely high on the do-this-and-you're-writing-good-literary-fiction-list. However, in terms of other media, that puts fiction FAR behind the curve. Think about the complexities in a story arc for a season of Lost, or better, the story arc for the entire series. Character driven fiction can't meet that, and it can't build any form of fanbase similar because it lacks said complexities. These complexities, or the current Trans Media way of doing things is that of World Building. Give me a world, any world, and we can build all the plot-driven or character driven stories we want, and each one contributes to the greater whole. Think Star Wars. Think The Matrix.
This idea of world building, of course, isn't new. Faulkner did it with his Yoknapatawpha County. Ben Marcus writes it from the inside in The Age of Wire and String, George Saunders in The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, etc. All of these fictions employ world building at the most intrinsic level.
Brian McHale's Postmodernist Fiction talks (again I'm paraphrasing) in great deal about the effects of what he calls "Worlds in Collision," or, what happens to a reader when the reader is forced to recognize that the world within the fiction is not the world that the reader lives within. Such a collision firstly forces the reader to abandon all forms of epistemological interpretation for ontological interpretation. By doing so, the entirety of the fiction necessitates analysis--nothing should be taken for face value. Since ontological interpretation, at its most base level, is concerned with plurality and the absence of any absolute truths, our subjectivity, level of reading intensity, and knowledge come to be more heavily important on the understanding of the text than in traditional epistemological readings. Furthermore, in an age of TransMedia exploitation, particularly dense works get easily dissected by online forum groupThink exercises, where each person brings a different skill/knowledge set to the same text, allowing for greater depth to be achieved than possible without other perspectives.
I'm part of such a groupThink exercise--the Warrior Poet Group; and throughout our book discussions, we've consistently avoided contemporary realist works in favor of those that involve the creation of entire worlds: The Age of Wire and String - Ben Marcus, Rant - Chuck Palahaniuk, Visionary/Prophetic Poetry, and Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov.
So why do worlds work so well?
Perhaps in this age of information, our ability to be truly affected by an event is thoroughly diminished to a point nearing total desensitization. Everyday we joke, sing, or causually talk about killing, rape, stealing, etc without blinking an eye. Media Piracy is called "Filesharing" to downplay its illegality, and ask any college student, not one of them will tell you that music piracy should be illegal. Perhaps world creation works so well because in this age, we spend so much of our time trying to assemble a self out of the cacophany of information surrounding us--one tiny voice in the datafeed, we scrabble and scream our way to the top of Facebook, or whatever online den we call home. Star-struck and searching for fame and fortune, we fall into the glamor of world-building because it allows us to transpose not our true self, but the self we want to be into an alternate world where we pull a Burger King and Have it Our Way (for once). Look only to the success of Second Life, WoW and other MMORPGs. Shitty jobs become suddenly bearable when there's another world to run off to once you punch out.
My escape worlds have always been rooted in D&D and video games (currently Fallout 3), but increasingly, as I develop this thing called Not an Autobiography, the inter-connections between stories has begun building a growingly more complicated ontology of Self stemming from each individual voice. And as I see it, the book becomes multi-layered in this way--each character telling the what-if story of several personal past events and claiming each other character, but also the over-arching inter-connectivity; a sort of super-self that gets generated by the cross-overs, similarities, and other flair.
So what am I saying?
In addition to writing good stories, I think we should also start considering how the masses are to consume our fictions. If you can get a group of peole to dedicate a forum to your book, then you're also generating word-of-Internet marketing for your creative endeavor; it's like free promotion.
What if we take this a step further. Take the notion of world building and tack a Creative Commons license on our fiction rather than 1st American Publishing Rights or whatever other licensing offered by publishers -- you can still make money on your own work, but with Creative Commons, you also enable your fans to drive your work futher in derivative creations, building upon your world, and expanding, further your fanbase. Surely this already exists, but can such a creation lead to one or more published books? I'm not sure, but at the very least, on this blog entry, it sounds like a very tantalizing idea.
