Deep Media

From 'Oliver Twist' to 'Game of Thrones': Six serials and how they've deepened the art of storytelling

For a couple of years now, “transmedia” has been the buzzword most people use to define story­telling in the digital age. But while telling a story across different media formats (video, text, game, what have you) can be an effective way to engage people in a narrative, it's not the only way—nor is it necessarily the best. One of the most effective means of creating an immersive narrative is in fact one of the oldest: by serializing it. 

I was reminded of this recently when I went to Turin to speak at the Scuola Holden, a “school of storytelling and the performing arts” founded 20 years ago by the novelist Alessandro Baricco. Named after that world-class narrator Holden Caulfield, this unconventional institution (no teachers, for a long time no tests, and certainly no phonies) was intended to be a place where young Caulfield might feel at ease. Instead of hiring professors, the school brings in professional storytellers; and instead of focusing on technical skills like journalism or filmmaking, it tries to foster an aptitude for telling stories in any medium. 

Nonetheless, students are expected to spend about half their time during the two-year program in one of six “colleges”: Scrivere (writing), Filmmaking, Series, Crossmedia, Acting, and “Real World”—that is, stories inspired by actual events. In the first month of the school year, people like me were brought in to describe what these different disciplines were all about. I was asked to talk about Series. Then I was handed this map, which I decided to redraw a bit. The point was to show how serialization can create a sense of immersion. 

 

 

What 'The Silent History' app teaches us about the future of digital stories

It's been nearly a year now since a couple of McSweeney's alums released The Silent History, a story in app form about a near-future epidemic of EPR—emergent phasic resistance, "a congenital disorder characterized by the inability to generate or comprehend language of any kind." It was all very meta—a story about the loss of language, which of course is the tool we use to tell stories, that was itself a re-tooling of the way we tell stories. It was also beautifully written and published and inventively structured—an intriguing exploration of new possibilities for narrative. But now that it's been out for awhile, what does it tell us about the future of storytelling? 

Now at Medium: 'The Disappearing Book'

A few weeks ago, when I was blogging about Neil Gaiman's speech at the London Book Fair, I came across his reference to These Pages Fall Like Ash, a highly unconventional experiment in storytelling by Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman of Bristol. The project Gaiman described seemed fascinating, so I got in touch with Abba, whom I'd met when I was in Bristol two years earlier to speak as part of the city's ongoing Festival of Ideas, and asked him about it. The upshot was this piece, which ran yesterday in the online publication Medium: 

“Book? What’s a book?” I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately, and I keep getting different answers — but none so quirky or inventive as the one Tom Abba and Duncan Speakman have come up with in Bristol. Abba, who heads an interactive media program at the University of the West of England, and Speakman, of the Bristol art collective Circumstance, have conspired with the novelists Neil Gaiman and Nick Harkaway to construct a story that starts out as a book but then unfolds as a digital text that people read on their smartphones or tablets. It’s called These Pages Fall Like Ash, and it’s a tale of two cities — cities that exist in the same time and place without, somehow, ever bumping into each other.

The book, encased in a wooden box and sold . . . [To continue reading, please visit Medium]

I particularly liked the idea of publishing this in Medium because it too is an experiment in digital publishing. Started last fall by Ev Williams and his partners at Obvious Corp., Medium is "a collaborative publishing platform" (in Williams's words) that aims to rethink many of the conventions of online media—conventions that in many cases began with Blogger, which Williams co-founded in 1999.

Blogging back then was a rarefied activity almost unheard-of outside tech circles; by creating the first easy-to-use platform (one he later sold to Google), Williams changed that forever. But that was a couple of eons ago in Internet years. So why not take what we've learned and start over again, with the idea of getting it right? As Williams has explained, that's the idea behind Medium. In some ways it seems as far-fetched and idealistic as Blogger did 14 years ago, or Twitter after that. But hey—these guys do have a track record, right? 

More on the future of books: Neil Gaiman at the London Book Fair

Not long after the If Book Then conference in Milan and Stockholm, Neil Gaiman gave a much-talked-about keynote at the London Book Fair in which he too talked about the future of books. Speaking to the international publishing establishment, he made a point that was both familiar and critically important: Change is here, and denial is pointless. "I worry that too many of us . . . are certain that if only we can get 1993 to come back again, we'll clean up. That if we hold our breath and close our eyes and guard the gates with bigger and more dangerous weapons, time will turn backwards and it will be yesterday again. And we all knew what the rules were yesterday. The rules of publishing were simple. Authors, agents, books, incredibly long lunches—that was publishing. Not any more." 

Along the way, however, he gave some tantalizing glimpses of what the future could hold. Some were quite basic: the idea that buying a physical book might automatically give you the ebook and audiobook as well. Others were counterintuitive in the same way that the study I designed with JWT was counterintuitive: "I suspect that one of the things we should definitely be doing . . . is making books that are prettier and finer and better. We should be fetishizing objects. We should be giving people a reason to buy objects, not just content, if we want to sell them objects." 

 

If Book Then . . . what now? Books face the future

What's a book, anyway? The answer used to be simple: two covers, a lot of words in between, printed on paper and meant to be stored on shelves. Not any more. With ebooks the paper is gone, the covers are vestigial, the shelves are virtual, and the words might be joined by playable videos, expandable photos, interactive graphics, and HTML5 pyrotechnics. The question is not what a book is but what it can be. 

So it was gratify­ing to spend a couple of days re­cently with people who have smart ideas about this. With The Art of Immersion just published in Italian, I was invited to Europe to speak at IfBookThen, a future-of-books confer­ence staged in Milan by the Italian e-publisher Book­Republic and reprised two days later in Stock­­holm by Publit, its Swedish counter­part. Here's what I came away with. 

 

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media' (part 2): How Web 2.0 went wrong, and why 'viral' sucks

Last week, in part one of my interview with Henry Jenkins, we talked about how he and his coauthors came to write Spreadable Media and what it means that the "participatory culture" of the Web focuses so much of its attention on broadcast properties like Lost or, more recently, The Walking Dead. Today, in part two, Henry takes on some of the basic metaphors we use to describe the things we do online. 

In the book, you argue that a number of the terms we've used for years to talk about Internet-related activities are in fact misleading and outright damaging. You object in particular to the infection metaphor of phrases like "going viral." Does this really damage the idea of participatory culture? 

A key assumption in this book is that words matter, that the metaphors we use shape the assumptions we make and thus the actions we take, all the more so in the context of an emerging and still ill-defined phenomenon. We argue that the term "viral media" consistently strips agency from the participants within networks of circulation. Infection metaphors lead many to think of those who spread videos as the "unknowing hosts" who are acting "irrationally," and we think of the content as somehow "self-replicating."

Henry Jenkins on 'Spreadable Media,' why fans rule, and why 'The Walking Dead' lives

"If it doesn't spread, it's dead": With this pithy dictum, Henry Jenkins summed up the nature of media distribution in the Internet age. Introduced as "our new mantra" in a 2007 blog post about Jonathan Lethem and slash fiction, it turned up again as the title of a 2008 white paper from the Convergence Culture Consortium, the initiative Henry launched at MIT to explore the changing dynamics of the media industry. Now it's the central idea that animates Spreadable Media, the new book he's written with Sam Ford and Joshua Green, two former C3 colleagues who have moved on to consultancy roles — Sam at Peppercomm Strategic Communications, Joshua at Undercurrent. In whatever context, this idea stands as a corrective to the distribution model of the broadcast era, which presumes that control will rest with whoever puts the product out, not with the people who are the market for it. The levers of power have shifted. 

Due out next week from NYU Press, Spreadable Media is an essential read for anyone who wants to under­stand how media works today. The book begins by contrasting spread­­ability with sticki­ness, an earlier measure of online appeal that prevailed during the heyday of "Web portals" like AOL and Yahoo! Sticki­­ness was a Web 1.0 concept that tried to port ideas from the broad­cast indus­try into the Web world — ideas like cen­tralization and pull and pre-structured inter­­activity, as opposed to dis­persal and flow and open-ended participation. But the au­thors take issue with Web 2.0 as well, and they seem border­line ap­palled by the "viral" metaphor that has attached itself to the act of online sharing. Participation, they argue, is not a dis­ease, and should not be treated like one. To do so is to denigrate not just the act but the peo­ple who doing it — that is, us. 

Henry and I have known each other for sev­eral years—I've spoken to his class at USC, and he interviewed me when The Art of Immersion came out. So with Spreadable Media now available for pre-order, I was eager to return the favor. Here's part one of our email exchange: 

When you coined the phrase "participatory culture" in 1992, did you have any idea how participatory it would get? 

I never would have imagined it, to be honest. My understanding of the concept has deepened over time. In 1992, I used "participatory culture" as the subtitle of my book, Textual Poachers, which just came out in a 20th anniversary edition. I was trying to set up a basic contrast between the ways that mass media had created a spectator culture and the ways that fandom was asserting a collective and individual right to par­ticipate within media culture, often through the production of new kinds of works — fan fiction primarily, but also fan music and fan video — from the raw materials that the culture industry provided. My thinking at the time was informed by writers like Seymour Papert, who had described the forms of cultural participation which had grown up around the Samba Schools in Brazil, but my thinking lacked much cultural scope or depth. 

 

 

How Pepys Road takes you into the fictional world of Britain's coming 'Lost Decade'

Some of the most intriguing innovations in story­telling these days are happening in the UK, where broadcasting networks, book publishers, and even newspapers have embraced the idea of creating immersive narratives that invite the audience to join in. The latest effort comes from Matt Locke, former head of cross-platform programming at Channel Four, who left television last year to start Storythings, a consultancy that's been developing projects with top brands and media outlets. Story­things' first project, released last month, is Pepys Road, an online story that ties in with the John Lanchester novel Capital, recently published by Faber & Faber. 

Capital documents the lives of characters on a fictional South London street as they deal with the fallout from Britain's ongoing financial crisis. Pepys Road is designed to bring all this home to the reader. To experience Pepys Road, you go to the Web site, type in your date and place of birth and the place you live now, and wait for what happens next. Over the next 10 days, you get a series of emails con­taining, among other things, stories by Lanches­ter that demonstrate how you might be affected by the economic changes the next 10 years are expected to bring. The experience is immediate, immersive, and highly provocative. Here's what Matt had to say about it:

C21 author learns to make pineapple with readers

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk at ad:tech Sydney that got written up in a blog post on MarketingDirecto.com, a Madrid-based marketing and publicity site. My Spanish is not so great, but with a little help from Google Translate I could see that their correspondent had gotten my point—that brand marketers need to stop trumpeting their message and start enlisting the consumer to spread it for them. It was the headline that threw me: “Para contar historias, las marcas deben hacer piña con el consumidor”—which Google rather unhelpfully translated as, "To tell stories, brands must make pineapple with the consumer."

Funny—I couldn't remember saying anything resembling that. 

B Positive? Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan have something special in mind for you

Department of Human Management: "Meet B Positive Singles"

If the term Department of Human Management gives you a bit of a chill, check out the Web site. At departmentofhumanmanagement.org, you will find in­for­mation on such topics as How To Live ("your guide to living, connecting, and inter­acting with our new environ­mental factors") and an About Us page that talks about creating "a support system for citizens to up­hold our new status quo." A hint as to what that status quo involves comes from the bright red badge at the bottom of the page: "Give Blood Every 5 Days." Another hint comes from the crawl at the top: "Ignore the lies and propa­ganda of The Strain Trilogy."