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Interactive Lather

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Yesterday a story that’s been running for seventy-two years finally came to a close:

Friday marked the final flicker of CBS’ “Guiding Light,” as that venerable daytime drama logged its farewell hour after 72 years on the air.

As the article points out, there’s a lot more competition for eyeballs than there used to be, and there are fewer and fewer consumers at home during the day. Of such societal shifts are final curtains made.

It also seems to me, however, that the essence of the soap opera remains deeply-rooted in our culture, even as the pre-packaged network television versions have been dropping like flies over the past decade. For what is the online gathering place — whether bulletin board, chatroom or social networking site — but a live-action, real-time soap opera?

The king of the hill these days isn’t General Hospital, it’s Facebook — a 24/7 rolling soap opera filled with bad blind dates, drunken escapades, desperate pleas for help, fake desperate pleas for help, loneliness, sexual intrigue, comedy and enough vanity to stock every dressing room the length of Broadway. Instead of SAG actors playing roles, the users are the cast, mixing truth with fiction as they build and morph their online personas into the feel-good characters they most want to be.

The entire production cycle is down to mere seconds. The production cost is the price of broadband. The actors, writers and directors are you. The show never goes off the air. And each user’s dialogue is immediately embraced by other live human beings, who in turn play out their parts against a backdrop of pop-culture myopia.

How could any fictional soap opera hope to compete with that?

— Mark Barrett

License to Lie

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I don’t know when I first heard the terms narrative nonfiction and creative nonfiction, but it wasn’t too long ago. Five years at most. I do, however, remember what my reaction was.

You’re kidding.

The joke was on me, however, because it turns out that people really aren’t kidding about these — what to call them? — terms? Genres? Amazing new art forms?

Call me old fashioned, but I don’t really see why these newfangled words are necessary from a functional point of view. (If this is really just about marketing the same old books to a new crop of easily-led readers, that’s something entirely different. It’s still not okay, but it’s entirely different.)

As hard as I try, I can’t really see the difference between what used to be called nonfiction and what is now being dressed up as narrative nonfiction or creative nonfiction. Unless of course these new terms (that’s what I’m going to call them) are really an excuse for allowing nonfiction writers to cross the line into fiction writing.  [ Read more ]

Writing Blogs and M&M’s

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27 Writing blogs vying to make a Top 10 list. To my mind, the list itself is the treasure.

Here’s a favorite found nugget:

Stay away from the peanut M&M’s. You may think they’re harmless, but a handful turns into ten and you’re going to consume just enough calories between September and February to make you hate yourself in March. Remember, you’re spending lots of hours sitting on your ass. Your brain doesn’t burn calories at the same rate as your body. Eat accordingly.

Don’t I know this. You start with the little packet. You move up to the Tear & Share packet — but you don’t share. Then you see the medium-sized bag is on sale at the local market. Then you notice the large bag is also on sale for the same price. Then you’re pushing a wheelbarrow full of lose, custom-printed peanut M&M’s down the purgatory hallway of your dreams, slipping and sliding on the candies that fall out of the barrow until you finally lose your balance and plummet into a swirling cauldron of half-melted pills, only to wake up screaming with the caked-on taste of peanut-flavored chocolate foaming the inside of your mouth like spray-on insulation.

Which is when you finally admit you have a problem and switch to plain.

[Warning: if you are prone to seizures, narcolepsy or zoning out, don’t click here.]

— Mark Barrett

Writing in Library Books

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I checked a book out of my local library the other day, and when I went to read it I discovered that someone had been there before me, littering the words and sentences with sharp lines and emphatic scrawls. Not a rare occurrence in my life, to be sure, but one that always makes me think the vandal (or vandals in this case, if the three different colors of emboldened ink are indeed evidence of serial abuse) is revealing something deeply disturbing about themselves in this simple, narcissistic, and completely self-absorbed anti-social act.  [ Read more ]

Leet

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Do you know what leet (or leetspeak) is? I’m betting you do, but like me you may not have known the name for it.

I’ve actually been trying for over a year to figure out what to call this hallucinalingo the K3wL kids are all using, but every search on the subject was thwarted precisely because the language is so plastic. Today, however, while enmeshed in a completely different subject, I stumbled on the keyword that unlocks the code. Leet.

L| <4// |~33[) em0|~3 /-/3|~3.

(And before the leetpolice throw me up against a wall and give me a few kidney punches for desecrating the lingo — yes, I know you can’t just slap things together like that. For demonstration purposes only.)

Google & Sony: Together Again

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It looks like the Google/Sony alliance is getting serious. And as I said last week, in a post about the rollout of Sony’s new anti-Kindle e-readers, it’s going to be very hard to bet against this tag-team powerhouse in any market they decide to enter.

The news from last night is that Sony is going to be putting Google’s Chrome browser in all of the PC’s that it ships in North America.

Sony started installing Chrome in PCs bound for North America in May, a Sony representative said. The deal was initially a test run for the two companies, but the test phase is nearly over.

The Sony deal marks an important step for Chrome into PCs. Launched almost exactly a year ago, the browser has had a rough time against rivals such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Once again the Google/Sony alliance is strengthened, and the momentum of their combined flying wedge is aimed straight at Microsoft.  [ Read more ]

Willful Ignorance as Productivity Tool

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I said in a previous post that I had “complete unfamiliarity” with the subject of fiction on the internet — then I promptly launched into a high-level analysis of blog fiction in the same post. Since that seems a bit incongruous even to me, I thought I’d get a few things into the record before relating any more of my fiction hunting escapades.

Prior to launching this site I had a lot of questions about the state of storytelling in the digital age, but I didn’t do much (meaning any) research or scouting ahead of time.

Here’s why:

1) I didn’t want to spoil any of the surprises I might find along the way. If there are great stories out there on the web, or there are growling literary factions at war over virtual turf, I wanted to experience it all with this blog at the ready. (I’ve already deployed all the sticky notes my desk can handle.)  [ Read more ]