internet

Social Networking as Entertainment

March 15, 2015 By Mark 3 Comments

Sturgeon’s Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap. Ninety percent of music is crap, ninety percent of food is crap (unless you’re starving, in which case it’s life-sustaining crap), ninety percent of television is crap, ninety percent of literature is crap, and so on.

Sturgeon’s Law is correct. Ninety percent of everything is crap, which means ninety percent of the social networking being done in the name of democratization and personal empowerment is also crap.

What’s interesting about social networking crap is that it breaks down into two symbiotic categories which are opposite sides of the same entertainment coin. On one side we have ridicule, which makes us laugh, and on the other side we have righteous indignation, which makes us cry.

Comedy. Drama.

It’s as if social networking is actually a medium of entertainment, and only incidentally concerned with socializing or networking.

Adding to the appeal of social networking as entertainment is the fact that ridicule tends to generate righteous indignation and righteous indignation tends to beget ridicule, meaning there’s no stopping them once they get started.

Looking for laughs? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone making fun of someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the temerity to accuse you of ridicule you can respond with righteous indignation.

Looking for justice? Log onto any social networking site and you’ll find someone standing up to someone, which you can then like or retweet or comment on. If anyone has the effrontery to accuse you of righteous indignation you can respond with ridicule.

(If you were in third grade you might be accused of bullying or playing victim, but because you’re an adult using expensive information-age technology you don’t have to worry about that.)

Like every other medium of entertainment, the ninety percent of social networking that is crap would be harmless fun if it wasn’t also inherently dehumanizing. Unlike every other medium of entertainment, participating in the generation of all that crap diminishes our ability to appreciate the remaining ten percent.

— Mark Barrett

Storytelling and the Evolution of Mediums

February 14, 2013 By Mark Leave a Comment

Following up on several previous posts about mediums and how mediums affect storytelling, I recently ran across an article that illustrates my claim that stories exist apart from the mediums we use to communicate them. From PCMag:

Just like soap opera characters wake up from years-long comas or return from beyond the grave, two cancelled daytime dramas are getting revived.

Prospect Park today announced that All My Children and One Life To Live will in fact get a second chance as the anchor programs on The Online Network (TOLN).

In a sense this development probably doesn’t even seem evolutionary, let alone revolutionary. And from the point of view of the end user it’s probably neither. You fire up whatever glowing screen you want to look at, you input a few commands, and voila: content. But consider what this means for television itself. [ Read more ]

Blog Fiction and NeilRorke.com

October 18, 2010 By Mark 2 Comments

I’ve been thinking about publishing and fiction and the internet for over a year now, in a dedicated way. I’ve been thinking about storytelling my entire life.

How do stories take hold in the mind of the audience? How is any story changed by the medium of expression? What are the necessary ingredients of a story? What is the craft knowledge any storyteller should have?

I don’t have all the answers. I can get fifty pages into a work and be as lost as anyone who ever wrote. But I also think I understand the basics, and after fifteen years of thinking about interactive storytelling I think I know where the limits are as well.

In time the internet will become a storytelling medium itself. It’s not there yet, but the potential is considerable. To further that goal I’ve put up a site that I hope to grow over time. It’s a storytelling experiment in low-tech transmedia, aimed at entertaining an audience while also discovering and advancing useful internet-based storytelling techniques.

I’ll be discussing NeilRorke.comin greater detail, but for now I wanted to let you know that it’s up and ask for feedback. What do you think?

— Mark Barrett

Blog Fiction: An Introduction

October 16, 2010 By Mark Leave a Comment

Blog fiction sees the internet not as a distribution pipeline or as a means of presenting stories, but as a storytelling medium itself. Text, sound, image and movement have all been used to create and embrace fictional characters, events and places in other mediums, and the internet will be no different.

Blog fiction attempts to advance the cause in two ways. First, by being honest, open and upapologetic in this aim. Second, by calling attention to ways in which internet storytelling might move toward mature craft techniques similar to those in print, film, television and theater.

The first step on the journey to realizing the potential of blog fiction is clarifying the medium for the intended audience. Just as a book has its cover, a movie its opening credits, and the stage its rising curtain, blog fiction requires demarcation. Without such a portal the audience may be confused about the intent of the experience, or distracted by authorial intrusions.

To see version 0.1 of a proposed technical and craft solution, click here.

Format Freaking

November 18, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whether you know a little or a lot about the interactive entertainment industry, it’s worth reading this (short) article if only to see how pervasive the current uncertainty is in all content-driven mediums. You might think the software business would be less at-risk of the internet as a distribution mechanism, or to concerns about formats, but you’d be wrong.

The article is also hilarious in demonstrating the kind of outdated reference that suggests key executives in all content-driven industries are missing the bigger picture:

For example, [Yoichi Wada, CEO of Square Enix] said, films are generally two hours long or less; television is a half hour or an hour, and runs in a series regularly for several months; and a newspaper is delivered in roughly similar size every morning.

Those mediums could have evolved in very different ways, but at a certain point, they standardized, and consumers know roughly what to expect when they experience one.

Newspapers? Delivered? Wha….?

Note, too, the complete omission of reference to the book industry, which is going through its own format freakout. Each industry will evolve in its own way, but if you believe that form(at) follows function (and I do), then all of these format issues are really just an(other) result of the inevitable move to internet distribution.

— Mark Barrett

The Last Nail

November 11, 2009 By Mark 3 Comments

You know all there is to know about the disintegration of music publishing, in part because you’ve lived it, and in part because you’ve done your homework. You know the newspaper-publishing business is getting killed because you can hear Rupert Murdoch squealing. You know the movie business is hurting. And of course you know the book-publishing industry is coming apart at the spine.

But even as all this is happening in concert, and even as the internet looms large in every instance, there are still people explaining how what’s happening in one industry has nothing to do with what’s happening in another industry. Or how it’s the recession that’s causing these problems. (It’s not.)

To this litany of carnage now add the computer gaming industry. On Monday Electronic Arts (EA), one of the the largest developers and publishers of interactive titles, announced that it was cutting 1,500 jobs. If that was the end of the story we could chalk up the layoffs to the recession, but that’s not the end of the story. [ Read more ]

It Isn’t the Recession*

October 30, 2009 By Mark 2 Comments

Lying is a part of doing business. When things are good, you leverage trust as long as it makes you money. When things are not good there’s no lie you won’t tell in order to survive.

The problem with the publishing industry is that I can’t tell whether the people in charge are lying or simply oblivious. Here’s a quote from an AP/WaPo article at the end of last year:

The economy has crashed on a supposedly recession-proof industry: book publishing. There is consolidation at Random House Inc., as well as layoffs at Simon & Schuster and at Thomas Nelson Publishers.

And here’s a quote from the Boston Globe a week ago:

“Historically, the conventional wisdom was the publishing industry was recession-proof, and if the adage was ever true it doesn’t remain the case,’’ said Gary Gentel, president of the trade and reference division at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a sponsor (along with the Globe) of the Boston Book Festival. “That said, this is the perfect time for a festival. What a great escape.’’

It’s hard for me to believe that people actually think constriction in the book business is being caused by (or primarily by) the recession. If the adage that publishing is recession-proof was ever true, it would make sense to look for other causes of trouble even if you were in the middle of a recession. There’s also the rather obvious point that the music business has been pulverized by the effects of the internet for the better part of a decade, and that the decline of newspapers has accelerated because of the internet, making it at least plausible that what’s happening in publishing has something to do with the internet.

Which would mean that these publishing voices, like all vested voices in a darkening market, are simply lying into the wind, hoping that enthusiasm, confidence, and bravado will shore up an eroded foundation. And if that’s all this is, I’m fine with it, in the same way that I was fine watching high-flying kamikaze pilots on Wall St. and in government smile as they blew up the foundation of our economy.

For the record, however, what’s hurting publishing is not the recession. It’s the internet.

* Apparently the recession is over, so we can all stop worrying and love the bomb.

— Mark Barrett

The Bigger Picture

October 29, 2009 By Mark 1 Comment

CNET’s interview of Eric Garland, CEO of Big Champagne, has attracted understandable interest over the past few days. Garland talks turkey and sense about how the internet will inevitably impact the movie business, just as it has the music and publishing industries:

What will happen is the studios will exhaust every available remedy and there will be a series of evolutions, meaning they will exhaust one remedy and a new one will present itself. These things will be pursued in tandem. They will pursue technological intervention on the Internet. This goes to the study at NYU that basically says this has had no effect. Ultimately, because they are spending a lot of money and not getting results, they’ll become disillusioned with these vendors. They’ll clean house. But something else will present itself.

I think he’s right about where we are, and I think he’s right about where we’re going in the future, but I think he and almost everyone else stop short of where we’re ultimately headed. And I’m not saying that as a criticism: Garland properly frames his comments in the context of survivability, not ultimate truth. The goal is getting your industry through the transition, after which things will of course continue to evolve.

Still, I think the lines of convergence are pretty clear, even if they still resolve over the horizon. Everything people think they know about the internet is predicated on a set of relatively arbitrary decisions. Net neutrality is one instance, anonymity is another. Flip a couple of simple switches and suddenly the internet doesn’t look like the wild west or a commune, it looks like Big Brother or a corporate bureaucracy. [ Read more ]

Saturation Day

August 26, 2009 By Mark Leave a Comment

One minute you’re skulking around a forgotten alleyway, looking at sights (and sites) that only a few intrepid explorers have ever seen. The next minute someone runs up laughing, slaps a satellite photo in your hand, points to the teeny-tiny, itty-bitty you standing in an infinite grid of similar forgotten alleyways — all of which have already been clearly marked by and populated with people just like you.

That’s Saturation Day. The day the exploring catches up with reality. The day the ground drops out from beneath your feet. The day you realize that the thing you’re trying to take in is bigger than you thought it could be. The day you begin to sense the forest for the trees.

(It’s also the day you’re really glad you didn’t do any exploring before you put up your site, or you just might have decided to go with Plan B: The Ditch in American Cinema — 1930 to 1975.)

Internet fiction is happening. I’m still trying to find a fiction site that really connects with me, but the long tail of independent effort is already established. People are writing fiction on the internet and other people are trying to figure out how to make a buck off those people. Which is pretty much how the internet ballgame works.

Tomorrow, I’m going to speed up the tempo and try to catch up with the things I’ve seen and thought about so far. Because I’m already getting a good idea about what I want to try, and I’m not seeing any reason to think about it a whole lot more before I take the leap.

— Mark Barrett