Universe Creation 101

Saw this Error Message Generator on Drew’s blog and couldn’t help but create some popups that a user/interactor/operator/reader/vuser/viuser/wreader/player etc may come across:

Let me know if you come up with any too!

Lisbeth Klastrup completed her PhD in 2003 but has put it online for 1 month. ‘Towards a Poetics of Virtual Worlds: Multi-User Textuality and the Emergence of Story’ was completed at the Department for Digital Aesthetics and Communication (DIAC), IT University of Copenhagen. Klastrup began looking at, playing, immersing herself in ‘interactive narratives’ in 1996 and was immediately struck by the uncaptured phenomenon in front of her:

I started contemplating the nature of the relationship between a networked world, its users and the narrative experience. Gradually I realised that it could be dangerous to enter these worlds looking for narratives as I had previously known them, since the unfolding of a linear narrative proved to be well-nigh impossible as soon as there were several users influencing the development of events.

Other questions soon arose:

How can you explain the generation of text and events in a multi-user environment? How does the interaction between users, and between users and world, shape the experience of text and generate interesting player stories? (14)

Doesn’t this sound like participatory design?…Klastrup also gives us some wonderfully juicy quotes to use:

We are still at a stage in the study of digital communication and aesthetics where we still have to resort to “old” theory in order to speak meaningfully about these new digital phenomena, and the emergence of increasingly more and more hybrid genre phenomena such as alternate reality gaming (The Beast, Majestic) or online social spaces which are both games and construction sites (The Sims Online) demonstrates, it becomes more and more apparent that we must learn from a number of these “old” theories as well as from current writings on digital media by a variety of cyber researchers to explain networked aesthetic phenomena fully. (16)

Hmmm, ‘hybrid genre phenomena’…sounds like cross-media…But wait there’s more:

My intuition is that what we will see in the future will be a number of hybrid phenomena which contain elements of what, we traditionally used to define either as a game or a story, but which are also themselves altering the very notion of these concepts, and of what a game or a narrative can be. (18)

Ah wonderful! Klastrup goes on to deliver an alternate framing of narrative, games and text-production with her concept of a ‘virtual world’ which she terms as:

A virtual world is a persistent online representation which contains the possibility of synchronous communication between users and between user and world within the framework of a space designed as a navigable universe.
“Virtual worlds” are worlds, you can move in, through persistent representation(s)
of the user, in contrast to the imagined worlds of non-digital fictions, which are
worlds presented as inhabited, but are not actually inhabitable.
Virtual worlds are different from other forms of virtual environments in that they
cannot be imagined in their spatial totality. (27)

I’m sure there will be lots of hearty concepts that will add to the reframing currently making strides in the ‘interactive narrative’ domain, of which cross-media is part. (I’ve only just started reading her thesis, as well as Drew Davidson’s, Jill Walker’s and Tom’s-in-progress…). But I wanted to post because I was excited about the overlaps in approach. Indeed, Klastrup describes research interests as:

[I]interactive storytelling, forms of communication on the internet and persistent online (game) worlds and universes. Therefore I’m interested in phenomena such as transmedial worlds, websites which present entire universes, weblogs, interesting story experiments and forms of interaction which cut across all these genres of expression.

And forthcoming is a seemingly applicable paper: “Transmedial worlds - rethinking cyberworld design” (Klastrup, Lisbeth & Tosca, Susana) in Proceedings/IEICE Special Issue on Cyberworlds, spring 2005. Paper to be presented at Cyberworlds 2004.

Check out her personal page, her thesis page and her blog.

Following the previous post on Tom Apperley is the inclusion of another cross-media researcher, focusing on games: Drew Davidson. Drew contacted myself, and Monique, excited about finding other researchers in this area. Whereas Monique and myself were beginning our research at the beginning of the millenium, Davidson had just completed a dissertation.

Davidson completed his PhD in 2001. It is online, indeed, was only online (part of the move towards ‘electronic scholarship’,‘electracy’ and so on). Here is a snippet:

In discussing the narratives of Myst, Sandman,Ultima OnLine and MitterNachtSpiel I used a schema of narrative composed of four characteristics: setting, character, theme and plot. These four characteristics are the building blocks of narrative. Together they combine to give us a story.

My contention is that these four building blocks of narrative differ in degree in relation to each other across mediums. Looking at my objects of study has shown that these blocks do differ across mediums, but not necessarily because of the mediums. Instead, it seems to have more to do with the authors of the texts, and less to do with the characterisitics of the mediums themselves, that allows one block to foreground over the others. So, it becomes a matter of the authors’ choices and how they approach the medium that cause a narrative element to be foregrounded.

The Myst novels may have foregrounded character, but the medium of print is more than capable of having any of the narrative elements highlighted. The same can be said for the comics. Sandman had theme as the strongest perspective because of Gaiman and company’s choices in the story. Comics are also capable of having any element foregrounded. And similarly, the hypermedia objects of study may have foregrounded setting, but hypermedia is capable of having the other elements highlighted as well.

This is not a total loss. For while each medium is capable of having any of the elements foregrounded, the experience of these elements is different. Each medium demands a learned literacy in order to be fully engaged. You have to learn to “read” each medium. It is a performative difference in the immersion into the story across mediums. And while books and comics are relatively affordable, you need a computer in order to experience hypermedia (which is currently still an expensive purchase). In print, readers deal with the power and skill of the authors’ words. To immerse yourself into the story (into the plot, setting, charracters and themes) is to let the words describe the story for you. The story is filtered through words. With comics, readers now have words in conjunction with images. Immersion occurs as you see the elements illustrated before you. The story is refracted through the dance between words and images. And with hypermedia, readers are virtually placed within the story itself. You are immersed within the world of the story. You have to act in this world, exploring within the story, in order to experience the narrative.

There is also a temporal difference for the writers of the mediums. Print is mostly a solitary pursuit in which authors complete and publish the work. This is where authors let go of of their active part of the narrative, and the rest is in the hands of the readers. Comics have a similar ending point where the authors release the work to the readers, but there is usually a team working on the story, so there is a narrative collaboration prior to the finished document. In the case of a CD-ROM, hypermedia also has a ending point, where the product is released to the public. But with the internet, the ending point blurs. The “final” story is more ephemeral. Authors can continue to change the work, even as readers are engaging the story. In fact, that is exactly what has happened with this dissertation. Instead of handing in a final hard copy, printed version and waiting for comments to come back, I am continually making changes to the document and posting the new revisions up online. In fact, with the advent of XML (Extensible Markup Language), ASP (Active Server Pages), Java and other technologies on the web, dynamic interactivity in webpages can be automatic and determined by the readers themeselves. So, this dissertation could be automatically and dynamically (re)arranged anew everytime someone “reads” it. This can be done both individually and collectively, as the website (and the arguments therein) respond to the readers. A hypermedia document on the internet is an organic and rhizomatic experience for both readers and writers. The story changes.

Davidson, D. (2001) ‘Stories In Between’ [PhD] Department of Communication Studies, University of Texas at Austin.

Davidson has also written a fascinating paper on the cross-media work Myst:
‘The
Journey of Narrative: The story of Myst across two mediums’, where Myst and War of the Worlds are compared. We agree that Worlds is perhaps the poster-child of immersive design.

The media phenomena of these two narratives share some similarities and differences. Both share the novel form as part of the overall narrative flow. The War of the Worlds started in the novel and then was adapted to radio. Myst started and is continuing as a CD-ROM, but it had a middle section in the three novels. Both narratives are developed through the novel. And both narratives take advantage of a new and different medium to continue the narrative. Orson Welles and WKBW utilized the immediacy of radio to bring the audience into the drama. The listening audience was a part of the story, listening to “real” events that had consequences. Myst explores the capabilities of multimedia hypertext to allow for a nonlinear, interactive “reading” experience. The audience is a part of the story because the story will not unfold unless the reader/player puzzles through it. The audience is the impetus for the narrative’s progress.

A major difference between the two phenomena is the progression of the narratives. The adapted radio versions of The War of the Worlds were the same story as the novel. The difference was in the updating of time and place. Both of the broadcasts brought the story to a local setting and the present time. This took advantage of the immediacy of medium of radio and made the theatrical broadcasts seem to be actual events. So, while the story of a Martian invasion stayed the same, the time and place were changed to make the audience a part of the story in progress. In contrast, the Myst novels further developed the story that the audience puzzled through in the CD-ROM. So, the story was not the same across the mediums, it continued to grow and change. The novels added to the original CD-ROM and will help the audience to better puzzle through Riven. You do not need to read the novels in order to “play” the Riven, but it will help you to better understand the context of the new story through which you have to puzzle.

An interesting similarity between these two phenomena is how the new technologies are used to actively include the audience within the narrative. Welles and WKBW use the immediacy of radio to include the listening audience in the story, they are listening to the reporting of actual events that have real consequences
. Thus you have the public panic as people fulfilled their implicated role in the narrative. The listening audience was a part of the story in progress. The CD-ROM parts of the overall Myst narrative rely on the reader/player. The audience needs to become immersed in the environment and carry the story forward with their explorations. You are an inhabitant of this story that will not progress unless you make progress solving the puzzle(s).

Currently he is working on a paper analysing the videogame ‘Prince ‘Prince of Persia: Sands of Time‘ according to traditional plot diagrams and an interactive diagram he developed previously. Davidson is on the ball in looking at the relationship between interactivity and narrative in the cross-media paradigm (much like Apperley too — you 2 need to talk!). He’s also looking at ‘ubiquitous storytelling’, folksonomies and their similarity to the meaning-formation process of a cross-media reader and as an architecture for communities to co-create stories.

Davidson currently works as:

Academic Department Director for Game Art & Design and Interactive Media Design at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and is an Affiliated Professor in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a professor, producer and player of interactive media, exploring narratives and mediums across texts, comics, games and other media. Primarily, he is interested in conceptual interactive design, integrated narrative and interwoven media, collaborative design and development, applied media and game logics.

Lots of exciting ideas happening. I really look forward to hearing more from Drew.

Since Tom is now online as well I’m putting together a ‘People’ page, like the terms and works ones, with details on the areas researched by those we’re aware of thus far and their papers…it will be online soon.

Tom Apperley, fellow cross-media researcher at the University of Melbourne (different department though), is publishing his thesis-in-progress online.

Appereley is focusing on the game, specifically console, dimension of cross-media (where games are an ‘intertextual commodity’), and on ‘interactivity’. He is also doing a valuable ethnographic comparison of Venezuelan and Australian gamers. His posts include:

Preliminary Report on Venezuelan ‘Gaming Situation’

Subsequently I mentioned this game to other people in conversation I discovered that while the game was universally admired for its game-play and technical excellence, there was a general feeling of ambivalence towards the subject matter of the game. In short, while people were pleased that Venezuela was the setting for such a prominent game, they felt that the scenario was implausible. I interpreted this as a cognitive dissonance with the world-view of the game, which was designed with a North Americans audience in mind. To its intended audience the game was located within pre-existing tropes of anxiety involving terrorism, oil supplies and the Latino ‘Other’.

A listing of sites on Lara Croft for his research into the fans of Lara
General Ludological links
An article-in-progress on genre and games

The main argument is that the market-based categories of genre that have been developed in the context of computer games obscures the new medium’s crucial defining feature, by dividing them into categories (loosely) organized by their similarities to prior forms of mediation. The article explores the inherent tension between the conception of computer games as a unified new media form and the current fragmented genre-based approach that explicitly or implicitly concatenates computer games with prior media forms.

A draft of chapter one of his thesis
In this chapter I found, among other gems, a great proposal:

I suggest a third type of interaction exists; that of interaction with the rules of the interaction themselves. This type of interaction is radically different, as it allows the player to change the cybertext by altering its ergodic structure, rather than by making choices within that structure. The practice of altering the cybertext in this manner is known as ‘moding’.

Also, his first graduate seminar paper on designing a Research Method for X-box

The technology and practices associated with gaming encourages a new model of commodification and consumption. The transmedia intertextual commodity: here I am refering to the current ubiquitous trend in the mass media to remediate the same content across all media platforms. The Book/Film/Game/Happy Meal phenomena that is associated with most contemporary mass media products. While I believe on one hand this is a calculated marketing tool in the sense of a product reaching all kinds of demographics, to put it crudely a shotgun effect. On the other hand this form of commodification encourages a deliberate process of intertextual assemblage during the audiences production of meaning, which allows the audience to experience a sense that each product is a part of a wider mediated universe that is largely constructed in the minds of the audience through the process of assemblage of the disparate medias.

An article-in-progress: Queering the Game Player

Popular media portrayals of the activity of computer gaming, with few exceptions, associate the computer game with a male audience. In this article I will explore the implications of this linkage in order to foreshadow problems in the ethnographic enquiry I propose on the uses of x-box games and the x-box in everyday life. Part of my project here is to try to understand, how should I approach the gamer as an ethnographic subject. By considering gaming as an ‘a-priori’ masculine activity, I suggest that I would be ignoring the myriad practices and activities of female, gay and transgender gamers. My project in this article is to open the quotidian practices of gaming to include the heterogenous practices and pleasures that can only be accounted for by detaching games from the dominant discourse of masculinity in which they circulate; in short it is to ‘Queer’ the predominantly masculine field of games.

He has opened up comments on his blog so please feel free to contribute to his research. Great to be able to read your ideas Tom, and not just scribble down notes as you say them! Congrats on being online.

The 5th Symposium on Art and Multimedia Metanarrative is being held on the 28th and 29th of Jan (did anyone else know about this?!) and seems to be an interesting theme:

Fruit of having entered into complex formal systems, one could speak of the formulations made following the narrative/non-narrative duality of the meatnarrative (applying the prefix meta- in the sense of ‘after’, in the way that it has alsways been understood that metaphysics comes after physics). These new creations challenge established narrative models while at the same time raising the question as to which model(s) of (meta)narrativeness we are converging on, whether we can decide on this/these model(s) and to what extent we can continue maintaining borders between narration and other forms of contemporary creation.
[...]
The 5th Symposium…will use this referential framework to encourage and broaden reflection and offer an(other) showcase for the creative circulation of narratives or (meta)narratives. Three blocks have been established by way of thematic lines:

* “Desire versus destiny (how expectations of participation in the metanarative context are broadened).”
* “The rules of the game (how narratives and games are mutally influential in the generation of metanarrative experiences).”
* “The narrative continuum (how metanarratives become heirs to the artistic research of the last century).”

The starting point is the line of argumentation that if there’s a narrative, there can be an antinarrative, a non-narrative, a metanarrative…that there is and there has always been an antinarrative, etc; and all them are as old as narrative itself. Therefore I am for the assumption that there are continuous non narrative practices in the artistic creation area, from which we’ve inherited a great number of incursions into the audiovisual and multimedia expression and communication. (from blog)

In the artistic practice, current narratives are at a crossroads, as you put before, of difficult classification, and this precisely the most interesting challenge. (from blog).

It is interesting the uptake of the idea of convergence of narrative schemas — Jenkins’ ‘cultural convergence’ perhaps? I also like the idea of non-narratives existing alongside narratives. It is also good that they are addressing participation, the influence of medium-specific narratives on each other, and generally the confluence of narrative. Tick, tick, tick. Pity there aren’t any cross-media researchers (that I can see) there flying the flag. Many of the ideas, however, are there. Here are the links to the English website and the accompanying
Blog. I look forward to reading the papers for this one.

I have just discovered that I have been deleting emails that are inquiries re this site and not spam. If you’ve sent me an email and I haven’t responded — try again, all should be good now. How can you tell if someone is ignoring you if you’ve never met them? And how can I tell a genuine email re my website? Ah, we get so close and then so far away…

It is here: Monique’s paper from her session at the European Information Society Event that I contributed to is online as a pdf:

Crossmedia communication in the dynamic knowledge society
Paper offered to the European Commission
DG Information Society
Report of the IST Networking session N28
15 November 2004 The Hague

The paper is well skewed for policy decisions regarding ICT infrastructure and the Entertainment industry. The paper should help decision-makers understand the area and plan for cross-industry development.

Well done Monique.

As some of you may have seen in the terms, works and other resources links, there is another researcher looking at the phenomenon of cross-media storytelling. The latest researcher (that I’ve found, I’d love to know of more) is Jill Walker. Walker, web-celeb academic, has considered many aspects of storytelling in new media and produces, I think, canny insights into interactivity, storytelling and the experience of eliterature. I particularly like her work on Online Caroline, and would like to know more about her ideas on ‘fusion’ as explicated in her PhD. So, it is exciting that a researcher whose ideas I respect is turning her focus to cross-media storytelling.

Walker has established a webpage on her blog to keep those interested abreast of her activity on this topic. Thus far she has written 3 papers on the subject and is in the process of another and perhaps a book. I have included in the terms and works section of this website Walker’s descriptions, definitions and examples. Here, I’ll provide a bit of an overview of Walker’s approach but more importantly where I see us diverging. Although the area is young and so are our ideas, I think our divergences provide some interesting insights into the subject and will hopefully encourage further debate.

Walker’s approach is to compare works that are ‘bound’ in a media – a book or film – and have ‘self-contained’ narratives to those that require more than one session and medium to experience, and have been written by more than one author. Walker terms these as ‘distributed narrative’. The main paper, Distributed Narrative: Telling Stories Across Networks , provides an incredibly helpful clear and concise description of the networked and distributed phenomenon and details how narrative has changed:

A new kind of narrative is emerging from the network: the distributed
narrative. Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This paper begins an investigation into this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

Through a reworking of Aristotle’s ‘Dramatic Unities’ Walker presents the following ‘narrative disunities’, the ways ‘narrative can be fragmentarily distributed’:

1) Distribution in Time (can’t experience in a single session)
2) Distribution in Space (cannot experience in a single location or single medium)
3) Distribution of Authorship (collective, emergent authorship)

(See quotes in terms or go directly to Walker’s page to read further). The following are quotes from 2 version of the one paper: Distributed Narrative. They are the long version, which is referred to as DN and the short as DN, short version.

Walker sees distributed narrative as being broken-up, fragmented and without unity:

‘This is not an easy task, because it is hard to describe and locate things that are not things but connections.’ (DN, 1)

‘It is far easier to talk about a river or a human than to discuss the system of molecules or cells that make up each of these “things”.’ (DN, 3)

‘To write about these works that I claim are not unified, not things, not even, really, works, I’ve succumbed to traditional attempts at definition and categorisation. Perhaps this is necessary; perhaps it is something to pass through on the way to better ways of thinking around and using that which cannot easily be handled or commodified.’ (DN, 19)

‘Providing a complete definition of distributed narratives is unlikely to be possible, or productive, because the very nature of this way of telling stories is to escape the boundaries we have been used to.’ (DN, 2)

‘The web, and our networked culture, nurtures the breaking down of a different side of unity: the unities of distribution and of delivery.’ And refers to the disunities devices of Brecht and Beckett and Müller as shocking us (DN, 2).

Claims that unity is the opposite of distribution (DN, 2).

‘Understanding how narratives can be split open and spread…’ (DN, short version, 2)

‘Until recently, narratives have been constructed to achieve unity. While postmodern narratives open out into fragments and bricolage in content, plot and style, distributed narratives take this further, opening up the formal and physical aspects of the work and spreading themselves across time, space and the network.’ (DN, short version, 1)

This, fragmented, non-narrative, non-unified perception of cross-media storytelling: distributed narrative, is where Walker and I digress. I do see a unity, a total work of art emerging from the connections. I agree that it is not a singular schema — that it doesn’t operate by a single narrative design throughout the distribution across space, time and authorship and it does not adhere to the singular schemas we know. I do see a system however, in the sum of the work across space, time and authorship. The system operates in different ways according to the stage, mode and producer.

The way these works are designed, created and used is different. We have seen the development of narratives: medium-specific narrative (eliterature, games, film, etc) and delivery (serial, episodic etc.). I believe that a creator of a cross-media story needs to consider medium-specific narrative and those transmedial, and the emerging qualities inbetween; and participatory design, ‘interactive narrative’ and so on. There is also relationship between the mechanism of delivery and the content. As such, particular care is taken to create a storyworld that is interesting enough to be told and viewed over many TV seasons, over many film episodes or film serials, and now over franchises. With cross-media storytelling, special care is taken to create a core ‘meme’ if you like -– a logline, abstract or synopsis –- that is interesting enough (a ‘media virus’ if you like) to be followed over multiple media, over many sites within the same media, to be experienced over time (days, months and years), to incite participation (sharing of content, content creation and all the variants within this, purchasing of licences and of content, etc.).

My view is that what we’re seeing is the discovery and contemporary enunciation of what I term ‘polymorphic narrative’. The Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary defines ‘polymorphism’ as ‘the occurrence of something in several different forms’ (Moore (ed.), 1997, p.1040). The term ‘polymorphic narrative’ is intentionally polysemous, indeed synecdochical: it refers to the different narrative schemas (transmedial and medium-specific) and Narratologies developed by different producers diachronically and their relationships; and to a dynamic system of narrative. A dynamic system of narrative has to account for and encompasses medium-specific narrative, the transmedial qualities of nar
rative, distributed narrative and hybrids. Polymorphic narrative therefore, is an approach that considers the *subject* and the discipline that studies it as systems that are dynamic. A polymorphic narrative is the schema a cross-media work can be created and analysed by.

I’ve come to this perspective, likewise Walker, Monique de Haas, Tom Apperley, Henry Jenkins and Marsha Kinder because of our respective entry-points to and paths through cross-media storytelling (works and discourse). It should also be noted that Walker is concentrating on works that may have more than media, not a cross-media but a distributed media and time perspective. Which is different to myself, Monique, Tom and Henry who have looked at franchises as well (and some exclusively).

It is excellent that the area is already showing complexity through divergence: a sign of maturity. I think it is interesting that the medial, temporal and producer classifications, and the observations on searching and experiencing a ‘distributed’ work appear to be consistent across researchers but it is our views on narrative that differs. Which is, cheesily, the nature of the beast and the subject we’re investigating…

Just scanning over audio interviews over at IT Conversations and I came across an audio recording of a chapter from Lawrence Lessig’s (Professor of Law at Stanford Law School) book titled Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. The ideas discussed in it and the subsequent ‘derivative’ works created around it are very pertinent to a discussion I’m having with Monique De Haas on the different types of content creation (gee, we’re having fun and learning alot together but can’t someone else join in too!!?). We’re discussing appropriators, ‘textual poachers’ (Henry Jenkins), fan fiction, pirates and so on and looking at when an appropriator becomes an artist, and also how this relates to top-down management of rights etc. Lessig is acutely aware of the difficulty in defining a ‘creator’, a ‘pirate’, a ‘copyist’ and so on. I’ve only just started reading his book but here are some quotes from Lessig’s book that have resonated so far:

A free culture supports and protects creators and innovators. It does this directly by granting intellectual property rights. But it does so indirectly by limiting the reach of those rights, to guarantee that follow-on creators and innovators remain as free as possible from the control of the past. A free culture is not a culture without property, just as a free market is not a market in which everything is free. The opposite of a free culture is a “permission culture”—a culture in which creators get to create only with the permission of the powerful, or of creators from the past.(ix)

A free culture has been our past, but it will only be our future if we change the path we are on right now.(xv)

A free culture is not a culture without property; it is not a culture in which artists don’t get paid. A culture without property, or in which creators can’t get paid, is anarchy, not freedom. Anarchy is not what I advance here.

Instead, the free culture that I defend in this book is a balance between anarchy and control.(xvi)

…this book is about an effect of the Internet beyond the Internet itself: an effect upon how culture is made. My claim is that the Internet has induced an important and unrecognized change in that process.(7)

This rough divide between the free and the controlled has now been erased.9 The Internet has set the stage for this erasure and, pushed by big media, the law has now affected it. For the first time in our tradition, the ordinary ways in which individuals create and share culture fall within the reach of the regulation of the law, which has expanded to draw within its control a vast amount of culture and creativity that it never reached before. The technology that preserved the balance of our history—between uses of our culture that were free and uses of our culture that were only upon permission—has been undone. The consequence is that we are less and less a free culture, more and more a permission culture. (8)

Digital technologies, tied to the Internet, could produce a vastly more competitive and vibrant market for building and cultivating culture; that market could include a much wider and more diverse range of creators; those creators could produce and distribute a much more vibrant range of creativity; and depending upon a few important factors, those creators could earn more on average from this system than creators do today—all so long as the RCAs of our day don’t use the law to protect themselves against this competition.(9)

My fear is that unless we come to see this change, the war to rid the world of Internet “pirates” will also rid our culture of values that have been integral to our tradition from the start.(10)

To build upon or critique the culture around us one must ask, Oliver Twist–like, for permission first. Permission is, of course, often granted—but it is not often granted to the critical or the independent.(10)

There has never been a time in our history when more of our “culture” was as “owned” as it is now. And yet there has never been a time when the concentration of power to control the uses of culture has been as unquestioningly accepted as it is now.(12)

What I also love about the concept and the complementary content creation around it is the application of the ideas — the good ol’ putting your money where your mouth is. The book’s website offers not only further discussion and the whole book for free, but an index of ‘derivatives’ or ‘remixes’ from/of the book by people (fans). These works include audio versions, html, pdfs, pdas, flash, wikis and so on. Of course! This excitement and participation reminds me of the hacking of the Hackers movie website in 1995 (of which I can’t find the hacked version on the web anymore — anyone found it?).

Interesting and exciting stuff. But the discussion about types of participation and the issues around it really calls for a continuum of participation. I’m working on that at the mo…any ideas?