Making Users Out of Readers: or Taking Advantage of Web Tools for the Creation of New Literary Forms

In 1996, The Atlantic Online sent Ralph Lombreglia a “Cyber Lit Quiz.” He passed.

Wen Stephenson started the email exchange (something perhaps novel at the time) with this question: “Do you sense that there’s a crisis in our literary culture? And if so, or if there’s just the perception of a crisis, how much of it has to do with new digital, interactive media? Have the Web and other digital media become scapegoats?”

It’s easy enough to peel away the layers of history here. The term “Web 2.0” shows up in 2004, when Tim O’Reilly organized the “Web 2.0 Conference.” The new name didn’t imply a change in the structure of the Web, rather it marked the moment when the Web had grown up. Web applications were born and allowed for diverse new methods of interactivity, including information sharing, interoperability, design, and collaboration. The hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, and blogs that grew in this new space have effectively changed the way we communicate forever. Although the Web may not have changed, the uses we discovered for it had suddenly, and irrevocably changed us. The epistemological shift that occurred as a result has affected every aspect of our society and how we integrate ourselves into it because the Web became another interactive space, something closer to our “real” lives, and, therefore, infinitely richer than any other medium to come before it. This interactivity produces for us a second life, another space to explore what it means to be human, even if the circumstances of that life are conceptually and practically new.

Much of our social lives have moved into this space, and for good reason. The Web offers, reproduces, and recreates the platform of experience. The best example of this success is Facebook. It is so successful that over 400 million users have some virtual form of their life loaded onto the Internet. The ways in which these virtual lives intertwine with our “real” lives has become so integrated that trying to separate them conceptually is a mistake. The Web has given us more than a second representation, it has given us a tool to live a different kind of life. If each Facebook user has, on average, 130 friends, and those users can share media with friends in the spirit of opening up to them, of sharing the information that they use to personally document their own lives, why isn’t fiction targeting these users and the tools they use to create impressive, distinct representations of characters, their community, and interests?

If we view the Web 2.0 as a resource for users, we must also see that its success as a resource is dependent on its viability as an interactive resource. Users can now interact with other users or alter a site’s content. This differs drastically from the, mostly, static websites of the past, where users were more like “viewers.’ This passive viewing experience provided novelty rather than innovation. When the Web changed, so did we, so did everything.

Facebook is a perfect example of this grown up Web 2.0 experience. The reason it has become so successful, arguably, is because it promotes the notion of interactivity, and does so devotedly. Over a “million developers and entrepreneurs from more than 180 countries” are currently developing applications or other experiences for Facebook. What’s more interesting is that 70% of Facebook users engage with Platform applications. Not only are they logging in they are also utilizing the Platform and all of its gifts. These tools are richer than the tools employed by fiction, so rich, in fact, that journalism, business, commerce, television, education, and more have begun to use services like Facebook as a tool to reach a larger audience, offering them their preferred means of access to do so.

Ralph Lombreglia answer to the Atlantic Online question is this, “There is a great crisis in our literary culture, but it was not engendered by digital media. In fact, computers and the World Wide Web may well prove to be the salvation of the written word.”

Lombreglia strikes me as a man who happens to be very good at whatever he wants to be good at. This includes his fiction and the fact that the man teaches at MIT, a sure sign that his brain is bigger than most. He realizes that, like all art, fiction will continue only if there is a viable market for it. That is, he believes that the crisis literature faces is not its art but its commerce.

He continues: “The villain in our progressive, collective loss of soul is the worship of personal financial enrichment as the ultimate ideal of human life, with the gross misuse of TV technology as the villain’s main mesmerizing device. What more do I need to say?”

“Personal enrichment” is the goal, minus the focus on personal financial enrichment, according to Lombreglia. I’m no mind reader, but Lombreglia seems to believe that there’s more to life than financial success. Instead, we hope that our lives are filled by experience that leads us closer to understanding who we are, what we’re here to do, etc. The sad news is that the Web seems to have also replaced TV as our main, mesmerizing device. However, it isn’t all bad. Arguably, the interactivity, the ability to annihilate distance and deliver rich, worthwhile content to users (baby pictures, emails, birthday wishes) makes this medium different than the other, better.

Lombreglia finishes off his first answer by saying, “Apparently, we need a lot of obedient, unreflective people to make this whole system work. After organized religion, the “traditional” expression of personal inner life and the source of collective soul is art. But our present political “leadership” is withdrawing public support for the arts, and in the corporate world “art” means a boardroom painting whose color scheme goes with the power furniture, and maybe dropping some bucks on some artists somewhere as a tax write-off.”

He sure sounds pissed, and it’s hard to blame him, but he is also mistaken. The “obedient, unreflective people” needed to make the “system” work were never fans of fiction, either because they weren’t exposed to it or because they hadn’t learned how to use it. The Internet offers a wholly new experience for people, changing how they behave when engaged with either medium. That is, the Web user is different from the television viewer because he or she is engaged in an activity that asks them to reflect, to consider, and to act. They don’t have to obey either. They can do what they like, and because of the massive amount of content available to them they must not only actively engage in discovering the content that they wish to find (an argument for diversity on the Web, representative by service like Twitter, smaller communities that gather around blogs, or even the viewing and social experience of a television based technology like Boxee) they must also have the necessary skill set required to interact with these services. The Web has created smarter, more adept users. Their ability to categorize, remember, and utilize information gathered from the Web is supported by the tools they utilize to store it. Memory is now on a server. Links provide access to information that behaves as an adjunct to material. The possibilities are so endless that our experience on the Web is much like wandering Wonderland, each link takes us down another rabbit hole, whether or not we resurface in the world we began in is another matter entirely, but it is an interesting one. What would fiction be like if it tried to mimic the ways we get lost surfing the Web? What new stories can appear when the ways in which we acquire knowledge have changed? Our tolerance for footnotes has, perhaps, changed as a direct result. Is that interesting? Perhaps, but footnotes are static as well….

So, what does this have to do with New Media Fiction? Everything. Fiction ignores, to its peril, a diverse user base already skilled at utilizing the Web to engage in new forms of interaction. They crave rich media experiences, and that craving isn’t always satiated by sweets. The Web has become the second most likely resource for our news and information, just below television, and it will, no doubt, continue to grow until it overtakes that medium. In fact, television is already beginning to rely heavily on the Web as an adjunct to the experience it has provided since cable programming was introduced.

Arguably, television is better suited to deliver the Web experience to users. It is, in essence, a larger screen by which to view the Web, but it is not designed to do so. It is a medium that delivers a particular experience. Television is, at its heart, a shared experience, or at least one created to deliver a captive experience where viewers engage by passively acknowledging the sounds and images that are produced for the viewer’s entertainment. The Web is a singular, solitary user experience. One must access it independently, and engage with others singularly. Television excludes the viewer from the production of the material. The Web encourages interactivity, demands it. That is, watching the Web from a TV is impossible. Like TV the user must find programming and select it. However, the Web encourages repeated interactivity. We cannot simply watch, we must interact with the Web. For this reason, the experience the Web offers in the living room is different from the experience it offers behind a desktop computer, different from even the experience it offers behind a lap top, different still (perhaps much more so) when experienced holding a mobile device. However, those experiences offer interactivity to suit fiction.

Like the fiction reader, the Web user begins his or her experience alone and then engages with the material. However, fiction, as it exists today, is a limited experience, one that does not offer or provided the varied levels of interactivity produced by the Web. The challenge for new writers is to see this opportunity, to develop programs and new story telling devices that provide new experiences for the reader, to make the reader something closer to the user. This does not insist that “traditional narrative text” is dead, but it sure looks like it. However, text will always remain the key ingredient of fiction. It must continue to be featured more prominently than other media, and it must bend these other media (image, sound) to provide opportunities not commonly provided by fiction.

What makes 1996 different from 2004 are our tools for production.

The arts are our second religion. The decline of reading behaviour may correlate to the increasing scope and range of the Internet, but the Internet is changing, growing, trying to get comfortable. Instead of turning to the arts as an opportunity to engage in the “collective soul” we have turned to the web as an experiment, as a way to live lives that we wouldn’t live independent of the Web. We have created a virtual soul, an identity unbound by the body. Because we have done so, we have also created opportunities to engage in a more experimental forms of identity building, one that because it is not bound to the real world, makes any Facebook user an unreliable narrator, a philosopher, or something else.

We are reading less as we age, and we are reading less than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago. This decline is relative to the increasing popularity of television and will no doubt continue to be effected by continued Web usage. In order for fiction to survive, it must stop purging readers or it must join readers where they exist, where they live and where they interact, and it must do so by using the tools that these users are familiar with.

Tune in next time when I get to talk a bit more about the possibility of New Media Fiction and the adaptation! It’ll be another painful exercise in academic voice.

Thanks,
Lon Koontz