The first stories I can remember hearing were those from my grandfather. He said, “Hey kiddo, go grab me a beer, and I’ll tell you a story about Lon Koontz.” I was stunned. My name was Lon Koontz. Who could exist but me? So, I ran through their mobile home to the fridge in desert-hot Arizona and grabbed the man his beer. After a few stories about my great grandfather, he said, “Hey kiddo, go grab me a beer.” Despite the fact that the story had ended and I had already paid for his story by agreeing to grab him the first beer, I went running. I was sold on the product my grandfather was selling. That product was, of course, my grandfather. The dude kicked ass. Here’s a picture:
Before we look too deeply into my psyche and the associations I make (person as product) know that one of the reasons I loved my grandfather was because of the stories he told. I also loved him because he gave me the keys to his car when I was 13 years old and he was a cowboy!
I suspect this paradigm, stories for goods and services, has been true for some time; perhaps it goes back as far as the first words man used to barter goods. “I kill calf two hour ago. Fresh. Guarantee.” What came first the story or the pitch? What came first the story as entertainment or the story as advertisement? I’m not sure what came first advertising or fiction, but I assume they were born at the same moment or were born close enough together to earn the distinction as twins.
I bring this up only because I wish to suggest that advertising is as much a story telling driven line of work as is the labor required of traditional narrative fiction. It also goes without saying that one is better than the other. However, they are both forms of fiction. In this light, we might view current advertising campaigns as fictions used to sell products. Sure, yes, some campaigns do tell you what the products is, what it’s made of, how it was fabricated… But they also sell image. They define themselves fictionally as something relatable to the consumer. Tough dudes smoke. Healthy people eat… healthy food. These campaigns do not strike us as great art, and they are not, though they often display wonderful talents, but, again, they do tell stories. Recently, Google aired its first ever commercial during the Super Bowl, and it has become an excellent example, structurally, of what New Media Fiction should aspire to accomplish.
TechCrunch, and almost every other article that discussed the ad, described it as a story about two people falling in love, and told from the POV of one man’s search queries. Here’s TechCrunch’s synopsis: “The tale begins with a query for “study abroad Paris France”, moves on to “impress a French girl” and eventually makes it all the way to “how to assemble a crib”, showcasing Google’s technology in a way that pretty much everyone can relate to.” Again, the ad is a story or, according to TechCrunch, “a tale.” Fascinating. Now that we have that out of the way we can examine how this type of tale works, why it works, and what tools it utilized.
Under the “Google Search Stories” Profile users are offered an “About Me” section, a familiar New Media staple. Here it is:
About Me:
Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story. These videos show that anyone can do anything when paired with the power of search.
The best part of the pitch is that it’s true! Search has changed us, made more things possible because of the information to which we are given access, but it is a story, too. In fact, it functions as an example (if incomplete) of New Media Fiction.
First, let’s take a look at the ad the Super Bowl made famous.
Pretty great, right? Sure, yes, it isn’t great art, but it is moving, allows for reflection, and is based, primarily on text. It also uses sound quite well, music and sound effects (an airplane taking off, a man speaking French, spoons in coffee cups, a funny-foreign telephone ringing, more planes, music playing in a church, and a baby’s laughter.) These effects work to focus the reader on the text while they, subliminally, queue emotion. My favorite moment is when we hear a man say “Bonjour.” This bit of French makes the reader uncomfortable. We want to know why French is being used, and we turn to the text for answers. As we read, we might miss, unless we are really listening, a French woman say “tu es tres migon.” Instead, we read it as the screen pans to show us the translation. It’s the text that does the heavy lifting required for plot construction. These tools, sound effects and dialogue, focus the reader rather than distract them. We hear the voice, and we begin to construct our understanding of the French woman based on that voice. We do not see her face. We do not see her in action. Instead, the small detail we get, her voice, is something that helps us construct an image of the character. Its incompleteness, essentially, transforms it into an abstraction. We must use our imaginations to construct a complete image of the character. This is not unlike what we do when confronted with the cold abstractions of print. In this case, the French woman’s voice may not be as cold an abstraction as its print based equivalent, but it is compelling beyond what print offers.
All of that being said, the ad is a video. It is static. It does not bend to the will of the reader unless they press pause, pressing pause ends the experience at the cost of contemplation. That is, pausing as we read we are offered the opportunity to digest, consider, and carry with us, into the next sentence, anything we may have gleaned from the experience to that point. Ending a video stops the process. Without going much further into this difference, my point is that the video ad from Google fails because it does not allow the levels of interactivity necessary to create a successful form of New Media Fiction. New Media Fiction must rely on the experience of text first, using other media to augment the effects of reading.
Neil Postman says this about print:
“From Erasmus in the sixteenth century to Elizabeth Eisenstein in the twentieth, almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one’s habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the “analytic management of knowledge.” To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense. It also means to weigh ideas, to compare and contrast assertions, to connect one generalization to another. To accomplish this, one must achieve a certain distance from the words themselves, which is, in fact, encouraged by the isolated and impersonal text. That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”
Postman is right! More specifically, he’s right about why text works. It does allow us a moment to pause, to reflect, and to accomplish these things at a pace determined by the reader. In this respect, Google’s ad fails to provide what print offers. If this ad were made of pages and the pages moved at the speed the user determined all would be fine, even that nagging part about achieving “a certain distance from the words themselves.” In fact, we can argue that the sounds and images also give us distance from the text, allowing us to more easily access the story (it’s message is something entirely different). The text is there, the behavior desired on the part of Postman and Walter Ong are fulfilled. You cannot passively watch that video. You have to engage with it, read it, to understand it.
To sum up why it is representative of New Media Fiction, it uses a variety of media to accomplish a singular thing: the telling of a story. It tells its story in a new way, one that is not often used by fiction writers, but one that is as familiar to users as print is to readers.
First, the ad is text based. Like New Media Fiction, text should be front and center, should aspire to use text as its primary tool and allow for other media to augment it. Why? Print is what’s at stake, and it is the best representation of the human mind that we have available to us. However, we encounter many other modes of expression that create, especially when used in conjunction to produce a message, powerful internal experiences. The Google ad tells a story with text presented on the platform we use to access the Web most often. It’s made more powerful because it allows the idea of a search engine to be represented visually as we know it. It’s truth becomes more concrete, and if the aspiration of art is to transform the abstract into something concrete, poets write about love as represented in nature because they hope to define, even momentarily, love.
Currently, there are far more users than there are readers, and taking advantage of this is paramount if fiction is to continue as a viable form of art and communication. The only thing the ad doesn’t do, provide interactivity in a more streamlined way. That is, interactivity does occur, but it does not occur within the ad (in the case the work). Instead, the Web offers a platform for response and the comments section below the ad, as it appears on YouTube, provide user an opportunity to share their responses and explore the work in ways that fiction only provides when people come together at book clubs.
Though the spot seems to ignore the possibility of interactivity, that’s just not the case, but it’s also not designed to be interactive. It’s interactivity is a result of the Web itself. The Web and the comments section below the posted video create an opportunity for the ad to become something that grows beyond its presentation. There are over 4,000 responses under one representation of the ad. Despite being a static, moving image, the power of the ad, the reason why over 4 million people have turned to YouTube to engage with it (not to mention the millions who saw the ad during the Super Bowl), is so strong that users have created, for themselves, a way to make the story their own.
Type in “parisian love parody” in YouTube’s search engine (the second most popular search engine on the Web) and you’ll find over 700 stories riffing off the first. The following response tickles me because it attempts, through parody, to deconstruct the “preciousness, of the original ad.
This response has generated over 25, 000 views. It has provided people an opportunity to extend the experience of the first and provided new place to discuss the first. If that many people were reading short stories, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Not to mention that this response is a form of story telling as well, one that is made possible only because new media exists. The interactivity, the audience’s willingness to search and find this response, also implies a user base that is interested in these stories, more interested than stories presented in magazines like the New Yorker.
Sure, yes, the success of these two examples may also be based on their brevity, a painful truth that reveals one of the reasons fiction, especially the short story and the novel, are not as successful as film or television. The density of the story, its thematic heft and its symbolic power, pale in comparison to great works of literature. Rather than make the ad less attractive because of its deficiencies, an argument suggesting that it is more “successful” (if we base success, as the market does, on how many people read the work) than traditional narrative fiction because it is easier to access is legitimate, too. But, we cannot deny that the mode of story telling here is successful.
What strikes me as particularly interesting is the need for the ad. Google didn’t need the ad to promote its search functionality. It is what they’re “most famous for.” They needed the ad because it sold Google as a particular type of company, one that disappears and allows users to live their lives. Building their brand helps them sell more products. In Google’s case, this branding is an attempt to endear themselves to a customer base that may, one day, buy Android phones, Android laptops, Android TV set boxes, and so on. The ad did more for Google’s brand than it did for its search traffic.
TechCrunch, a popular tech blog, had this to say, “As predicted, Hell has indeed frozen over. Yesterday, Google CEO Eric Schmidt sent a tweet hinting at something most people probably never expected to see: a Google Super Bowl ad. But the contents of the ad, and even the product it would be promoting, remained a mystery. Moments ago some 90 million Americans watched as Google showed off the search functionality that it’s famous for, in an ad called Parisian Love.”
I end here because it is important to remember that the ad is just an ad. Unlike fiction, which aspires only to sell you the book and provide the experience, the ad targets us and our emotions, hoping to draw us to a brand, but in a time where fiction chooses to ignore the tools it is now offered, we must look anywhere for representations of what will, undoubtedly, become a new means of expression for fiction.
Let’s end with more Postman: “I do not mean to imply that prior to the written word analytic thought was not possible. I am referring here not to the potentialities of the individual mind but to the predispositions of a cultural mind-set. In a culture dominated by print, public discourse tends to be characterized by a coherent, orderly arrangement of facts and ideas. The public for whom it is intended is generally competent to manage such discourse. In a print culture, writers make mistakes when they lie, contradict themselves, fail to support their generalizations, try to enforce illogical connections. In a print culture, readers make mistakes when they don’t notice, or even worse, don’t care.”
Google helps people find people, learn about people, and help people. It is a part of our consciousness. We behave differently because of it. The power of the text, too, is palpable, as moving as a James Cameron film, perhaps, but still more effective because text was used and still more effective because of what text represents. What it represents, of course, are moments like those, romanticized by the way it uses mundane “searches” to, with a heavy hand, remind us of key moments in the couple’s lives and our lives, but they do so to sell us something. Fiction should not be used for such things (unless you’re rewarding your grandfather) and this, more than the fact that it is a video, a static representation of story, is the reason it won’t be used in any literature courses.
New Media Fiction 