Pan Narrans and the Open Source Fiction project

The new edition of newmediastudies is out now. Theme: participatory culture. Feeling: oh my god, that is the context discourse of my end thesis I am struggling with for already six months. Idea: lets test the new insights I am proposing in my thesis, so I can get some fresh perspective in the form of merciless, though sustained and founded, feedback. Simultaneously creating an open briefing for my tutor who might already gave up on my MA graduating this year. Please note that the insights are thoroughly founded in the actual thesis. This is just an overview of my thesis journey so far.

Well, first things first. In my endless and tiring ambition to break walls and shape new boundaries I came with the idea to write my end thesis about the abstract phenomenon ‘Open Source Fiction’(OSF). A concept  that has overlapping characteristics with more familiar concepts as ‘interactive storytelling’ and the more broad defined  ‘collaborative writing’. Thinking I coined the term, I stumbled with my first google search upon a workshop, a writers project and even a whole website www.opensourcesciencefiction.com. Though all projects shared my curiosity about the possibilities and assumptions that come with the term, they all are dying in their call for a  system that can facilitate an open source writing environment, as we speak.

With all my New Media & Digital Culture baggage it then stroke me. We use those systems every day, only we don’t see them as such. We call them Social Media! The next step for me was to look at those vague projects as the twitter-book, the twitter-screenplay and lots of other ‘lets use twitter to create a story’ projects that came to existence the last years. Scanning and analyzing them lead me to the quick conclusion that the creation of fiction via social media is not bound to be a success, as long as we don’t shape the context in which open stories can flourish to unique and (re)productive media texts. The twitter projects mostly lead to the most unreadable plots and storylines due to the bewildering-effect of ‘more minds, one plot’. It made me aware of the necessity of the plot, as in, the kernel code for the open source community: it needs to be open on forehand. At this point I was sure: OSF is the right term, it only needs the right cultural and technological context in which it can work. Or in other words: the rules of the game had to be shaped. One thing I could hold on to was that the plot of an Open Source story is as the kernel code of an open source project, metaphorical speaking.

So off I went. Into the depths , balancing on the frontiers of our new mediascape and the land of the unknown. Constantly questioning myself: what the hell did you get yourself into?? My first step towards the first proper cultural context in which ‘OSF via social media’ can flourish was the changing of my perspective on social media itself. In the normal sense we view social media from the ‘social’ point of view. I needed to look at social media from the ‘narrative’ point of view. How can we regard social media as ‘narrative creator’? Instinctively it felt good to look at social media in this way. I saw dialogues, storylines, story twists, character building and references being made when I looked at my facebook profile. But it didn’t answered my question: how are we experiencing narratives in our social media use?

The answer came from unexpected direction. In my early stage of thesis-proposal I was convinced, for obvious but right now, not important reasons, I needed to read a lot about ‘performance’ in our mediatized culture. As a NMDC student you than soon will turn to the work of Philip Auslander. His view on the role of liveness in our mediatized culture (where the reference point is the television) led me to the insight that the role of liveness is being overtaken by the principle of real-time in a mediatized culture where the reference point is being dissolved into cyberspace. To be more clear: my statement here is that the urgency of the live experience in the era of television has evolved into the experience of real-time content in the era of the Internet. And where our motivation for the live experience was held up in the claim for authenticity of the mediatized (Auslander, 1999), our motivation for the registration of real-time content is being held up in our need to know  ‘if that what is happening right now’, changes the situation of which we thought was ‘true’. Or: our motivation has being shifted to domain of the narrative since we want to know if the story we are following is evolving.

Not being able to find any academic work in the field of new media studies that sustained or considered this point of view I still felt in loose sand (please if someone does know work that corresponds or emulates with my insight, please let me know). Looking outside the new media field, I did came across the very interesting notion of Daniel Clement Dennet and his ‘multiple draft’ theory.

“According to the Multiple Drafts model, all varieties of perception — indeed, all varieties of thought or mental activity — are accomplished in the brain by parallel, multitrack processes of interpretation and elaboration of sensory inputs. Information entering the nervous system is under continuous ‘editorial revision’” (Dennett 1991, 111).

Our constant exposure to real -time content on Facebook and Twitter concurred with this notion of Dennet. If the status update of a facebook friend of mine changes from “Working on my thesis” into “Going home to visit my parents”. My ‘multiple-draft’ function in my brain fills in the missing storylines. I might imagine him driving home in a car. Another friend maybe knows for a fact that the person does not own a car and therefor imagines him on a bike, creating ‘multiple drafts’ of one story.

In this way we can say that the loose statements on facebook and twitter stimulates the narrative function of our brain, making us better and better storytellers. Perhaps even  fulfilling our destiny of the ‘Pan Narran’ (the storytelling ape). Aware of the dangerous ground of slippery determinism I quickly go back to what this insight really means for my thesis. I adopted it as the ‘a priori’ context/condition in which we can understand ‘OSF via Social Media’. It made me sum up that the notion about the real-time mechanism on social networks makes of us all ‘the witness of a performative action’ because we are constantly witness of an action (in the form of a comment, status update or tweet) that changes our reality of which we thought was true.

The search for the other cultural and technological conditions in which OSF via social media can flourish is being done right now. The question I ask: in which way is OSF ‘open source’? My method: take the actor network of Marianne van den Boomen and Mirko Tobias Schäffer in their article ‘ Will the revolution be Open Source’ and make a similar actor network for OSF (Boomen en Schäfer, 2006). Steering up the nodes that are needed. Giving me more stable ground to work on.

Of what I am sure already is that in our participatory culture  there should be more research on the function of the real-time mechanism with which we decide what ‘to take in’ and what ‘to get out’ (distribution and production). It may lead to more insights in the why and how of the  architecture of our new mediascape. Especially in the liveness vs real-time debate we can find a lot of pinpoints from where we can explore new territory and discover new nodes in the ever changing actor network of new media. Perhaps it even can make the network three dimensional, being altered as that little toy in the form of a metal cage construction that could be adjusted in any form you wanted without breaking (I am already searching for the name of that toy for months. Please if anyone knows what I am talking about, let me know).

For my tutor to know: the experiment part is being dismissed. I totally focus on the theoretical implications I get entwined with. Though the basis of my thesis proposal is still the same. I am still answering that same question according the same structure that got the green light. I still am creating the adequate cultural and technological conditions under which OSF via social media can flourish. And I still aim to graduate before the end of this year.

Please, any comment, insight, direction or another form of founded criticism are welcome. Thanks on forehand!

Quoted works

Auslander, Philip. Liveness : performance in a mediatized culture. London: Routledge, 1999.

Boomen, Marianne van den, en Mirko Tobias Schäfer. „Will the revolution be open-sourced? How open source travels through society.” How open is the future? Economic, social and cultural scenarios inspired by Free, 2005: 1-25.

Dennett, Clement Daniël. Consciousness Explained. New York: Back Bay Books, 1991.