City Threads
By James Decker
Hamstrung? That might be the right word. You can feel that way trying
to analyze what is a major development, what a minor trend, and what
a forced attempt to capitalize on the hyper-hype of Internet based
media. How to make sense of it? The revolution might not come charging
all at once over the horizon. It might creep up from within. As entertainment
news, hard news, and investment news join one another alongside product
reviews, marketing features, and sports scandals, the entire experience
begins to resemble well… nonlinear fiction as much as journalism.
Now that's interesting. A lot of fiction writers are wondering how
best to create non-linear narratives. And here the blurred boundary
between news and entertainment may offer some insights. You can see
it happening now at http://www.cnn.com. The most effective news anchor
is mysterious, seemingly aware of facts that aren't getting reported
as rumors and amateur video shine like pure news gold. For fiction
writers, nonlinear narrative is less and less the vision of a single
author and more the perception of real experience, reported, refigured,
and brought to some emotional or intellectual purpose. Are "consumers"
of fiction and news beginning to see themselves on equal footing with
authors and news anchors? Find a juicy article on some backwaters
Web site and it might qualify for a rewrite and re-mail to your personal
network of friends. Your filter has to be a tight weave though, the
real news like the real jokes come less often. A news anchor has no
personality if he's just talking all the time. An author has no experience
if she's writing all the time. Am I making this up, or are new standards
for good, reliable, and effective media changing? I suppose it's subjective.
Anticipating these changes may leave us hamstrung, but enterprising
folks will keep an eye on the possibilities. One student experiment
in hypertext fiction is called City Threads. It turns an eye to the
city of Seattle, Washington as the organizing element of a nonlinear
story. The premise of City Threads is to explore the lives of three
million people living in Seattle on a single day. Various writers,
including you, can submit a story that intersects with the others,
runs parallel to them, or actually resembles your own real life story
. Yes, the premise is a little flat and there's no hope of getting
to the three million character mark; but the notion of tweaking scale
is the interesting concept here. There's nothing at City Threads to
put the fear into AOL Time Warner just yet… unless it's the idea
that daily news could be organized by some other means than headlines.
City Threads organizes information in a couple of interesting ways
that allow for comparisons and juxtapositions that topical categories
couldn't allow. A child's perspective might surprise us nested as
a hyperlink within a police officer's account. And the pleasure of
reading crosswise through a range of stories is familiar to any who
surf CNN. As events unfold, a single incident can serve as a pivot
to multiple perspectives of that same incident, a passage or piece
of dialogue serving as hyperlink to the same text in a different contexts.
Similarly, objects and artifacts can produce an interesting response
in readers. (for me anyway).
City Threads is an experiment and so it's allowed to fail. As it
does, it becomes clear that much information distributed via the Web
imitates the visual and verbal forms of print and broadcast media.
To ignore the devices that do work as ways of making meaning in City
Threads is to ignore natural curiosities of readers using new technologies.
To ignore how news teaches its tricks to non-linear narrative and
how fiction is beginning to show through the rhetoric of broadcast
news is to deny that lately we are all hamstrung.