Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
Ugh, Monday… if you’re feeling like I’m feeling, you could do with some light entertainment. Well, this should be just the ticket – especially for those of you a little jaded with the proliferation of barely defined yet still rapidly ubiquitous and cliché-ridden subgenres of fiction. You see, there’s a webcomic called Wondermark, and a few weeks back its creator drew the wonderfully cod-steampunk Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000.
Which is funny enough alone, but – the internet being the internet – someone else rapidly threw together the code to automate the procedure, allowing you to create your very own fake fictional framework at the merest click of a mouse. So go have a play – once my tasks for the day are complete I will be settling down to write a story entitled “The Cosmoblades”:
In a post-apocalyptic Aztec empire, a young wisecracking mercenary stumbles across an otherworldly portal which spurs him into conflict with a government conspiracy, with the help of a leather-clad female in shades and her reference book, culminating in eternal love professed without irony.
All the chores of theme and plot swept away, as by an unobtrusive yet efficient man-servant. Huzzah! [original comic seen via loads of people but initially via Jay Lake; automated version via MetaFilter]
Ever have trouble thinking up character names for your fiction?
Gareth L Powell takes the quick route of simply opening his spam email folder and looking at the pre-randomised names in the “From” field, but Robin Sloan (who we mentioned in passing when talking about new publishing business models) went into a little more in depth: he ran a bunch of Google AdWords campaigns to find the name people were most interested in reading about.
Here’s what I did:
- Created a campaign attached to a bundle of search terms: mystery, detective story, sherlock holmes, noir, and more like those.
- Came up with a whole set of names, basically wide variations on a theme. One was my original pick, but I liked all of them. Then, I created an ad for each one, all with the same body text but each with a different name swapped in for the headline.
- Allocated a small budget ($40, to be exact) and kicked off the campaign. And wow there are a lot of people searching for stuff on Google. Over the span of 24 hours, my ads made about 100,000 impressions.
Sounds a bit like a very convoluted form of displacement activity, no? Well, Sloan’s aware of that, but it’s part of his overall writing philosophy:
… okay, I’ll be honest. This was mostly just an excuse to try a new tool. Any nerd will tell you that tools can provide their own intrinsic rewards. There’s an aspect of exploration to it, too: you’re pressing out into new tool-territory, learning about what you can and can’t do.
This little AdWords test is a first step. Mechanical Turk might be next. I mean, imagine — this is the sci-fi extrapolation — imagine highlighting a block of text, choosing a menu item called Test the way you’d choose Spellcheck today, and when you do, a little timer appears next to it. Five minutes later, ding — the timer goes off and you have the results right there, floating over the text. Aggregated feedback from an anonymous swarm of readers: “I stumbled here,” “this variation works better,” “this line rings false.”
That might sound naive — it’s definitely oversimplified — but I think there might be something useful lurking in this particular tool-territory.
Crowd-sourced micro-fragment beta-reading… for some reason, my brain wants to rebel against the idea (because it doesn’t fit into the pre-established set of writer behaviours, I guess), but that’s probably as good a sign as any that it might actually work. [via GalleyCat]
One could be cynical and assume that Sloan performed the AdWords experiment as much for the potential publicity as for practical purposes, but if that’s the case, hey – it’s worked, hasn’t it? Writers have never really had the same opportunity as visual artists or musicians to experiment publically with methodologies up until now… maybe this sort of “performance writing” will fill that PR void we were talking about before? Nothing gets a link passed around as effectively as novelty.
One of the more perennial modern rants is the one that decries the internet (or computers in general, or modern popular culture, or text messaging) as the ultimate enemy of literacy, a corrosive reagent eroding our ability to use the written word effectively – we’ve mentioned it quite a few times before here at Futurismic, in fact.
Well, not everyone agrees with that assessment… and it turns out that research bears out the opposite conclusion. Clive Thompson takes the podium at Wired to discuss the research of Andrea Lunsford, a professor of writing and rhetoric who is convinced that the internet is actually producing “a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization”:
From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
[…] For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.
But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.
Of course, the question as to whether Ancient Greek traditions of rhetoric hold the same validity today as they did in the time of Plato and Aristotle is open to debate… but the Cambrian explosion in our production of text is inescapable. Perhaps the public nature of web content is actually a Darwinian force, developing our ability to communicate, discuss and debate to ever greater levels of rhetorical skill? [via SlashDot]
Well, everywhere apart from YouTube comment threads, I guess.
Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]