Tom Armitage - Telling Stories: what Homer, Dickens and Marvel Comics can teach your (social) software
Reboot8
social sofware design through the lens of serial fiction
Serial Publishing
Dickens’s books were published in monthly installments
Pickwick Club
For the publisher you recoupe your costs faster
More people can afford it
More people can review
It makes the story more manageable and the serial structure enforces structure.
Placing data on public display = Publishing
A personal blog/journal adds up to fragments of a life
“I think all onvels are actually compounded short stories. […]” David Mitchell
Datad data
blog: tajmahal, infovore
Archives
Technorati comments
Feedback loops
Statistics (see JJG’s talk)
- Epic
telling the same story over and over again
Homer’s huge stories: Illiad + Odyssey
epithet
convention
meter
formula
Story you keep telling over and over again: Sign-up form
Only ask stuff you need to know
Profiles should be different
Parallel stories in multiple accounts
Don’t assume too much continuity, it’s not that important, keeping writing is
- Retroactive Continuity
adding new information to historical material
deliberateyl changing previously established facts
Marvel: Crisis on infinite earths
Flickr: replace button
- Fiction
telling untruths to make a better sturry
Truth: something with no deliberate dishonesty
The Doorbells of Florence
playful fiction on forums, MMORPG
Identity
Personas are very important, real names not so much
Expect people to give false details
Kaycee Nicole Swenson, lying pretending to be a girl dying of leukemia
There’s no truth or fiction flag on the internet.
People can detect if stuff is untrue or unhealthy or so.
- Telling the story
Theh poet should in fact speak as little as possible in his own person since in what he himself says he is not an imitator.
Plot vs. narrative
Video games make terrible films, ’the narrative is always up for grabs'
Breedster
Conclusion
Tell stories
Fiction can creep in
