Articles
With all the buzz about the wisdom of crowds? and mass intelligence? someone had to be brave ( crazy?) enough to try mass creativity?.
On February 1st, the Penguin publishing company boldly launched amillionpenquins.com - an experiment in collaborative fiction - a dangerous experiment according to some of the participants.
The project was simple - to write a novel via a public wiki?. Technically speaking - it is a piece of cake, allowing thousands of people to login and edit a page is a piece of cake in the world of web 2.0. However the eating of that cake is much more difficult . . .
...split...
Table of contents
The difference between fact and fiction.
While projects like Wikipedia have successfully used collaborative editing to create a knowledge base in a wiki, these projects are firmly grounded by reality and history. There is only so much debate about who shot Abraham Lincoln, for instance, so eventually somebody writes down what most people think is the truth?, and then they leave that particular niblet of text alone.
In a creative world - not so. No facts, plots, characters or universes are permanent in amillionpenguins. Characters pop into and out of existence like subatomic particles. This is no small frustration to the projects would be editors. Jon Elek, the projects "chief editor" writes in his editors blog
:
"I see that you, the 6 billion writers of amillionpenguins, have decided to gamble. I, your miserable and long suffering editor, admit to feeling completely at odds with the novel as it stands. In Stalinist Russia they would have considered this a good thing: that the familiar had somehow become very strange indeed. But in this, our stupider age, I find I just can't get very far. . . . The main problem I have is that every time I go back to the website it's changed, a bit like my girlfriend's mind. And perhaps like that it resists rational enquiry."
A new artistic order.
The community of participants are not necessarily taking the chaos lying down, however, and numerous proposals are floating:
- that once a chapter is written it should be "locked" and this will hopefully encourage other editors to continue to weave threads established in the earlier chapters.
- That the quest for universal narrative should be abandoned and a "parallel universes" approach should be taken whereby from each page in the story a reader can depart to numerous other pages - reflecting alternate narratives and endings.
- The Chief editor seems to have unilaterally imposed "reading breaks" when nothing is allowed to change - which might give editors enough time to develop a sense of the overarching narrative.
- A fully, partially or not at all democratic editorial board? which manages all contributions and imposes order on the mob.
This experiment will close in a few weeks, which is a pity, for all the server costs (which are small) Penguin should turn the project over to volunteers who can start self governing and create order as they might or can.
Smartmobs vs. Shakespeare
It is in the truly creative enterprises that the intelligence (or lack thereof) of a crowd meets it most formidable opponent in the "one great genius." I predict though, that in most areas of creativity, the crowd will soon win. The contest is much like the one which occurred when computers battled humans for supremacy in chess, and won. "Computers" in this contest were not sentient robots, of course, they were mobs of human programmers, who collaboratively, eventually came up with the robust algorithms that could respond to any challenge initiated by their sneaky and creative little human opponent. Computers don't think on the fly, and neither can mobs - they have processes and sub processes and sub-sub-processes.
In creative endeavors, writers are often loath to examine or formalize their processes, and hope for great bursts of inspiration to see them through. Collaborative writing cannot work this way. Collaborative editing will require editors to see the process the way a computer would see it - as processes. Govering processes, sub-ordinate processes, structure, structure structure.
First steps for the Wiki literati
Wiki literati might start with writing sitcoms. And might save the world from bad TV in the process. The discipline of the sitcom is perfect for wiki because it eliminates most of the zaniness that overwhelms the Penguin experiment.
1. Develop a short list of archetypal characters.
2. All plots must resolve to "normal" - everything back the way it was before - this implies that "normality conditions" must be explicitly stated.
3.Objectify the plot devices - experienced writers have been saying for years that there are only so many stories. The wiki literati must embrace this and use plot templates.
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