BigShinyThing

As anyone who has ever worked in a team will attest, much of the effort in group creation goes into the meetings, haggling, biting and scratching around the project, rather than into the project itself. With luck, the final creative product will emerge from the scrum relatively intact, and possibly even fit-for-purpose. Generally, unless the history of the end-product is written up by some third-party, its consumers remain blissfully unaware of the scrummage and niggles which led to its creation. So things have been since the dawn of time, and so they remained until the development of social media tools for group co-creation.

Choose some topical news on Wikipedia: Anna Nicole Smith’s sad demise for example. Or the history of militant Islam. The Wikipedia entries themselves seem relatively sedate and restrained. But take a deep breath, then click on the ‘discussion’ link at the top of the page. Welcome to the world behind the curtain of ‘the authentic’ — a seething cluster of white-hot forums where the content of postings is revised, fought over, denegrated and spat on, by as unruly a rabble of obsessives, freaks and zealots as you could find anywhere on- or off-line. Given at least tacit agreement as to the task at hand, empowered, focussed readers can generate excellent conent. But things get messy when the task is more open-ended. Mosey on over to Penguin’s A Million Penguins project: an attempt to produce a wiki-based collaborative novel. A nasty nasty mess on the surface — but as noted by the good people at if:book:

Far more interesting is the discussion page behind the novel where one can read the valiant efforts of participants to communicate with one another and to instill some semblance of order. Here are the battle wounded from the wiki fray… characters staggering about in search of an author. Writers in search of an editor. One person, obviously dismayed at the narrative’s dogged refusal to make sense, suggests building separate pages devoted exclusively to plotting out story arcs. Another exclaims: “THE STORY AS OF THIS MOMENT IS THE STORY — you are permitted to make slight changes in past, but concentrate on where we are now and move forward.” Another proceeds to forcefully disagree. Others, even more exasperated, propose forking the project into alternative novels and leaving the chaotic front page to the buzzards.

How ironic it would be if each user ended up just creating their own page and writing the novel they wanted to write — alone.

Reading through these paratexts, I couldn’t help thinking that this [the discussion page] was in fact the real story being written. Might [it] contain the seeds of a Tristram Shandyesque tale about a collaborative novel-writing experiment gone horribly awry, in which the much vaunted “novel” exists only in its total inability to be written?

The if:bookers are themselves active explorers of collaborative marginalia — check their Future of the Book site for some lovely examples of ‘networked books’ and commenting tools. We’re particularly excited about the possibilities opened up by their CommentPress plugin for Wordpress, which enables comments at paragraph rather than posting-level on sites built with WordPress (as is BST itself).