Looking back, our group’s decision to write on Douglas Adam’s masterpiece was an extremely successful one. Not working with a piece of literature that everyone in the group was very familiar with brought with it an interesting dynamic. The three members of the group each brought with them varying levels of knowledge about the work and about Douglas Adams. Rather than going into the story blindly, we were lead into the books with certain aspects to pay attention to and eventually draw our own conclusions from.
Our initial group wiki proved to be a work of great collaboration between the members while we attempt to master the form of the ‘wiki’. What came out of it was a great combination of visual art with some definitions for fans looking to further their knowledge of the story. The importance of fan fiction within that aspect of literature is immense. We are seeing a new form of post-literature forming that truly changes the way authors now write their books. The immediacy of the internet has caused worldwide collaboration to become instant.
I hope that our project will be seen at least by a couple of random Adams fans. I know some people within our class will see it and possibly they might show some other people who are also fans. I guess that is how fan fiction starts, as a small project that just slowly and slowly builds in a more traditional sense. The internet these days has become a place where instant stardom can be born. What we are attempting here is a platform for other to eventually build and improve upon so it can reach as many people and positvely influence furthering their own Hitch Hiker experience.
While writing for my posts as Eddie the super computer on board the ship named “The Heart of Gold” I found myself doing something that has not happened writing on WORD for a long time. I found myself enjoying what I was doing; the writing came natural (not sure what that says about my natural writing ability) but it flowed from my fingertips onto this screen that I am now once again staring at. I had fun writing for this blog, I found myself wanting to write more and words filled the page seamlessly. I know this may all sound extremely cliché, but this is what impacted me most about the group projects. I loved continuing the story for Eddie. I felt as though his voice (albeit an annoying one) was not fully heard throughout the story; that a computer of his mass intelligence would most likely have the best answers for their own unique situations.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Post-Coda to the Hitchhiker's Guide On-line Fanfiction Project
The decision to base our on-line literature project on Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came about unanimously from out shared admiration for the work and our familiarity with it.
Thus we unwittingly fulfilled one of the basic criteria of fanfiction: admiration for the work and a wish to continue with the story.
For the first part of our project, we decided to create a fake on-line encyclopaedia explaining some of the elements in Adams’ books, and to add some contemporary ones that we felt were relevant to the course. The thought of creating an encyclopaedia was inspired by existing online encyclopaedias, namely the Wikipedia and the UrbanDictionary. However, we decided to keep our entries in tone with the book and make them amusing but rather useless.
We decided to select the important terms from as well as a few completely irrelevant, in keeping with the Hitchhiker’s Guide logic, and also add a few contemporary ones. In defining the terms, we followed another rule of fanfiction: emulating the tone of the original. We attempted to keep to the tone Adams uses throughout the books: dry wit, irony, understatement, non-sequitur random jokes. From authorial point of view, this proved harder than expected as I found it very difficult to forego my personal tone and worldview and prevent it from slipping into the definitions.
For the second part of the project, we decided to create a fake blog where characters from the books would post their thoughts and diary entries. Deciding on who is going to write whose entries for the blog, we fulfilled another criterion of fanfiction: likeness for a character and a wish to continue his or her story beyond the scope of the book.
For the actual writing, it was necessary to identify with the character, to step into their shoes, so to speak. For instance, I wrote the part of Marvin. Although I immensely like his character and share his resigned attitude to life, I found thinking like Marvin unexpectedly hard. First, the blog entry was in the form of a monologue, and Marvin does not have any in the book. He is always engaged in conversations with other characters. So it would be easy to write a comment or two, but I found writing a consistent paragraph difficult. Chiefly because the very act of verbalising his thoughts for posterity contradicts Marvin’s outlook on existence: it is pointless, and there is not sense in trying to do anything about it. So Marvin is not very likely to keep a journal.
Secondly, I found it very hard to keep up the tone. Marvin is very depressed indeed, and trying to write in his style made me very depressed too, to the point that of failing to see the point of the whole exercise. Getting over the existential question, I found consistency the main problem. I tried very hard to stick to Adams’ British-English register and slightly quaint turn of the phrase and realised that his mastery lies in the understatement and the seeming simplicity of his style. Even though his style is not manifestly obvious, the harder it is to keep it up.
My first-hand experience with creating on-line fanfiction altered my view of it, although not too radically. I used to consider fanfiction as a slightly dubious activity motivated by the fan’s desire to bask in the author’s reflected glory. I still think that this is the case in the vast majority of fanfiction works. However, now I have a deeper appreciation of the effort that is necessary for creating quality fanfiction. Even with good knowledge of the original, a reasonable grasp on reality and the English language, it is not easy to try to bend one’s imagination along somebody else’s line and especially, be consistent in doing so.
I am aware that despite linking it to fanfiction websites, our project will most likely vanish into the depths of the internet, maybe to be discovered at some future date by internet-archaeologists, who perhaps will cherish it as a piece of amateur-art. More likely it will be forgotten, abandoned, unread and unrated, like the vast majority of online fanfiction. On the other hand, Virilio tells us that internet obliterates geography and makes the outside the new centre, so perhaps by some fluke in its improbability drive our website will be discovered and enjoyed by other Hitchhiker’s Guide fans and random passers-by.
Thus we unwittingly fulfilled one of the basic criteria of fanfiction: admiration for the work and a wish to continue with the story.
For the first part of our project, we decided to create a fake on-line encyclopaedia explaining some of the elements in Adams’ books, and to add some contemporary ones that we felt were relevant to the course. The thought of creating an encyclopaedia was inspired by existing online encyclopaedias, namely the Wikipedia and the UrbanDictionary. However, we decided to keep our entries in tone with the book and make them amusing but rather useless.
We decided to select the important terms from as well as a few completely irrelevant, in keeping with the Hitchhiker’s Guide logic, and also add a few contemporary ones. In defining the terms, we followed another rule of fanfiction: emulating the tone of the original. We attempted to keep to the tone Adams uses throughout the books: dry wit, irony, understatement, non-sequitur random jokes. From authorial point of view, this proved harder than expected as I found it very difficult to forego my personal tone and worldview and prevent it from slipping into the definitions.
For the second part of the project, we decided to create a fake blog where characters from the books would post their thoughts and diary entries. Deciding on who is going to write whose entries for the blog, we fulfilled another criterion of fanfiction: likeness for a character and a wish to continue his or her story beyond the scope of the book.
For the actual writing, it was necessary to identify with the character, to step into their shoes, so to speak. For instance, I wrote the part of Marvin. Although I immensely like his character and share his resigned attitude to life, I found thinking like Marvin unexpectedly hard. First, the blog entry was in the form of a monologue, and Marvin does not have any in the book. He is always engaged in conversations with other characters. So it would be easy to write a comment or two, but I found writing a consistent paragraph difficult. Chiefly because the very act of verbalising his thoughts for posterity contradicts Marvin’s outlook on existence: it is pointless, and there is not sense in trying to do anything about it. So Marvin is not very likely to keep a journal.
Secondly, I found it very hard to keep up the tone. Marvin is very depressed indeed, and trying to write in his style made me very depressed too, to the point that of failing to see the point of the whole exercise. Getting over the existential question, I found consistency the main problem. I tried very hard to stick to Adams’ British-English register and slightly quaint turn of the phrase and realised that his mastery lies in the understatement and the seeming simplicity of his style. Even though his style is not manifestly obvious, the harder it is to keep it up.
My first-hand experience with creating on-line fanfiction altered my view of it, although not too radically. I used to consider fanfiction as a slightly dubious activity motivated by the fan’s desire to bask in the author’s reflected glory. I still think that this is the case in the vast majority of fanfiction works. However, now I have a deeper appreciation of the effort that is necessary for creating quality fanfiction. Even with good knowledge of the original, a reasonable grasp on reality and the English language, it is not easy to try to bend one’s imagination along somebody else’s line and especially, be consistent in doing so.
I am aware that despite linking it to fanfiction websites, our project will most likely vanish into the depths of the internet, maybe to be discovered at some future date by internet-archaeologists, who perhaps will cherish it as a piece of amateur-art. More likely it will be forgotten, abandoned, unread and unrated, like the vast majority of online fanfiction. On the other hand, Virilio tells us that internet obliterates geography and makes the outside the new centre, so perhaps by some fluke in its improbability drive our website will be discovered and enjoyed by other Hitchhiker’s Guide fans and random passers-by.
Final Thoughts on Literature and On-line Media: A CODA to our Group Projects
Fan Fiction and Cyber Media:
How Blogs, Message Boards and Wikis provide a ‘Cooler’ Second Life
Three Months ago, we set out to explore fan fiction in on-line media in order to better understand the emerging connections between cyberspace and literature. Although there is much to be learned from the conventional forms of fan fiction akin to the examples that can be found at sites such as fanfiction.net, it was only when we expanded the definition of ‘fan fiction’ that our understanding of the impact of technology on literature began to form. If Marshall McLuhan is correct, and the medium is the message, then any fan-fiction that does not take full advantage of the medium through which it is delivered is not art, at least not the type of art that is “always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because [its creator] is the only person aware of the nature of the present”(McLuhan, 96).
When looking at the fan-fiction that had been written about Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker’s books, it became apparent that the majority was unremarkable, and save the comments section on sites like fanfiction.net, did not really reflect the impact of technology on literature anymore than would a self-published fan-zine. However, two less conventional forms of Guide-inspired art did stand out. Being that the Hitch Hiker’s Guide novels were themselves heavily invested in ‘buffering’ us from the future of technology, it is no wonder that DNA fans were some of the first to break fan fiction free from the confines of the conventional ‘short story’. The two best examples of this were the Hitch Hicker’s inspired satirical wiki’s and message board/MUD fan-fiction websites.
The wiki’s are an extension, or a mutation, of the encyclopedic satire that the “Guide” itself represented in the books. One of the best examples of these is the projectgalacticguide.com site; however, they are all literally a “Guide”—a contraption that stores an infinite amount of absurd knowledge come to life. What we found when creating our fan-wiki was that, while fanfiction that incorporates technology, and all the interactive and non-linear possibilities it can offer, is a better example of McLuhan’s ‘art-as-buffer’, it is meaningless if not executed with witty and thoughtful content. This lead us to conclude that the successful delivery of a message through a medium is also dependent on the quality of its content. This is perhaps the greatest truth about the future of literature in cyberspace that the fan-wiki's illustrate, and when we created our wiki, our goal was to achieve a balance between exploiting the mediums "cool" potential and living up to DNA's brilliant use of wit in his writings.
The message board, or MUD, incarnations of fan-fictions are the intersection between literature and “Second Life”. In his article on cyber media, Jonathan Sterne argues that, “our available histories of cyber-culture are highly selective”(Sterne, 23). He claims that as a society, and as a critical academic community, we are obsessed with the visualization of communication in cyber culture. This focus on the visual can in part explain the phenomena of Second Life. The Internet invites a maximum extension of ourselves, and that is exactly what the software/program provides visually. However, “Second Life” is not the only manner in which it is possible to completely extend yourself into a virtual reality.
The second type of fanfiction we were inspired by, the MUD/RPG/Message Board based ‘games’, is also a means to a 'second life'. Specifically, the Milliways' website, named after the “Restaurant at the end of the Universe”, allows fans of all different genres of media to orthographically inhabit a character from a given fandom. These fan-boards provide an alternative to reality; however, because this reality is text-based, and not visually actualized through moving avatars, they remain a ‘cool’ medium. In forcing the users to imagine their own spatial and physical boundaries, this type of fan-fiction allows for both the complete submersion into a second life while at the same time retaining all the tropes and conventions of literature and creative writing.
In our fake logs and diaries, we used the medium of the blog to achieve this 'cool' 'second life'. By writing in the first person, we allowed ourselves to become the characters of the novel; however, the interactivity of the medium also allowed us as users to easily craft more complex and non-linear narratives by simultaneously combining all of our perspectives. As a result, the fan-fiction we were left with is arguably much better than anything we as individual writers would have been able to create. Although we imposed limits on ourselves based on the canon of Douglas Adams’s stories, we were not as creatively restricted as we would have been had we attempted to produce the same project in Second Life. While programs like Second Life may visually foretell our future of total self extension through media, fan fiction sites like Milliway’s and our “Hitch Hiker’s Log” exemplify how our ‘second life’ in cyberspace can be more than a ‘hot’ and numbing visual experience. Fan-blogs like this one demonstrate how literature can survive a collision with emerging media like Second Life by fusing the cultural and social change that the internet demands with the tropes and conventions that have been carefully tooled by writers for centuries. However, given the relative infancy of fiction expressed through digital media, Fan-MUD’s and Fan-boards are really only scratching the surface of what literature can become in emerging the age of cyberspace.
Kristina L.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, Ed. Terrence, California: Ginko Press, 2003.
Sterne, Jonathan. "The Historiography of Cyberculture", Critical Cyber Culture Studies, Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
How Blogs, Message Boards and Wikis provide a ‘Cooler’ Second Life
Three Months ago, we set out to explore fan fiction in on-line media in order to better understand the emerging connections between cyberspace and literature. Although there is much to be learned from the conventional forms of fan fiction akin to the examples that can be found at sites such as fanfiction.net, it was only when we expanded the definition of ‘fan fiction’ that our understanding of the impact of technology on literature began to form. If Marshall McLuhan is correct, and the medium is the message, then any fan-fiction that does not take full advantage of the medium through which it is delivered is not art, at least not the type of art that is “always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because [its creator] is the only person aware of the nature of the present”(McLuhan, 96).
When looking at the fan-fiction that had been written about Douglas Adams’s Hitch Hiker’s books, it became apparent that the majority was unremarkable, and save the comments section on sites like fanfiction.net, did not really reflect the impact of technology on literature anymore than would a self-published fan-zine. However, two less conventional forms of Guide-inspired art did stand out. Being that the Hitch Hiker’s Guide novels were themselves heavily invested in ‘buffering’ us from the future of technology, it is no wonder that DNA fans were some of the first to break fan fiction free from the confines of the conventional ‘short story’. The two best examples of this were the Hitch Hicker’s inspired satirical wiki’s and message board/MUD fan-fiction websites.
The wiki’s are an extension, or a mutation, of the encyclopedic satire that the “Guide” itself represented in the books. One of the best examples of these is the projectgalacticguide.com site; however, they are all literally a “Guide”—a contraption that stores an infinite amount of absurd knowledge come to life. What we found when creating our fan-wiki was that, while fanfiction that incorporates technology, and all the interactive and non-linear possibilities it can offer, is a better example of McLuhan’s ‘art-as-buffer’, it is meaningless if not executed with witty and thoughtful content. This lead us to conclude that the successful delivery of a message through a medium is also dependent on the quality of its content. This is perhaps the greatest truth about the future of literature in cyberspace that the fan-wiki's illustrate, and when we created our wiki, our goal was to achieve a balance between exploiting the mediums "cool" potential and living up to DNA's brilliant use of wit in his writings.
The message board, or MUD, incarnations of fan-fictions are the intersection between literature and “Second Life”. In his article on cyber media, Jonathan Sterne argues that, “our available histories of cyber-culture are highly selective”(Sterne, 23). He claims that as a society, and as a critical academic community, we are obsessed with the visualization of communication in cyber culture. This focus on the visual can in part explain the phenomena of Second Life. The Internet invites a maximum extension of ourselves, and that is exactly what the software/program provides visually. However, “Second Life” is not the only manner in which it is possible to completely extend yourself into a virtual reality.
The second type of fanfiction we were inspired by, the MUD/RPG/Message Board based ‘games’, is also a means to a 'second life'. Specifically, the Milliways' website, named after the “Restaurant at the end of the Universe”, allows fans of all different genres of media to orthographically inhabit a character from a given fandom. These fan-boards provide an alternative to reality; however, because this reality is text-based, and not visually actualized through moving avatars, they remain a ‘cool’ medium. In forcing the users to imagine their own spatial and physical boundaries, this type of fan-fiction allows for both the complete submersion into a second life while at the same time retaining all the tropes and conventions of literature and creative writing.
In our fake logs and diaries, we used the medium of the blog to achieve this 'cool' 'second life'. By writing in the first person, we allowed ourselves to become the characters of the novel; however, the interactivity of the medium also allowed us as users to easily craft more complex and non-linear narratives by simultaneously combining all of our perspectives. As a result, the fan-fiction we were left with is arguably much better than anything we as individual writers would have been able to create. Although we imposed limits on ourselves based on the canon of Douglas Adams’s stories, we were not as creatively restricted as we would have been had we attempted to produce the same project in Second Life. While programs like Second Life may visually foretell our future of total self extension through media, fan fiction sites like Milliway’s and our “Hitch Hiker’s Log” exemplify how our ‘second life’ in cyberspace can be more than a ‘hot’ and numbing visual experience. Fan-blogs like this one demonstrate how literature can survive a collision with emerging media like Second Life by fusing the cultural and social change that the internet demands with the tropes and conventions that have been carefully tooled by writers for centuries. However, given the relative infancy of fiction expressed through digital media, Fan-MUD’s and Fan-boards are really only scratching the surface of what literature can become in emerging the age of cyberspace.
Kristina L.
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, Ed. Terrence, California: Ginko Press, 2003.
Sterne, Jonathan. "The Historiography of Cyberculture", Critical Cyber Culture Studies, Ed. David Silver and Adrienne Massanari. New York: NYU Press, 2006.
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