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.
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