Those reader statistics showed me what pages people read, in what order, and how long they remained on each page, or at least kept each page open. Unfortunately, even those who had claimed to have read the entire work, rarely made it past 30 or 35 lexias.

I’ve brought this issue up several times, in public arenas, such as DAC ‘09 and ELO conferences, as well as more private exchanges, emails with Michael Joyce, Rob Wittig, and Juan Gutierrez. Reactions have ranged from blaming the story (just write a more compelling plot) to blaming the attention crisis (kids these days don’t read anything), but while these might be factors, those explanations offer little insight into how to use the medium better.

At one panel hosted by Rod Coover, at a moment where my crisis in faith in long form e-lit narratives was at it peak, I found myself recommending that authors create works that can accommodate partial attention, working as yet another open tab, clicked on and off, without concern, like less interactive media forms, such as TV or radio. Certainly, the works of netprov I’ve collaborated on follow that advice. But such a position is a rather unsatisfying acquiescence that is no doubt driven by a slavery to the vanity of hit stats. Also, can you imagine the folly of artists seeking only the path of least resistance to their reader’s minds? There would be no Ulysses, probably no Paradise Lost, no To the Lighthouse. Nothing but the page-turning thriller and the flashiest of flash fiction would remain. The fleeting attention of reader’s at the interface should not be cause for deforming one’s artistic practice.

Nonetheless, solving the problems of getting readers through and deeper into longer form electronic narratives acknowledges genre and media-specific challenges, the lived realities of our media moment, and the larger challenges of storytelling in any form

As I work on a new piece, I just wanted to take some time to share a few of the ideas that others have suggested.

1. Go Fractal: Every small piece of the story contains the entire story or can at least stand in for it. There’s a little of this strategy in the narratives and monologues of The LA Flood Project.

2. Eschew Plot: If long-form plot relies on a pre-empted or delayed revelation, create other kinds of stories where plot is de-emphasized, where the power comes not in reaching the revelation on page 934, but in savoring each page.

3. Use External Motivators: Use scoring mechanisms: Such a device would present readers with incentives (external to the narration) to encourage readers to continue. Badges, points scored, et cetera.

4. Create a Shallow Bowl Atop a Larger Cistern: I guess this technique is the most satisfying one. One e-lit author explained to me that his works can be read by the visitor who merely wants to sample through an initial pass that offers a highly condensed version of the story, opening up into more detail and depth as the reader peruses over a longer time. This technique can be achieved merely by using gate mechanisms, keeping certain story materials hidden until a flag has been reached. However, this narrative technique is also used in print stories. Consider Toni Morrison’s Jazz, which tells its full story in a nutshell and then expands. It is a kind of overture approach.

The advantage to this approach, is that the work can be at once offered for the reader who is merely passing by, or, like many e-lit readers, merely trying to get a sense of how the medium is being used, without sacrificing the larger goals of the project. Readers could achieve varying levels of knowledge of the story, like knowledge of an acquaintance versus that of a close personal friend.

Which isn’t to say that e-lit authors need to focus on shorter works or that any work should be judged solely on the number of people who feel compelled to complete it, but in as much as electronic literature is an exercise in the experimentation of emerging forms, the paths of readers is an important measure of impact. And if you are trying to tell a story in this form at some point you must contend with the measurable realities of reading practices online, which no doubt, are still (and will always be) very much in flux.

October 20-October 27, 2011
The LA Flood Project on Twitter

Thursday, October 27, 2011
The Mobile Voices of L.A.’s Immigrants
Harris Hall 101
Gin Wong Auditorium

Friday, October 28th, 2011
The Transborder Immigrant Tool: On the Download
SOS 250 12pm

The LA Flood Project (Oct. 20-27)

The LA Flood Project returns to Twitter this Thursday with a week long event. Join in on Twitter as the rains reach epic proportions. To participate, merely tweet your experience of the Flood with the #laflood hashtag. Follow @LAFloodProject to find out all the updates on the state of the Flood. You don’t have to be in LA to play along, but your tweets need to say you are. More information and a map of LA with the latest flood narratives and monologues are here:The LA Flood Project site

Ready for some netprov? Join in this War-of-the-Worlds-style simulation.

The Mobile Voices of L.A.’s Immigrants (Oct. 27)

USC’s Visions and Voices present an evening of performances around the issues of mobile phones and migration, including Voces Moviles, The Transborder Immgrant Tool, and the LA Flood Project. The presentations will be followed by a reading by Roberto Leni-Olivares and a discussion moderated by Josh Kun. Also featured, the photgraphs of Maria de Lourdes Gonzalez-Reyes.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool: On the Download (Oct. 28)

Following Thursday’s performance, the Electronic Disturbance Theater will join us for a conversation about the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Join Ricardo Dominguez, micha cardenas, Elle Merhrmand, and Brett Stalbaum for this intimate discussion of this controversial project. Sponsored by the Center for Scholarly Technology

From the 8-bit aesthetic of the novel’s cover (or at least the promotional copy) to a mention of Family Ties, Dead Man’s Party, and Galaga within the first 25 pages, “Fanboys” director Ernie Cline’s first novel is like a love letter to adolescent male geek culture of the 1980s or, more simply put, to me. It is destined to become the not-so-guilty pop-rocks and Pepsi reading of the end of the summer and will no doubt inspire rhapsodic talks at academic conferences and nostalgia-fests on message boards.

The premise is simple: in 2044, James Halliday, the gazillionaire creator of an online virtual world called Oasis,has died, but his last will and testament video has presented the real world with a hunt for the keys to his fortune. Inspired by the Easter Egg in Atari’s Adventure, and the structure of that game, he has hidden 3 keys to 3 gates.

What makes READY PLAYER ONE so much fun is one more feature of this quest: Halliday was completely obsessed with 1980s pop culture. So the more you know about the 1980s, the more likely you will solve his riddles and the cooler readers will feel for, say, knowing what the cover of the AD&D Player’s Handbook looks like.

I couldn’t put it down primarily because of my own 80s obsessions and because the Willy Wonka/Ender’s Game story framework gives the plot a video game structure, where characters literally fight over their spot on the leader board and level up. I have reason to believe an ARG is in the works to help promote the book — but really, you will be vector enough for this book’s pandemic.

At this point, I will resist making any literary judgments — just as I did when reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But if you ever dreamt of owning a DeLorean (like Cline himself), played Ultraman in your driveway, blew a stack of quarters on Pac-Man, or have a special Netflix cue for John Hughes films, you are more than ready for READY PLAYER ONE.

On a recent trip to the University of Bergen, we had the opportunity to meet, discuss, and compare notes on some of our mutual interests in Internet art, specifically in a highly performative, “real-time,” spontaneous form of writing that seemed to run through our various projects. As we compared notes, we discovered an emerging genre, which we will begin to detail here. On the eve of another exciting improvisational collaborative project, Grace, Wit, & Charm, we offer some preliminary thoughts on this new form we call netprov.

Past Projects
Here are a few of our past projects with varying degrees of improvisation that nonetheless have given rise to our conceptualization of netprov.

Rob’s Projects
Chicago Soul Exchange, online marketplace for past lives (blog, collaborative, performed live over 1 week)
Friday’s Big Meeting, a chatroom novel (faux chatroom, released live over 1 week)
Blue Company, hand-illustrated email novel (e-mailed daily for 1 month, performed twice, 2001 and 2002), which inspired Scott Rettberg’s response/sequel Kind of Blue
Fall of the Site of Marsha, faux-vernacular webpage fiction

Mark’s Projects
The Ballad of WorkstudySeth, Twitter fiction provoked by workstudy students (Twitter & Facebook, during 3 months of 2009)
The LA Flood Project, a locative narrative and flood simulation (Google Map, YouTube on-going, and simulation tweeted during LA Times Festival of Books April 30-May 1, 2011)
The Loss Wikiless Timespedia, Wikinewspaper open to wikizen journalists everywhere (Mediawiki installation launched April 1, 2009).

Definition

Netprov = networked improv literature.

Netprov uses everyday social technology plus the ol’ tricks of literature, graphic design, and theater to create stories that unfold in realtime within public mediascapes.

Common characteristics:
Prose fiction — stories by and about people who don’t exist, done by writers emerging from the literary tradition of novels and short stories;

Real Time – texts are asserted, in the fiction, to have been written moments before publication;

Unity of Time –the fictional world and the reader’s world are contemporaneous;

Vernacular Media — projects are written in the popular everyday writing/reading media of the time, regardless of whether or not the medium is considered a “literary” medium;

Collaborative — often with groups of writers adopting and writing particular characters in whole or in part, composed of the assembled troop and reader-participants.

Interactive — reader comments and contributions can be included and can shape the story;

Live Theater — some netprov projects include performances where the online characters appear momentarily before an audience in a theater or other venue and advance the story;

Designed to be Read at Work — one never knows where one’s readers read, but an ideal of netprov is to seed the real world with imagination, to sneak fiction into a reader’s mindstream during the time devoted to “reality” rather than compartmentalized time set aside for “entertainment;”

Partially Pre-written and Partially Improvised — plots can be predetermined, some texts are pre-written and are published using electronic, timed-release technologies others are written moments before publication;

Inclusion of Current Events — which are woven into the story themes and enrich and often hijack them;

Satirical Approach — the urge to fictionalize everyday writing forms and to use for performance the millieus that purport themselves to be pure and transparent expressions of the self often grows out of the satirical impulse (a la A Modest Proposal);

Embedded Performance — the form gains its energy by performing in the streets of contemporary networked culture and ranges from clearly framed fictions, published in online journals, to more guerrilla styles of performance that might catch a reader unaware;

Designed for Incomplete Reading — it is not assumed readers will read every word or every episode; the strategy is to give readers a rewarding experience both if they read only a few messages and if they become devoted fans; the goal is to be skillful enough to entice readers into the depths;

Designed to be Remixed — netprov projects need not be closed fictional systems; netprov chunks can be designed as riffs to be remixed into readers’ own projects and culture blends.

We admit Netprov is somewhat of a misnomer, in that it refers not strictly to the pure, all improvised, Chicago-style theatrical Improv of Del Close and Charna Halpern, but as much to the actor-workshopped and written sketch comedy of groups like Second City, the Groundlings, and television shows like Saturday Night Live and MadTV. The value of the “-prov” suffix is that it gives the sense of a creative work “done before your very eyes,” it echoes the down-to-earth satire of theatrical Improv and sketch comedy, and prepares readers for projects that are experimental. It also stresses the real-time opportunities for readers to play along, to join in.

Netprov is often close to the roots of Improv, the Commedia del Arte, where an outline “scenario” is given to actors instead of specific lines.
For example: “Next Tuesday Shirley and Antoine will have a text-message hissy fit about the top story on that night’s CBS Nightly News that will result in Shirley leaving Antoine.” Apologies to Antoine if you’re reading this before Tuesday. Sorry dude. It was never going to last. Enjoy her while you can.

Whose Tweet is it anyway?
Twitter offers one of the most form-fitting media for netprov. First, unlike Facebook’s seeming insistence on authentication, tweets are a playful space where the snark reigns over sentimentality. Second, Twitter’s 140 characters have become a writing constraint played by millions, as much a writing challenge as the haiku or one-liner. Twitter also is home to many fictional characters, such as:

Fake Rahm Emanuel @MayorEmanuel by Dan Sinker
AdjunctHulk
SwearengenPHD

AdjunctHulk
HULK NOT HAVE MONEY FOR TV, SO HULK NOT KNOW WHO @SWEARENGENPHD @DEADBULLOCK AND @TATRIXIE IS.
4 May

Julie Levin Russo points us to the many fan communities tweeting the characters of Battlestar Gallactica or The Office.

What makes Twitter ripe for netprov is the flashmobby ability to create memes quickly that are easy for others to join in. A simple @ or # can bring their contributions into the stream. These memes can become nano-genres (for example, the recently trending: #icanttrustyouif or [corrected] Mark Sample’s fake digital humanities conference #MarksDH2010, born of his irritation that his Twitterfeed was filling up with a hashtag from a conference he was not attending.

Up next: Grace Wit & Charm

This Saturday begins a prime example of netprov, entitled Grace, Wit, & Charm. Merging Twitter with 2 live theater performances, reader-participants will be able to pose and answer challenges for the SmoothMooves corporation, which offers clients enhancements for their online avatars (grace), social media messages (wit), and online dating (charm). The project begins May 14 and runs until May 29. See two live performances in person at Teatro Zuccone (in Duluth, Minnesota) or online May 17 & 24. Twitter hashtag: #gwandc (use also #help if you’d like to pose a problem or challenge to the team). The team of employees will be answering challenges online throughout the two weeks and during the stage show. Visit the project website.

Come join our round table discussion as we explore the implications of this reconceptualization of the contemporary writing course.

[Information on how to access the webinar will be forthcoming shortly.]

Katherine D. Harris. Assistant professor of English at San Jose State University. Dr. Harris teaches courses in Romantic-Era and Nineteenth-Century British literature, women’s authorship, the literary annual, textuality and digital humanities. Many of these issues are addressed in journal articles and chapters in edited collections, including Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America, The Poetess Archive Journal, and Journal of Victorian Culture. She edits an online resource for the study of literary annuals, The Forget Me Not: A Hypertextual Archive which will also become part of a comprehensive literary history of British annuals currently in progress. Dr. Harris’ most current work involves the short story, the Gothic tradition and the literary annual. An edited collection of Gothic short stories from the annuals is forthcoming in 2011 with Zittaw Press.

Elizabeth Losh directs the culture, art, and technology program in Sixth College at UC San Diego and writes about digital rhetoric. Dr. Losh studies institutions as digital content-creators, the discourses of the “virtual state,” the media literacy of policy makers and authority figures, and the rhetoric surrounding regulatory attempts to limit everyday digital practices. She has published articles about videogames for the military and emergency first-responders, government websites and YouTube channels, state-funded distance learning efforts, national digital libraries, political blogging, and congressional hearings on the Internet.

Mark Marino. Assistant Professor (Teaching) in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Dr. Marino’s courses focus on writing in emerging information environments, particularly social media. Students in his course engage in a semester-long service project, using social media tools. He is also the Director of Communication for the Electronic Literature Organization, which recently published volume 2 of its Electronic Literature Collection. He blogs at Writer Response Theory and Critical Code Studies, a collaborative blog that explores the interpretation of computer source code. His portfolio can be found here.

Dave Parry. Assistant Professor of emerging media and communications at UT-Dallas. David Parry studies the ways in which people communicate in the digital age, and prepares students to use media — both vehicles currently in existence and those which haven’t yet been created. Parry’s research addresses how contemporary theory can help answer questions about how technology, and language as technology, shape the act of reading. He also examines the ways knowledge changes as media for transmission and archivization become digital. Parry earned his Ph.D. in English from the University at Albany (SUNY).