dripping digital

Short shorts: On their merits, circumsatnces, and pitfalls

The Mighty Morphing Short Short Forms

Literature has been shrinking. No, I’m not referring to the decrease in readership demographics, but about “new” literary forms that sprang up in the 1990s and which continually morph names and word counts. First came flash fiction, which was designed to fit on two standard paperback pages. In other words, a complete story within one turn of a page. Then came microfiction, which was designed to be read in one click of the mouse: stories in the microfiction genre must be under 500 words, which allows them to fit on a single web page that requires no scrolling. Along the way, forms such as the drabble (exactly 100 words), 55 words (exactly 55 words), and the 69er (you guessed it, exactly 69 words) appeared. Now the newest and shortest form has appeared: hint fiction (25 words or less).

There is a long precedence of short fiction, of course. The penultimate example is Ernest Hemingway’s infamous story “Baby Shoes”

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Reputedly written to satisfy a bet that he could write a complete story in less than 10 words, these 6 small words hint at a story much larger than its diminutive length. It is this kind of compressed yet expansive text that Robert Swartwood has been collecting for an as-yet-unpublished anthology. In Swartwood’s opinion, a story is defined by fulfilling the following goals:

1. It should obviously tell a story.
2. It should be entertaining
3. It should be thought provoking
4. And, if done just right, it should evoke some kind of emotional response from the reader

Whither Voice?

“If a story of 2,500 words or more can do all that, why can’t a story 25 words or less?” Swartwood asks in the thesis of the anthology. Though there is disagreement in literary circles (by Swartswood’s own admission), it has been difficult to find much academic discourse that attempts to invalidate the “short short.” One such available example is from 2004, a piece called “Who Wears Short Shorts? Micro Stories and MFA Disgust” by Jason Sanford. While Sanford does not completely disregard the merit of the short short (a phrase I will use as an umbrella term for the competing sub-forms), he sees a large deal of the problem lying with Masters of Fine Arts programs and their focus on word candy (“writing that passes through the system with no effect but tooth decay.”) In fact Sanford cynically pairs the popularity of short shorts with the ease of publishing both for the editors (easier to wade through submitted short shorts than longer forms) and writers (easier to write short shorts than longer forms, though this is likely a point of contention for Swartwood).

The problem with most short shorts is not the genre—it is that they are being written by writers who are not committed to the true exploration of voice that’s at the heart of great literature. Too often short shorts are written by writers emerging fully deformed from MFA workshops and programs around the country, writers churning out page after page of bland academic writing that has as little style, voice, and vision as George Bush on ritalin.

The question of literary voice, the truly defining factor that separates great literature from the rest, concerns Sanford greatly. In his mind, it is much more difficult to inject a unique voice into short shorts. This alone does not detract from the form(s), because the best writers will still be able to shape voice within the short short. Hemingway’s tersely short writing style, for instance, is perfectly embedded in “Baby Shoes.” Rather the problem is that the brevity of short shorts can provide a masking layer that hides a lack of literary voice by relying on word candy.

Writing before the advent of the hint fiction form, it is curious to wonder what Sanford’s reaction might be. Does the following story, the first place winner in a hint fiction contest, contain a literary voice?

HOUSE HUNTING

The fence is tall. Good. The mother is typical white-trash, too loud. But the kids … they seem frightened and quiet. Good. Easier that way.

Perhaps the largest drawback of the short short forms in general, and the hint fiction form in particular, is the fact that they are generally too short to be able to determine, from inside one piece, whether the author has a distinctive voice or is simply good at arranging short sequences of words.

The Attention Factor

Regardless of their merits and pitfalls, short shorts are seemingly everywhere. Is it a result of the internet’s effect on attention span, or as Nicholas Carr put it in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”: “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”? In that piece Carr points out evidence, both anecdotal and scientific, that the browsing of text on the internet has a negative effect on our ability to concentrate while reading longer works. Yet flash fiction came into prominence as a printed form, and, as Swartwood points out, flash fiction dates back at least to the days of Aesop. Like all human-machine interaction, I suspect that it is a dynamic interplay. The internet does indeed seem to foster the shortening of short shorts: from flash fiction to microfiction to hint fiction, for instance.

Microfiction is often intimately tied to the web. As Craig Snyder states in his introduction to microfiction,

Another difference might be that a Micro Fiction is more strictly a web phenomena, is more suited by it’s very nature to the screen environment. A story that can fit on the screen without scrolling can be manipulated in many ways via CSS. For example, through font-styling, letter and word spacing, and adding borders and images. Javascript may be added to make sections of text appear or disappear—to fade in and out, change color, etc. Flash Fiction at a thousand words or more must be scrolled.

Some examples of this interplay include In Your Monkey Suit, Snyder’s own Microdot, and Ellen Kennedy’s “novel” yesterday I was talking to myself…. However, it goes further. The-phone-book.com, for instance, was “a digital publishing project that commissions international new works of ultra-short fiction for quarterly distribution by wireless and traditional internet” that ran from 2000-2003. Twitter itself has come to host authors who publish their work in tweets, which is not to mention the gimmicky If Homer’s Odyssey Was Written On Twitter. (Grammar-minded people here no doubt shudder at the use of “was” here, rather than “were”). Hint fiction itself seems like a perfect fit for Twitter: at 25 words or less In Japan, serialized SMS novels have been popular for years and have recently made it to the bestseller lists when published in paper form. The capacity for mass distribution and quick consumption are highlighted by Daniel Heath as prime benefits for writers in his defense of scratch fiction (another short short form, this one characterized by a focus on publishing the process over releasing an already refined piece). Unfortunately so far the communities of short short fans seem to also be composed mainly of those who also enjoy writing short shorts, leading to a “genetic bottleneck” effect that Sanford sees as a problem for both short shorts and Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs alike.

Epilogue

Personally I think there is a lot of potential for short short forms. Like Sanford, I do notice a general tendency toward absurdism and a lack of a distinct voice. Countering such trends, however, is a journal called Brevity. By focusing solely on nonfiction short shorts (of 750 words or less, per their submission guidelines), they erase the potential for nonsensical absurdity, as for instance in “In Your Monkey Suit.” And 750 words is more than enough space for a good writer to express a unique voice, for instance Sherman Alexie’s Somebody Else’s Genocide. These differ from short blog posts in the same ways that creative nonfiction works differ from journalism articles.

If Carr is correct and the internet does literally reduce our attention spans, the emerging prevalence of short shorts is not only an effect of a decaying capacity for concentration but also one of the most coherent responses to it. If someone will read 750 words where they would not read 2,500, an author does well to attempt to compress the point to that number of words.

At the same time, such capitulation to an inability to concentrate feels cynical. To not even be able to process a longer piece of writing should be seen as a problem by all. So catering to such tendencies could be seen as a cynical act. Yet an artist who neglects their audience finds themselves without.

Regardless, and as librarians well know, anything that gets them reading is a good thing. Short shorts can serve as inspiration to further reading. The interplay between author, screen, and concentration will remain a space of controversy for years to come. Apart from a potentially cynical catering to attention deficit disorder, short shorts take on liberating forms for both writers and readers. Rejecting or criticizing the various forms for containing examples of poor writing misses the point entirely. Literature has never been about the mediocre. To expect serendipity from every short short is as ludicrous as expecting every published book to be captivating.

The short short forms, especially micro and hint fiction, leave a lot for the readers to imagine themselves. Their small size nevertheless contains a distinct expansiveness. The need to say more with less is ever present, intensified by the world today but stretching back as a tradition to Chuang Tzu, not to mention the Tao te ching. Fully harnessed, the short short forms contain the power to convey Truth, that is to say, the power to be art.

Preliminary Napster LOLCat

I don’t have it in me to get much further in GIMP tonight beyond the skill level to do this. But it’s definitely on my list.

What Social Network?

Perhaps I’m jaded. Perhaps I’m a nostalgist. Perhaps Facebook isn’t the most sinister CIA operation yet. But somehow, I cannot stop from thinking that the “Web 2.0″ as we know it today is an accident of history, an effect of a US legal decision in 2001 that irrevocably changed the course of the Internet.

Purr-fection

Anyone who doesn’t remember Napster gives themselves away as not a good, law-abiding citizen (as we might view those who refrain from downloading today), but rather as someone who just didn’t know, didn’t care, or wasn’t there. Like the reality behind the paternalizing phrase one hears in the USA about hallucinogens and the Sixties, “we were young and experimenting, and everyone was doing it,” those not using Napster were not doing so in order to avoid breaking the law. Some closet freak cases like those aspiring to the Secret Service or politics or neocapitalism definitely prove an exception to this rule. Regardless, at the time there was no legal ruling in regards to the legality of peer-to-peer networking. It was like the years before LSD became illegal: those who avoided it only did so out of a lack of either awareness or interest. While I could not easily find Facebook user statistics, I believe that Napster’s growth rate far exceeded it with a reported 70 million registered users at the time it was shutdown (after less than 3 full years!). Clearly file sharing, Napster’s core function, had serious pull. Compared to other forms of “social networking” whose values are only a function of their own inertia as walled gardens of people, Napster’s assemblage grew insanely fast precisely because file sharing represented the fulfillment of a latent desire to share data. In the initial case of Napster, this fulfillment was delivered through an easy-to-use interface for sharing libraries of music data.

Darknet Rising

In 2001, Napster was ordered to take down the central server that glued 70 milliion music libraries together. But what if that hadn’t happened? What if the right of free sharing had been enshrined and protected? Would Napster have remained the king of P2P?

We should discuss briefly the concrete reality of what did unfold. The ruling against Napster was a referendum on file sharing, effectively blocking the new economic force of data collectivization. Like LSD, P2P’s transcendental capacity would be occluded as a public option and the seekers of such transcendance forced to take alternative, risky, and/or more difficult routes. Another generation gets the reserved right to say, “Oh well, yes I [did this] in [that decade]. But times were different then, son. I was young, and I know so are you, but you know it’s wrong. And I didn’t.”

Never since has P2P seen such a social assemblage as Napster. Enabled by an easy interface and centralized indexing model, Napster provided a first generation look at a new way of networking. Though file-sharing precedence existed, extant examples[1] were simply file sharing piggybacked onto an existing communications protocol (Usenet, IRC) or were extremely centralized (FTP). Napster, however, was an application built to do nothing other than to facilitate direct connections between users who wished to share data. Though organized and indexed by a central server, the actual social interaction of the data transfer would be un-mediated except by the transportation mechanism of the internet. The application also provided a chat interface based on the same principle. This cemented the sharing in an emerging sociality, and it’s inclusion into the Napster application implies that other tools for socializing within the network might also be implemented.

These tools, however, were of no use in the post-Napster world. A world where the legality of participating on the network, indeed of the network itself had been clearly defined. Napster’s liability lay, ultimately, in its role as the “center” of the network. Every P2P protocol since then has focused on avoiding this liability by limiting the role of centralized servers. More importantly, the social climate around P2P is no longer a grey area–it is a decidedly “bad” activity (making it automatically cool in some circles.)

Hypotheticals and Assertions

Even if one still engages in sharing (many repented), it would be extremely unusual to include real personal information in, say, an account on the Pirate Bay. However, if P2P had instead been understood as a natural reaction to distributed networking and a legitimate exercise of the right to free assembly, Napster very well could have evolved many social tools that have since emerged: user walls, micro updates, etc. If this sounds like technological determinism–it is not. Rather it is the expectation that users would demand or invent new ways of socializing within the Napster, a rather social determinist point of view. And if not Napster, then another company, one that promised fewer fake files and better socializing. A Facebook to Napster’s MySpace, if you will. Except that neither of these would need to exist, because we would already be socializing within a more powerful platform: one that offers us the social act of sharing files as well.

YouTube itself might have been superseded, made redundant by the fact that streaming a video from a central server over and over again is less efficient than having a local copy, downloaded from peers and seeding to them as well. After all, by the time you finish the video, you have technically downloaded the entire thing–something that is done over and over. Or perhaps YouTube would have been implemented as a P2P assemblage, rather than a website sitting in front of massive server farms.

There are many hypothetical questions one could pose while pondering what might have happened. Perhaps I am wrong, and the incremental advances in social tools (from email to Wall post, from private picture hosting to a profiles’ picture albums) would still first, or only, emerge on the web. However, I think it is likely they would have evolved around the more powerful social tool of file sharing. Unlike other social tools, file sharing has been disbarred from publicly acceptable practice, meaning its evolution has been defined more by moves towards hiding its presence or distributing liability than by (existing and potential) social practices. Thus, the kind of evolutions of existing tools (again, email to Wall post, web page update to status update, etc) that Facebook, et al. have gone through, typified by increasing ease of use and sociability, have been denied P2P, whose socialization must account for the “unacceptable” nature of its practice.

Conclusions

Social networking as emergent on web sites such as Facebook and MySpace is not the only form such networking can take. Other systems can be imagined. However, with the stigma of file sharing darkening any P2P project, the most innovative and transformational forms are effectively neutralized of any chance at widespread success. The most prolific P2P platform of all time, BitTorrent, is marked by the distance of deviation from Napster in terms of interface. No search, no chat, no user names. These socializations occur instead on sprawling constellations of web sites, blogs, and forums. In a world with a different attitude towards P2P, it is possible that this division would never have emerged.

I am aware that such hypothetical situations are hard, and possibly even absurd, to research. However, I cannot help but feel that actual “social networking” has yet to emerge. Perhaps by examining the modes and practices of various P2P applications and comparing them with those of web based social networks, a clearer picture of what was lost, or even simply what is needed, can be developed.

[1] Excluding Hotline, which had 1) a less than ideal interface, 2) was not P2P in the sense of peers downloading from one another, and 3) was Mac OS only.

[Note: This is a slightly revized version of a post to the Masters of Media blog.]

Hello from Haiku!

Last week saw a momentous moment (to me) in the history of the future. For those who are not familiar with BeOS and/or have never heard me wax exotic about its capabilities, I suggest you read this excellent piece at osNews which goes into depth on the history and relevance of Be.

Context is slightly important–if for instance you don’t know that the Haiku team has been working towards this “R1 Alpha” for 8 years (ever since the collapse of Be, in fact), or that I’ve been waiting for it since the day I read of its existence,[1] you might say, “Why care?”

Ah, but that itself is still a matter of context–I care because in ‘98, with a 350Mhz AMD K6-2, 256 MB of RAM, and BeOS I could:

• play 5 mp3s: 3 forward, 2 backward (yes, as in back to front)
• watch 2 Quicktime movies
• open a file browsing window and explore my hard drive

That is something that was unfathomable at the time. Or do you not remember Windows 98? Maybe you remember Mac OS 8? My friend had a PowerPC and Quicktime still wouldn’t play smoothly. One Quicktime. Alone.

So is Haiku a worthy successor to the BeOS legacy? It boots in under 2 seconds in VirtualBox[2], so it still has a blazing fast boot time. As for running natively (i.e. boot from the CD and/or install to a hard drive partition), unfortunately this Alpha would not go. As you might expect, drivers are rather rare. In fact, in order for networking to work in VirtualBox, one has to switch the virtual ethernet card to one of the Intel options. This also means that my graphics card is not supported, and so would be stuck using VESA, which would obviously have some impact on performance/responsiveness.

So, aside from all that, how is it? Words can’t hold the nostalgia that I felt when (virtual) booting into the Haiku installer. They didn’t change a thing, except to change any “Be” to “Haiku.” But nostalgia is no solid indicator for events of historical significance. The historical significance of this Alpha is that Haiku has finally arrived. Many fans, including me, have been waiting until this moment to join the community in full. The reports of Haiku running natively on hardware with tuned drivers at conferences imply that even today people are not used to seeing the kind of performance BeOS had 10 years ago. In short, it is historical because from here on out Haiku’s mindshare will only get bigger.

If anyone has a few spare millions, I suggest we form a startup.

– Notes –

[1] As you can see, there was quite a diversity of approaches at that time. It is interesting to see that only one, OpenBeOS (which became Haiku, or didn’t you read the history article? has made it to this day.

[2] VirtualBox is VM software. It let’s you create “virtual machines” on your computer to run different “guest” operating systems within a single “host.” A lot of fun and it makes operating systems much easier to play with than back in the day.