I’m trying to get some work done, but keep bumping into neat things. Added to my collection of examples of taking twitter beyond the knee jerk perception of “a bunch of idiots telling each other what they ate for lunch” is ZombieAttack “The world is under attack by zombies. Watch what happens. Location: Little Town, USA”.
So it is being used to tell a science fiction tale, peeled back one 140 character segment at a tim (note I have reversed the reverse chronology):
We see a little girl tied to a table, her arm is infected, we ask her if she is okay. She turns our way her eyes bloodshot, and bleeding. 05:34 PM May 09, 2007Down in the basement is another medical facility, it is brighter and more clean then the one upstairs. We hear someone crying. 12:43 PM May 08, 2007
We see a little girl tied to a table, her arm is infected, we ask her if she is okay. She turns our way her eyes bloodshot, and bleeding. 05:34 PM May 09, 2007
All of a sudden time seems to come to a stop, and reality starts to crush us. No one is safe, and there is nothing we can do to stop this. 02:56 AM May 12, 2007
And look how slowly the story is being released! There is some more info on the ZombieAttack! blog:
Matt and Greg are two brothers that grew up on a livestock farm in a small town. Their lives had never been terribly interesting, until the day they noticed the children in their neighborhood begin to get terribly ill. As the illness progressed, the children would either die or become more and more aggressive, to the point of violently attacking family members and severely injuring many around them. Those that had been attacked or bitten also fell ill. After the violent death of Matt and Greg’s sister they began to realize that they needed to get out of their town, they abandoned their home and family to head for the city, hoping to find survivors and answers.
And the blog itself provides some context into the authors ideas, and also teases is with what lies ahead.
It’s a neat idea, conceived cleverly in the twitter format.
Micronovel? TweetStory?
Hmm… new art forms out of new technologies. Web 2.0 goodness… lovin’ it!
Have you ever seen one of these blog creations end? Or are we really reading soaps in another form?
Susan,
If you want to look at “end” examples, I suggest doing a bit of research on Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) many of which come to a [publicized] end.
See:
* ARG White Paper http://www.igda.org/arg/whitepaper.html
* ARGnet http://www.argn.com/
* and read up on Bryan Alexander’s blog http://infocult.typepad.com/
I am less interested in trying to validate this as a “literary form” and more interested in attempts to create new modes of telling stories- not all will succeed, but w/o experiments we live in the status quo.