Experimenting with the Platform

Mayan Codices

It seems to me that every story is meta in regards to the platform the author uses to tell the story. The platform will influence how readers interact with it. And you disregard this at your own peril.

Are you telling stories around a campfire or using a blog or a video or a game or telling a story in a bunch of bound paper? In each case, you will need to research how readers interact with the platform you've chosen.

Digital stories aren't just paper stories cut and pasted into a blog or recited in front of a camera. I guess they could be. We could call an e-book a digital story but think of all the opportunities we're missing when we do that?

I tried my first (and maybe only) Twitter poem. Writing your first story or poem on any platform will teach you how that platform works. For instance, blog stories need lots of spacing and content chunking to make reading them palatable. Large blocks of text look too intimidating to online readers. Brains process online content differently than offline content and you may need to compensate for the tendency for skimming.

You will also learn by making mistakes. Twitter poems come with many challenges as well and I feel my poem was worth doing just to discover the pitfalls. There were problems setting up multiple accounts due to recent political events. Posting also presented a challenge as I was creating conversations between all of my accounts. How to do this with one browser? I tried opening various browsers, going incognito in browser tabs, and opening and closing accounts after each comment.

I also needed to learn about posting order on Twitter for both main posts and comment post seen from various accounts (all which required testing) and to consider how Twitter was created to be consumed (most recent content on top, lesser on the bottom) and how readers are actually reading Twitter (from top to bottom, not starting with the first Tweet) and how I might misuse Twitter to display a vertical poem (by posting it backwards). All the idiosyncrasies had to be tested and planned for.

These learning curves probably existed for the earliest manuscript and book makers as well. They probably wondered how people would interact with a physical storytelling device? Would they know how to turn the pages? How would they learn to read? Think of that almost insurmountable challenge! Wide-spread literacy!

Challenges create layers of difficulty and timing to execute (even in traditional publishing).

I've always wanted to do a project in a codex format, like the picture above. All the same challenges and problems apply. Will readers know how to read it, centuries after this format was a popular form of story telling? Will readers of the future know how to read our blogs?

It's all fascinating. So, what should we experiment with next?


Works Cited

McCray, Mary. "For Whom the Bells Troll." https://twitter.com/BellsTroll. Accessed 27 April 2019.

"How Chunking Helps Content Processing." Nielsen Norman Group,
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/chunking/. Accessed 27 April 2019.

"Digital Texts and Reading Strategies." Association of College and Research Libraries,
https://acrl.ala.org/IS/wp-content/uploads/Tips-and-Trends-Sp18.pdf. Accessed 27 April 2019.

For Whom the Bells Troll

First sad note

I finished the poem over a week ago and I noticed Twitter has already deleted some of the posts from my TrollGuy character, even though the insults were just nonsensical. Luckily I archived it in full already. But what a bummer.

The Jist of It

This is a collage poem about media history, trolling culture and pundit's soft-alarm-isms. Trolling is mostly between the authors William Blake, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane, an idea seeded in my head from Dorian Block's first class piece: https://dorianblockportfolio.wixsite.com/blog/blog/gothic-microblogging-for-digital-storytelling/ and the tweets he quoted from https://twitter.com/oscarwilde. The Oscar Wilde tweets blew my mind!

Ways to Read It

1. Interactively on Twitter: https://twitter.com/BellsTroll

Pros: You can play all the fun videos, animated gifs, click on the links and discover the hidden comment threads.

Cons: You might miss the hidden comment threads and all that multimedia in your haste to read it. Clues for hidden conversations are under these symbols at the bottom of each tweet:

Sometimes there are many more comments than one. Also, click anything that says “more replies.”


2. The archived, static version on my website: https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html

Pros: You won't miss any of the comment threads or profiles. And you'll see the comments Twitter has removed already.

Cons: You will miss all the fun videos and links. Boo!


3. The most comprehensive way would be to read the static poem (https://www.marymccray.com/bell-trolls.html) and then try to find the interactions in the live version (https://twitter.com/BellsTroll).

Project Planning a Twitter Poem

About five weeks ago I stared thinking about the new things I've been learning in this class and deciding on how I would use Twitter to do some kind of online poem. I really liked Witch Court Reporter and wanted to do something similar but not automated or ongoing. There was just something about Twitter that seemed poem like to me, probably the vertical length and straight left edge. Modernist and contemporary poems also include a lot of parataxis and non sequitur and Twitter does this so naturally.

So I'm recreating my creative process here.

The Originating Idea

I had the vague idea that I wanted to do something commenting on vague, alarmist language in political discourse, how flat the components of this language are and how it drains the power of the words being so over used, which is all very scary because the intent of this language is to be ringing alarm bells. 

I also knew I wanted somehow to look back to see how we got here with alarmist language and why it isn't working effectively, which led me to think about Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death which blew my mind when I read it two years ago. The book went all the way back to the telegraph and early photography up through 1980s television news (and you can see all its predictions playing out now in internet culture).

The Inputs

My early research took the form of a mind map. I wish I had the original piece of paper because it looked like tracks or lists of the following:

• Internet history
• Early Internet memes
• Early media history (telegraphs, photos)
• Internet trolls (which came from the research above). This was a handy element to the eventual poem because it added the element of conflict. 
• This element of trolling led me to research another layer, past poets who might conceivably have trolled each other had they the resource of an internet. I had been reading and watching some movies about T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane and also reading an essay by Howard Nemerov pitting William Blake and William Wordsworth against each other so those were the four poets I chose and I had to locate indicative poems and read those for possible argumentative quotes. While I was doing that I located some really juicy stuff that could be read to predict our modern narcissistic social media tendencies. Research score! 

It's a good place to note that most of this stuff I was investigating anyway and it just all coalesced into this collage of a poem, the tone of which ended up being heavily influenced the gloom and doom of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," even though I've never liked that poem at all so you could say I'm being ghostly trolled by T.S. Eliot in this poem.

Building the Layers

My research didn't stop there. Layers were added as I researched online (like associating hoodies with the vague language statements). Adding images to statements changes their tone. I had to be cognizant of that.

I also knew the Twitter platform required that the poem be visual so I researched possible posts in the following areas:

• videos
• images
• links
• quotes to retweet
• comment digressions

I also started thinking about how these various memes and media could be read figuratively in the poem. Some work as filler; some are more meaningful.

Ordering the Poem

Then I took all that mishmash and typed it up. I ordered the poem to spread out all the elements and tried to build some tension toward the end. One of the early memes I discovered in research was the Bitterroot National Fire photograph (an early popular photo on the internet) and that got me on the track of the gradually more alarmist fire-related posts at the end of the poem.

With all the material spread out, I could see I would need 19 days to pull it off. It took me almost a full day to set up all the accounts and test the platform. Not fun.

Scheduling Deployment

After the problems setting up the whole Twitter poem universe, I tried to give myself time every day to problem solve with the technology of commenting and discovering how those would display and also deploying the conversations. This meant I tried not to over-schedule the work for each day.

No Editing!

I had to do the best I could editing before posts were added because I couldn't go back and edit them later. That would screw up the deployment performance. This caused (and still causes) anxiety for me.

Archiving

I didn't have an archive plan until day one of deployment when I realized how vulnerable a live Twitter poem would be.