The latest effort for CMC literacy from Penguin borrows elements from GoogleEarth, Twitter, maybe the Ultimate Search for Bourne,
“We Tell Stories” proposes 6 classical stories rewritten by well known authors for digital, interactive, social, godknowswhat media.

“The 21 Steps” by Charles Cumming readapts the classical “The 39 Steps” by John Buchan in “GoogleMaps storytelling”; still the geographic distribution of a basically linear story didn’t strike me as overly original, although the quality of the writing can’t be compared to that of many multimedia projects.
“Slice”, by Tobi Litt , is the readaptation of gothic short story The Haunted Doll’s House by M.R.James; you can follow the story on Twitter, from the point of view of the main character, a teenage girl named Lisa (Slice), or you can read her parents’ blog, also on Twitter, haiku-style.

“Fairy Tales” by Kevin Brooks calls for the user’s participation in a mildly interactive narrative : I could customize the names of the characters, choose if the magic help will be delivered by a Dull Caterpillar or by a Lowly Fly;

the magic seem to arise mostly from the technologic interface, although a bit crude, as most interactive storytelling. You can also add your own ending.
“Your Place or Mine” by Nicci French, a blog novel I guess, is inspired by Zola’s novel Therese Raquin - I wonder if the novelty of this one wasn’t rather its performance quality (the author would be blogging “live” for a week).

(to be continued)

With an agonizing four months delay I came across “Hope is Missing”, Lance Weiler (yes, the guy behind the film Head Trauma, who invented all those funky promotion and distribution strategies on the internet (check the Head Trauma comic), who co-founded “the discover and distribution festival” From Here to Awesome, who is also writing a book “How to put the Mass back in Media”, a genius).

Hope is Missing is a MIG (media integrated game play), also renamed as a “cinema ARG”. Difference with ARG, according to Lance: “Sometimes ARGs are dense and take a quite a bit of time to get into. With this we were doing media-integrated gameplay. You can enjoy it at multiple levels. You could dig as deep as you want, but you can just look at the web videos if you want. You don’t have to play the game.”

Lance Weiler is a truly cross-media evangelist : “We live in a remix culture, an on-demand culture. Media consumption is changing, and because of that media creation is changing. Everything now has become decentralized, controlled by the end user. When that happens it’s about discoverability. It’s all about empowering that user and finding ways to interact with them, and the language of that storytelling has changed.”
See Lance Weiler interview by Christy Dena here.

Now you can have your own Dylan Application on your Facebook profile, singing your chosen (alliterative) poetry on the tune of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, how cool.

translation: “although at its beginnings, interactive sex is making giants steps forward. In Italy one single man, with the mere help of a TV screen, managed to f… millions of people..” (published the last time it happened, in 2001)

It was only in 2003 that The Economist sent an open letter to Berlusconi, asking about the measures his government took to block all judicial investigations about Berlusconi’s muddy business past. It was only 2005 when Viva Zapatero, a film by the italian comedian Sabina Guzzanti, depicting the serious breeches to freedom of speech happened during Berlusconi’s spell, received a ten minutes standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival. It was only in 2006 that a feature film on a corrupted politician owning some TV networks (!), “Il Caimano” (The Caiman) was awarded at Cannes. It was just last November when Enzo Biagi, one of the main italian journalists for 40 years, died, and many remembered how he had been banned from Italian television from 2002 to 2006 after poking fun on how Berlusconi’s business interests conflicted with his political views. Only some weeks ago, when a precarious worker, a girl, asked to Berlusconi at a press conference to suggest a solution, he answered “you should marry a rich man, like my son”.
Now, against, all reasoning, the Joker is back.
Maybe the problem isn’t Berlusconi, who is obviously unfit to lead anything but his business (which he attends to with great care); maybe the problem is Italy, whose lack of training in Democracy made it unfit to be led (see Italy, the ungovernable nation and related articles). This is so depressing.
Here is a link to an article in several languages, prefaced by one of Italy’s foremost intellectuals Gianni Vattimo, has been distributed by the latter before Berlusconi proposed his candidacy for the European Parliament, as a warning. “He” would say, “this is just more communist lies”…

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