A few days before our first class I started a Twitter-based book club called 1book140. The name is a play off the popular city-wide reading programs like One Book, One Cambridge; One Book, One Chicago, etc. I’ve partnered with The Atlantic as host, and as of this moment the 1book140 Twitter feed has 5,439 followers from all over the world. That’s a pretty big book club, and after June it will become a monthly feature on the Atlantic site. Ideally, we’ll pick up readers every month until we become—note my tone of humility here—the largest collective reading experience in human history.
The 1book140 project is the descendent of a similar effort I conducted last summer for Wired Magazine called One Book, One Twitter. Over the course of eight weeks last summer some 12,000 people read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. That book was chosen by the participants using an overly complex three-part voting system (Don’t ask.) This time around we simplified the process. People nominated some 300 titles; we winnowed these down to a five-book shortlist, then put that up to a vote. Readers chose Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin by a decisive margin.
And what the hell, to got to the title of the post, does that have to do with drama? This: As a Wired writer I’ve spent the last ten years documenting how digital technologies affect the culture industry. Now I’ve begun to focus my research on how those same technologies are affecting storytelling—in whatever medium, book, stage, or film—itself. For the next 30 days Margaret Atwood will take part in a sort of social experiment. By reading her own book along with thousands of people, does it change the nature of interpretation? Of authorship? How will her Twitter “performance” change the experience of people reading the book for the first (or second or third) time? When an author has the opportunity to interact so spontaneously with so many readers at once, do we need to question what constitutes a “book?” Could we consider her tweets part of an extended text, and the hard copy work itself merely a temporary physical manifestation of her ideas?
Heady stuff, I know. Ultimately, I’d like to use the space in this blog over the next several weeks to look even more specifically at the sort of storytelling—much of it being conducted by theater professionals—that purposefully employs technologies like Twitter and Facebook, exploiting their structural characteristics to advance a new form of narrative.
To be continued …
