No theory (or navel gazing) today. Not too much is cur­rently going on. We’re about to enter week 8 and I have a ton of grad­ing ahead of me. As far as the inter­view, I haven’t heard any­thing and don’t expect to for a bit.

In gen­eral, my days are pretty busy with school work, which often bleeds into my nights. Week­ends are spent either on school work or help­ing over at Wild Wings. Per­haps that’s the reason for all of the academic/research blogging… namely, I’m look for an excuse to research and write on these topics.

On the fun side, I’ve finally gotten around to read­ing Ray­mond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. While it’s more con­vo­luted than The Big Sleep, so far its a bit more fun too.

• Recog­ni­tion
  Unlike most wiki’s that I’ve encoun­tered, Marvel “credits” fan authors. At the bottom of each entry is a list of its con­trib­u­tors. This is an exam­ple of how indi­vid­ual author­ship is cel­e­brated in this par­tic­u­lar Wiki (and not nec­es­sar­ily in others).
  
• Hero Points
  Note that the Hero Points are on dis­play at all times. Marvel’s putting your social “worth” front and center in the inter­face (note that as a new member, I’m a big 0).
  
• Edi­to­r­ial Guide­lines
  They’ve done a great job writ­ing edi­to­r­ial guide­lines for post­ing. It lay down both basic rules (no cita­tion of spe­cific issues in the char­ac­ter his­to­ries or dis­cus­sion of fan fic­tion) and also breaks down edi­to­r­ial style (“Never Send a Phrase to do a Noun’s Job” — iron­i­cally this is a rule that Stan Lee has never opted to follow). That plus the wanted and stub list­ings are exam­ple of how fan friendly they’re trying to make this.
• Dis­cus­sion & His­tory
  They’ve opted to leave arti­cle dis­cus­sions and his­to­ries avail­able to the public. This is and area to watch. Con­sid­er­ing how heated Wikipedia debates and edit his­to­ries can become, this may be the first fea­ture to dis­ap­pear. Marvel’s Wiki, and its evo­lu­tion (as far as which fea­tures and avail­able and which are not), will be an inter­est­ing test­bed for other com­pa­nies con­sid­er­ing this type of fan col­lab­o­ra­tion strategy,
• Inter­dis­cur­siv­ity (or lack there of)
  Writ­ers are instructed to “imagine that you are a com­men­ta­tor in the Marvel Uni­verse, wit­ness­ing the events, the bat­tles, and the drama first hand. By doing this, you’ll be cre­at­ing an entry that will not only be excit­ing for others to read, but excit­ing for you to write.” I’m a bit sur­prised that they missed an oppor­tu­nity to  ref­er­ence their own Watcher char­ac­ters, whose job is to observe and record events that happen around them (while never par­tic­i­pat­ing in the events themselves).

This one’s long, but worth it. In one fell *swoop*, or rather *Wiki!*, Marvel Comics has dealt with a nag­ging edi­to­r­ial prob­lem and cre­ated an amaz­ing good­will gen­er­a­tor. Best of all, this was done at little-​to-​no edi­to­r­ial cost to Marvel, using resources who are not finan­cially com­pen­sated (in fact, many whom have been writ­ing about Marvel charaters for years, just else­where). All Marvel had to do is trust their fans. Allow me to explain:

Like any comic com­pany, Marvel strug­gles with the daunt­ing issue of con­ti­nu­ity – the con­vo­luted his­to­ries of its char­ac­ters. While Peter Parker might not have aged much since his intro­duc­tion in 1962, he’s had a heck of a lot of adven­tures. Since his story is told as an ongo­ing epic, each episode build­ing on the past one, that means there’s a lot of his­tory, filled with vil­lains, allies, clones, and cos­tumes, all of which have come and gone, died and come back from the dead (yes, even the cos­tumes). Now, take all of those con­ti­nu­ity issues and mul­ti­ply them across the count­less char­ac­ters in Marvel’s comic “universe.”^[1] What you get, at least accord­ing to indus­try pun­dits, is a daunt­ing bar­rier to entry that intim­i­dates new comics readers.

Marvel’s orig­i­nal solu­tion was anno­ta­tion and cross ref­er­enc­ing. When the Sand­man lamented a pre­vi­ous defeat at the hands of Spider-​man, it would be accom­pa­nied by a plucky editor’s note like, “* See ASM #140, True Believer!”^[2] Later, in the 1980’s, Marvel came up with the bril­liant idea of doing an ency­clo­pe­dia in comic form –  a 32 issue series called The Offi­cial Hand­book of The Marvel Uni­verse. Based on the style (genre) of Base­ball cards, each issue was made up entries fea­tur­ing an image of the char­ac­ter accom­pa­nied by their stats (Name, Age, Height, Group Affil­i­a­tions, etc…) and a bio­graph­i­cal sketch. The hand­books sold like gang­busters and were incred­i­bly pop­u­lar while I was in Junior High­school. But, they were only a “snapshot” in time and con­ti­nu­ity. As soon as they were pub­lished, they were out of date.

Today, the prob­lem is just as bad, if not worse (as there is another decade plus of con­ti­nu­ity to deal with). Trying to keep up with an ever expand­ing con­ti­nu­ity is a full time task, let alone trying to come up with an easy method of keep­ing it all ava­iable for new read­ers (epse­cially given the fact that, accord­ing to recent stats, over­all cir­cu­la­tion num­bers are down across the indus­try). And, most impor­tantly, how could all of this happen with a min­i­mal amount of time and investment?

The answer, turn to the people who would be doing it any way. In oth­er­words, *Wiki!* (note that *wiki!* has that nice Marvel sound like *snikt!* and *thwip!*) Some savvy person at Marvel real­ized that the folks who have the best handle on their con­ti­nu­ity are their read­ers, who, like the Simpson’s Comic Book Guy,^[3] were already obses­sively doc­u­ment­ing and dis­cussing it online. 

Now, using the base Wiki engine (and some great .css work), those folks can go to Mar​vel.com and com­pose and edit char­ac­ter pro­files. Over 800 char­ac­ter pro­files have already been added. And that’s not count­ing other fan cre­ated entries on var­i­ous topics like Marvel places, things, and sto­ry­line summaries.

This plan is a win for every­one. Built into the struc­ture of the system is val­i­da­tion for the fan qua con­trib­u­tor. If your work is approved by a Marvel editor you get “Hero Points:” accu­mu­lat­able tokens of social cap­i­tal. Acquire enough points and you can approve and edit other fan sub­mis­sions. Also, points can be used to access yet to be spec­i­fied “super-cool and exclu­sive stuff” on the website.

From Marvel’s per­spec­tive they get good will and, more impor­tantly, free con­tent cre­ation. Instead of main­tain­ing a writ­ing staff, all they have to do is edit the work gen­er­ated by these fan "freelancers.” Fur­ther, they being to estab­lish more con­trol of prop­er­ties in the online space. For years, fans have under­taken sim­i­lar projects on per­sonal web­pages. Google “Amazing-Spiderman” and what comes first is not Mar​vel.com but:

Amaz­ing Spider-​Man .Info
The Defin­i­tive Spider-​Man Ref­er­ence & Image Web Pres­ence fea­tur­ing News, Covers, Rogues Gallery of Vil­lains, Heroes & Allies, His­tory, Enter­tain­ment, …
www.​sam​ruby.com/ – 37k – Cached – Similar pages

While these fan­site might have gen­er­ated good will and some pub­lic­ity, Marvel couldn’t cap­i­tal­ize (or rather mon­e­tize) on the con­tent they con­tained. With the Wiki, Marvel owns every­thing. While I haven’t dug into the legal agree­ments, I’m sure that they’ve sewn up all of the dis­tri­b­u­tion rights for any­thing that is cre­ated for Mar​vel.com. In oth­er­words, they’re build­ing a vast data­base of infor­ma­tion (at low cost) that can quickly and easily be con­verted for pub­lish­ing in other media, includ­ing future print updates of  The Hand­book to the Marvel Universe.

Now, will there be back­ground squab­bles between hero edi­tors? Of course. But, judg­ing from the suc­cess of sim­il­iar projects like the Home­s­tar Runner Wiki, what they’ll gain in con­tent will be worth far more than any related headaches this cre­ates (pro­vided the legal side has been han­dled cor­rectly). In fact, the argu­ment can be made that this would be far more suc­cess­ful than any inter­nally cre­ated project as they’ll get an “unbiased” (at least inter­nally speak­ing) per­spec­tive on their own prop­er­ties. Chances are that the fans will doc­u­ment things that Marvel never even con­sid­ered.^[4]

Now, the next ques­tion is: what other media providers will get it and jump on this band­wagon? How soon until we see ABC host­ing a Wiki for Lost? Or per­haps Gen­eral Hos­pi­tal is a better choice. After all, aren’t comic books and wrasslin’ just soap operas for boys^[5]?

For more infor­ma­tion see:

• Marvel’s Press Release on the Wiki
• The Marvel Uni­verse Wiki

A note before pro­ceed­ing: this post may read as a bit of a “duh” to some folks. To others it may seem like the height of naval gazing. These rela­tion­ships have been bounc­ing around in my head for about a week and I needed to get them out in order to sort these con­cepts out and begin making them my own. Like any good spark of an idea, this needs to be taken as a begin­ning and not a defin­i­tive stand­point. As with all models, there are holes in this one. My over­all goal was to create a jump­ing off point for future dis­cus­sions about what it is that we’re doing here at RIT and where we are going.

Last week, after my inter­views at RIT, Frank Cost and I sat dis­cussing the School of Print Media (SPM) and its rela­tion to the field of com­mu­ni­ca­tions. In par­tic­u­lar we were trying to sit­u­ate our posi­tion in the ever expand­ing world of tech­no­log­i­cally medi­ated com­mu­ni­ca­tions. We both agreed that we weren’t simply in the busi­ness of facil­i­tat­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion, as that’s too broad a cat­e­gory. Nor are we in the busi­ness of Pub­lish­ing, which has spe­cific indus­try and process impli­ca­tions beyond the (re)production^[1] of a text. So, from an aca­d­e­mic per­spec­tive, what exactly are we spe­cial­iz­ing in here at SPM?

The field of Com­puter Medi­ated Com­mu­ni­ca­tions divides inter­ac­tions into two cat­e­gories: syn­chro­nous and asyn­chro­nous. Syn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tions are those in which all indi­vid­u­als are “present” at the time of inter­ac­tion. The most common exam­ple is the prover­bial face-​to-​face con­ver­sa­tion. The notion of “present” refers to a tem­po­ral and inter­ac­tion col­lo­ca­tion rather than a geo­graph­i­cal one. Tele­phones, live-​chat, and video tele­con­fer­ences are all exam­ples of tech­no­log­i­cally medi­ated syn­chro­nous con­ver­sa­tions. The key thing is that wher­ever the par­tic­i­pants are, they are com­mu­ni­cat­ing in real time.

In asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tions, on the other hand, the par­tic­i­pants are not tem­po­rally co-​located. This blog is an exam­ple of an asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion. I’m typing this at ten min­utes to noon on Monday April 24, 2006. Who knows when you’ll read this. It might be later today (Monday April 24, 2006). It might be later this week. Or you might have found this through a Google search a year or two after I posted it. The key thing is that you are not look­ing over my shoul­ders as I’m typing this – though, speak­ing as the author, it often feels like you are.

In order to work, all asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tions must pro­duce arti­facts^[2] (or arte­facts if you’re using the Brit spelling) – “Any­thing made by human art and work­man­ship; an arti­fi­cial product.” (arte­fact, n. and a., 1989) With­out an arti­fact, be it this blog entry or the post-​it note left on someone’s com­puter screen, the com­mu­ni­ca­tion cannot take place. Note that the arti­fact does not need to be long-​lived or phys­i­cal. As already men­tioned, a blog can func­tion as an arti­fact, and that post-​it note isn’t intended to hang on that screen forever.

Asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tions can be seen as having (at least) two phases – pro­duc­tion and dis­sem­i­na­tion. I’m cur­rently pro­duc­ing this entry, under­tak­ing the action of trans­lat­ing ideas in my head to a static form within a word doc­u­ment. That’s just half of the process. When I press <crlt – s> for the last time and save this in its final form, the arti­fact is fin­ished. But, from a com­mu­nica­tive sense, it’s latent – unshared. It doesn’t have value until it’s dis­sem­i­nated – pub­lished to the web. And even then it isn’t truly a com­mu­ni­ca­tion until some­one reads it – thank you for com­plet­ing the process.

Acts of dis­sem­i­na­tion are not cre­ated – or are intended to be – equal. The vast major­ity of arti­facts that we create and dis­trib­ute are not intended for mass con­sump­tion. E-mail, and let­ters before them, are by and large con­sid­ered to be pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions, dis­sem­i­nated to select indi­vid­u­als. On the other hand, my blog and the books on my office shelves are writ­ten for larger audi­ences. Hence we have terms like “mass media” to denote chan­nels of com­mu­ni­ca­tion with access to large number of people. I think the prefix “macro” might work better than mass for what I’m get­ting at. Thus we can dif­fer­en­ti­ate between a micro-​dissemination and a macro-​dissemination. What is useful about “marco” is that it denotes both large scale and “the exis­tence of smaller individuals”

Relat­ing this back to the con­ver­sa­tion I had with Cost, the School of Print Media needs to be con­cerned with the (re)production and macro-​dissemination of arti­facts (forms of asyn­chro­nous com­mu­ni­ca­tion). This (re)production and macro-​dissemination can take place across mul­ti­ple technologically-​mediated medi­ums – paper, web, and portable media devices.

There are two key ideas here: (re)production and macro-​dissemination. Dig­i­tal media often blurs the line between the pro­duc­tion and repro­duc­tion of an arti­fact. For exam­ple, take this blog: there is no repro­duc­tion of this entry, at least not in a phys­i­cal sense. In the back­ground my words are tagged and entered into a data­base. When the entry is called, my words are retrieved, and then have design styles applied against them in order to render a fin­ished page. But, ignor­ing RSS feeds for the moment, no addi­tional copies of my words are cre­ated. Yet those words can still be, and are, fact, macro-​disseminated. Thus we cannot only be inter­ested in the repro­duc­tion of artifacts.

Macro-​dissemination is used to dif­fer­en­ti­ate us from visual artists whose job is also to pro­duce and dis­sem­i­nate arti­facts. The dif­fer­ences between their work and ours is a matter of scale (and per­haps repro­duc­tion). In order to be finan­cially and cul­tur­ally suc­cess­ful, an artist must not only pro­duce work but also to get it dis­sem­i­nated (installed in gal­leries, patron’s res­i­dences, or other exhi­bi­tion locals). At some point, that act of dis­sem­i­na­tion may include repro­duc­ing those arti­facts in a macro-​dissemination medium, such as print. In doing so, those exist­ing arti­facts are used to create new arti­facts (note that arti­facts often beget other arti­facts) and at that point print­ers often come into play.

What I also like about macro- is that it doesn’t con­tain some of the cul­tural bag­gage of “mass.” In par­tic­u­lar, mass con­tains the notion of uni­for­mity – mass pro­duc­tion. We don’t think of mass com­mu­ni­ca­tions as par­tic­u­larly per­sonal. One of the most talked about areas of print, on the other hand, is Vari­able Data Print. Facil­i­tated by dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy, we can create jobs where each arti­fact is cus­tomized (per­son­al­ized) for a dif­fer­ent recip­i­ent. The end result is a macrodis­sem­i­na­tion of indi­vid­u­al­ized com­mu­ni­ca­tions (hence the value of macro’s acknowl­edge­ment of “smaller individuals”).

arte­fact, n. and a. Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary. Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. 1989. cited March 28, 2006: avail­able from http://​dic​tio​nary.​oed.​com/​c​g​i​/​e​n​t​r​y​/​5​0​0​5​3​0​5​2​?​q​u​e​r​y​_​t​y​p​e​=​w​o​r​d​&​a​m​p​;​q​u​e​r​y​w​o​r​d​=​a​r​t​efact.

macro-, comb. form. Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary. Oxford Uni­ver­sity Press. 1989. cited March 28, 2006: avail­able from http://​dic​tio​nary.​oed.​com/​c​g​i​/​e​n​t​r​y​/​5​0​0​5​3​0​5​2​?​q​u​e​r​y​_​t​y​p​e​=​w​o​r​d​&​a​m​p​;​q​u​e​r​y​w​o​r​d​=​macro.

Dre for­warded me this arti­cle from McSweeney’s: Scott McClellan’s Replace­ment: AOL Instant Mes­sen­ger Bot Smarter­Child. It’s a well done piece. Smarter­Child is, in fact, an actu­ally chat­ter­bot avail­able on the AOL IM net­work. Based on read­ing the arti­cle, it looks as if SmarterChild’s response script is based on the Eliza code with a number of tweaks.

I’d love to know if Michael Brady actu­ally used Smarter­Child to gen­er­ate the final text for the arti­cle or if he’s simply writ­ing using the style of the “bot genre.” If that’s the case, then it’s a pretty nasty recur­sion: a person writ­ing like a bot who, is in turn, is writ­ten to appear if it were a person.

So I’m just get­ting this to the point that I like it and I’m con­sid­er­ing totally switch­ing tem­plates. The choice is not so much because I don’t like the look of Con­nec­tions (this theme). I like it a lot — btw, the new banner image is of the magenta inkwell on a sheet-​fed litho press. Unfor­tu­nately, it’s doesn’t have some of the back-​end inter­ac­tiv­ity of Kubric.

The other thing that cur­rently is tick­ing me off about Word­Press is that anchor tags¹ seem to get edited out of my HTML (pos­si­ble lead­ing to the accu­sa­tions of crufty URLs).

¹ – Anchors are used to handle foot­notes. If the browser jumped to this foot­note, then it means the latest ver­sion of Word­Press rec­og­nizes them.²

² – Woo hoo! They got it fixed!