library ad infinitum

Well there have been a few Twitter novels, the most successful of which (IMO) is @scharpling's surrealist comic noir FUEL DUMP (#FD). When you read it, you get the sense that it could only have been written on Twitter.

Apps are also silos; once you're in the app, you're in the same virtual space as the computer. So you easily get what we had there: games involving various degrees of interactivity. And ebooks. The first attempts in new media are always legacy-model imports.

What is different about the new e-readers, cells, and devices is the portability. And what speaks to portability is the external world, non-"virtual" space, reality, nature, all that good stuff. So I think Augmented Reality Games, and AR activities, like the recent psychogeographic walking tour So Many Important Things (http://
www.fancystitchmachine.org/conflux.htm), and my 2007 cellphone tour web021 (http://www.web021.org), are at least one new way to go.

Other things would be the penetration and precision of messages: the cellphone manga are, as you noted, an excellent example of that.

Jason's right! also @adelehugo and @enoch_soames. Although those aren't specifically about portability or devices, they are about sequentialism and the limitations/expansions of a new media space.

Twitter novels, yes—although I do think that even they represent the legacy-import mode Peggy describes. Of course, the tweet is so flexible that it represents a genre in itself, perhaps. FUEL DUMP may be like Pope's Dunciad, which was a mock-epic (legacy import!) made appropriate to the headspace of the 17th.-c. coffeehouse world.

A recent and interesting example is the collaboratively-authored story begun by Neil Gaiman in Twitter, which proceeded sort of like an exquisite corpse.

Games and augmented reality experiences go to the heart of it as well... but I am wondering about specifically literary inventions, and maybe in the multimedia era this is a quixotic search. It occurs to me that the new spaces for text open up new niches for readerly engagement—brief episodes of text-enchantment interleaved with other kinds of engagement. Of course, that's what the technology called the dog-ear is for in the paperback...

One factor to bear in mind is that creating content for these new devices (including multimedia and interactivity) still requires significant programming skills, which the current generation of writers and content creators don't necessarily have.

I see, literary rather than overall experiential. But "the new spaces for text open up new niches for readerly engagement—brief episodes of text-enchantment interleaved with other kinds of engagement" - this is exactly what Jason's walking tour did! Listen to the first couple entries, even though it's listening instead of reading (you can do this at yr desk to get the idea) - and it *could have been reading, with a barcode linking to a page of text, pulled down on a device, (which is what the web021 project did). A pause, on a city street, and a story or reflection is there, not too long, but hopefully meaningful and/or funny and/or otherwise engaging (and not trying to sell you something). Not that this is, or will be, the *only option, but I think it's an excellent early entry into the space. (typo in link b4, here's better one:)

http://www.fancystitchmachine.org/conflux.htm

I think Jason's walking tour is very cool, just as you say! Also, I wonder if there isn't some fun work to be done in the kind of fictional spinoff from profile/security questions Joanne McNeil has described.

As for programming, it's true that there are separate magisteria at work here—but the walls are breaking down. Robin Sloan's an author, blogger, futurist who's playing with Processing, a java-based development tool for visual play with information; others are doing cool, lit-like stuff with it as well.

Again, though, lots of genre remix in all this, but new forms are still much in flux.

Doug Rushkoff's recent talk at DIY days addressed the public-as-readers -> public-as-writers -> public-as-programmers trajectory, and the different narratives that that might entail. He claims 'the story' is a bit, um, patriarchal (he's actually more playfully graphic than that!), and that new forms of literature might look a lot like games or wandering than we're used to. Here's the link to the vid, well worth a look/listen:

http://rushkoff.com/videoaudio/diy-days/

It is hard to get lemonade from a plastic lemon. You want form to magically produce content? These devices are simply evidence of a culture that can't locate content, and they cannot PRODUCE it. And the vague hope that the discussion of these technologies can produce something original is REALLY pathetic. What a yawn!

Quod erat demonstrandum, Mr. Mintern.

Never liked that phrase, and now I know why. You should apply yourself to the charming (because clumsy) expression of your own images, Mr. Battles.

"Never liked that phrase, and now I know why." Never liked that phrase, and now I know why.

Lloyd, I'm sure we both agree on one thing: my post isn't worth the invective you seem to want to pour on it. In my admittedly clumsy way, I'm having a bit of fun speculation about the relation between technology and genre. And of course there's more involved in the equation. But I don't mean to imply that the technology PRODUCES form, much less content (although the folks running Demand Studios are making a killing disagreeing with that premise). At the time I posted I was feeling curious about the ways people might use technologies to find their way to (or reveal, if Platonism's your thing) new/previously unknown forms. Do I think the Kindle or the nook or any of the current crop of reading machines (really, they're *publishing* machines, or that's what they want to be) is perfect or magical? Certainly not. And in fact it was my thought that they hadn't inspired literary invention, which would put us in agreement. Although to be fair I should give them more than a month or two... the novel took a couple of centuries to appear after the invention of moveable type, after all.

Good Lord, man, I only wrote like four short sentences, and you are throwing the book at me. So to speak. As you seem to be aware, plenty of people are making a killing promoting a false issue. But WE are in a corner, as if hiding from the limelight.