In this video clip from our creative conversation of April 2016, our five panel speakers discuss the ethics of writing collaboratively. (You can also watch more videos and read a short report on the key insights we took from the event here)
Tag Archives: society
The Writer as Catalyst and Collaborator 27th April
Writing is self-expression, but it is also much more. Writing can start a conversation, issue a call to action or stand as an act of witness. Writing may be the work of a unique author, but it can also be interactive and collaborative. Our panel will discuss the potential of writing as a form of action and collaboration.
Panel Members:
Olumide Popoola & Annie Holmes, co-authors of forthcoming book breach, a short story collection, which tells the story of the refugee crisis through six voices based on interviews with refugees in Calais.
Nigerian-German Olumide Popoola is a writer and performer. Her other publications include essays, poetry, short stories, the novella this is not about sadness (Unrast Verlag, 2010) and the play text Also by Mail (Edition Assemblage, 2013).
Olumide’s interests include creative/critical investigations into the ‘in-between’ of culture, language and public space. She is an associate lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths College London.
Jean-Paul Flintoff, author of How to Change the World
Jean-Paul Flintoff is the author of five books, published in 16 languages. His latest is a novel, which he crowdfunded with Unbound, and the writing of which involved collaboration with theatrical performers, fellow authors, and many of the individuals who pledged money to the book.
Sarah Haynes, Head of Media Production at the Liverpool Screen School, Liverpool John Moores University and creator of collaborative fiction The Button Jar
Following a career in video production Sarah moved into new media and for a number of years was a multimedia developer at the International Centre for Digital Content, Liverpool, in a team working on CD Rom, web and digital games research projects.
Her research explores the opportunities digital technology affords for collaboration in writing fiction and the potential for new reading experiences.
Sarah is currently working on The Memory Store, an online narrative set in Liverpool in 2115. Readers are invited to contribute their own writing, influencing the story and expanding the narrative universe.
Maya Chowdhry, poet and interactive artist
A poet and Transmedia artist, Maya’s writing is infused and influenced through her work for radio, film and theatre. Her collaboration Tales from the Towpath at Manchester Literature Festival was shortlisted for the 2014 New Media Writing Prize, and her recent digital poetic work Ripple was shortlisted for the 2015 Dot Award. She is currently working for Lets Go as a Digital Artist, making interactive theatre and completing Fossil, a chap book of her poetry.
www.linkedin.com/in/maya-chowdhry
https://www.facebook.com/maya.chowdhry
Join us to discuss the following questions and more:
What is the role of a writer and writing in society? Has this changed?
Do new technologies offer new ways of writing?
How might we think differently about the relationship between writers and readers?
Is it possible to have too much writing in the world?
Date and Time: 27/4/16. 6pm Welcome Drinks, 6.30pm Panel Discussion
Venue: Stephen Lawrence Gallery, 10 Stockwell Street, London SE10 9BD
Attendance is free, but you need to register at Eventbrite
The hyper-connected audience
It feels as though Henry Jenkins observations on the potential for participatory, collaborative and convergent media has never been truer. The entertainment properties I find interesting have a life beyond any narrowly defined medium, in fact reaching out into the other media to develop a story gives the work nuance and richness and, of course, further emotional investment from me.
Anyone wishing to create or publish anything now has an eye to other media as an outlet. Naturally, as Jenkins suggests, this has led to not just telling stories through a transmedia experience, but to marketing these brands as worlds to be explored. The Blair Witch Project did this, famously, extremely effectively.
The mainstream media industries were always aware that new audiences could be developed by reaching out to them in a comic book for example after a film success. The decision to develop and fund entirely new content in order to grow an audience and keep them engaged is relatively recent marketing decision; showing that consumer behaviour analysis and an attempt to understand the deeper motivations behind consumer decision making is being taken more seriously. Jenkins terms this ‘affective economics’.
Ubisoft , no small industry player, released Watch_Dogs, an open world action game, in 2013. The protaganist that we were to identify with was Aiden Pearce, a vigilante who spent his time hacking into the city’s Central Operating System (CTOS). To market this game BETC Paris created Watch Dogs WeareData experiential website revealing a 3D interactive map in which we could explore the cities of London, Paris and Berlin the website through the visualisation of publicly available data, reading people’s live tweets, watching the metro go from station to station, looking through instagram posts. A person could lose themselves for hours in this ground-breaking piece of content that was arguably more interesting than the game it was marketing. And you could join in, adding your own data to this live stream.
More recently Faber & Faber published Capital, by John Lanchester, a story of post-crash London. To market this book Storythings created Pepys Road which tells the story of the ten years leading up to the world described by Lanchester. Over the course of ten days, they send emails asking questions about your attitudes to various public policies and send you ten new mini-stories written by John Lanchester. These stories reveal a period of public sector cuts and economic upheaval in which we become a part. James Bridle‘s data illustrations position your data within the rest of the accessible live data. Storythings have created ways to tell mini-stories about the decisions both you and the rest of their audience make.
Both marketing activities make use of our own digital shadow, created by our hyper-connected lives, to situate us within these created worlds, these branded worlds. This however doesn’t feel intrusive rather it feels intuitive, captivating and above all interesting. For me the most interesting thing about big data is when it contextualizes our small data, our personal data. We relate to stories and brands when they feel like they have a place in our lives. More and more we are asked to imagine ourselves in these branded worlds, it is a forward-thinking marketing approach, but how much easier is it to do so when we see how we are connected to these worlds and others in them? And how interesting it is when our data is seen through a different lens, one in which we are adventurers, or spies or hackers, or inhabitants of Capital. Media convergence and accessible data streams allow us to inhabit these other worlds easily and convincingly.
We are ourselves and not at the same moment. perfect.
The Marketisation of London – 3 ideas for change
In a recent article in The Observer, Rowan Moore provided an incisive and sobering analysis of the ever increasing marketisation of London, which he diagnosed as ‘suffering from a form of entropy whereby anything distinctive is converted into property value’. The resulting landscape is one in which more and more land is colonised by new builds designed ‘not to make homes or communities but as units of investment’. Nor is it only homes that are under threat, businesses and social amenities are being evicted from land that is then redeveloped as yet more luxury housing, whose absent owners will not sustain the shops and businesses that remain. As Moore points out, this process is destroying social and commercial life, the very markets, pubs, high streets and communities, that make London desirable and attractive to outside investment. ‘London is eating itself’.
What can be done? The problem is immense, the issues are numerous and there are many potential solutions. Here are three ideas, from three different sources, on how to do things differently:
1) Change the monetary system
According to Positive Money, a not-for-profit organisation based in London, the money that we’re actually using for most of the economy is money created by banks to fund loans. That money only comes into existence at the moment that the loan is created, but from that moment on it starts to create profit in the form of interest for the bank. In the words of Positive Money this means that ‘the entire money supply is on loan from the banking system’. It relies on the creation and perpetuation of debt and ‘transfers £200 billion a year from the public to the financial sector’ in the form of interest. So, while many consumers and businesses are struggling to service unsustainable levels of debt, ‘if we all paid off our debts, the current economic system would collapse’.
The solution Positive Money proposes is to remove this power to create money from the banks and give it instead to ‘a transparent, democratic, accountable body’ with the result that money is created in the public interest and spent into ‘the real economy (i.e a broader range of business and other economic activity), rather than into property bubbles and financial markets’.
2) Don’t leave it to the politicians, join a movement (or start your own).
In his book How to Change the World, John-Paul Flintoff makes clear that we cannot and perhaps should not expect the government to provide all the solutions. He points out that history is created through everyone’s actions and not just those of a few well known and important people. He stresses how important it is not to fall into defeatism or to passively accept things as they are, if we feel they should be different – something that it is quite easy to do, as long as our situation remains uncomfortable, but not actually unbearable.
Instead we need to recognise our own agency and the full significance of the fact that democratic governments are meant to enact the will of the people, not the other way round. People need to make their will known, which may involve action, as well as reaction. Movements may grow into political parties, but political parties rarely start movements. Flintoff has lots of practical suggestions as to how act on these insights. Community organisations, such as those that belong to Reclaim London and projects like The November Project are already acting.
3) Frugal Innovation
In his book, The Frugal Innovator, Charles Leadbeater explores the possibilities of innovation that is lean, simple, social and clean. His view is that ‘innovation needs to be recast and rethought… a new ethic, less about a proliferation of products and features, more about meeting basic needs well’ and adds that ‘frugal innovators… do not seek to create from scratch a product which might bring them fame and fortune. Instead their frugal approach to innovation relies on ‘ ‘re’-thinking: reuse, recycle, repurpose, renew’. This is the kind of innovation that is providing radical solutions in healthcare, housing, education and arts and culture in developing economies where there is no private or public money to invest in the kind of complex and expensive approaches that ‘the developed world’ is used to. In these societies, necessity is the mother of frugal innovation.
However, Leadbeater makes the point that the developed world also needs frugal innovators, both to address the need for sustainability, which current systems cannot meet, and also because society is becoming more and more unequal: ‘the share of economic growth that goes to workers and wages rather than investors and capital has fallen… even if economic growth were to return to pre-recession levels, it would not materially benefit those on median incomes.’ If economic growth is not the answer for the poor and the squeezed middle classes, frugal innovation might be. Leadbeater provides many examples, from a range of sectors and countries, to show how this might work.
For more ideas and to share your own join us at #MakingLondon on the 18th July. Register at https://makinglondon.eventbrite.co.uk