Oh hi blog, no offense, but I do most of my internettery on twitter these days. One of the keys to twitter's wild success has been the capacity of its stripped-down interface to paradoxically inspire a cornucopia of practices driven by the swarming creativity of its users. Although the update box at the top is still captioned "What are you doing?" people type into it any and all information that can be meted out in 140 characters, including reviews, live commentary, poetry, jokes, links, meme responses, calls to action, and messages to friends. The site's open API and ecumenical attitude has facilitated innumerable hacks and mashups that offer workarounds for some of the features that twitter lacks, as well as illuminating and fanciful ways of interfacing with its worldwide cloud of presence.
Notable among creative appropriations of twitter has been its popularity as a platform for parodies and interpretations of celebrities and fictional characters. While some "fakers" are relatively free-standing caricatures, others have congregated into interactive networks of accounts based on the ensemble of a TV show or movie.
I have been actively involved in the Battlestar Galactica twitterverse for going on a year now. I play Tory Foster and also took it upon myself to do some den mothering and archiving -- although I can take little credit for the project's endlessly delightful wit, and most of the participants are still totally anonymous to me. This collaborative fan fictional universe resembles other iterations of character-based role-playing games (RPGs), albeit a very lightweight version, but due to the constraints of twitter it is resistant to outside readers. That is, virtually the only way of following it is to subscribe to all of the 30+ characters with your own twitter account, a commitment that understandably few are willing to make, and there are no good options for preserving the updates collectively for later perusal. I've been struggling to find methods of documenting it and making it accessible to a wider audience, finally setting up a stream in Yahoo! Pipes (although any "digital lifestyle aggregator" that can combine multiple feeds, such as google-owned twitter competitor jaiku, might have served).
Thus, imagine my excitement and confusion when the new website twitterfic.com turned up a few days ago! It has been perplexing and preoccupying enough to inspire me to blog about it, which is no small feat.
First, let me give you the venture at face value according to the unidentified "we" who created it and their twitter account:
Now, here are some conspicuous absences that gave rise to my confusion:
Perhaps unfairly, it is the beauty of the site that makes me suspicious. The interface (apparently built on Wordpress, although this information isn't given explicitly) is clean and intuitive; kudos to whoever put the effort into constructing something so professional purely as a labor of love. There's no reason to assume that the oversights aren't a corollary of overeager amateurs rather than shady masterminds.
In the context of online fandom today, however, content creators have good reason to be wary. The infamous FanLib archive, for example, courted writers with similarly collegial rhetoric while backhandedly pandering to corporate sponsors, and eventually left its users high and dry when it couldn't make a profit. LiveJournal and YouTube TOSs accounts willy nilly according to their grossly conservative legal policies. Facebook sparked a wankstorm last week when it tried to claim rights to user contributions in perpetuity, calling attention to the vulnerability of ownership in the maelstrom of social media. The most successful non-profit fan-run alternatives (such as LJ-replacement Dreamwidth and the OTW's Archive of Our Own) are very careful to express their terms and values with maximum openness.
As![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
grrl_unscripted put it in our conversation about twitterfic, "why no transparency if there's nothing to hide?!"
The fact that the site offers few twitter-oriented features contributes to the appearance that it's trying to leverage the popular but decentralized phenomenon of twitter-based RPGs to promote its own agenda. The features it does offer -- blogs, profiles, groups, and friendslists -- are not unique, and would be available through any number of existing platforms (the pan-fandom LJ-based RPG community Theatrical Muse comes to mind).
Now, in actuality, the impulse to create a social network tailored specifically to extending role-playing on twitter is a legitimate and benign one. I am constantly reminded of the diversity of styles of engagement in fandom, and know better than to assume that my own inspirations and fixations are shared by everyone. I imagine that the hermetic structure of a twitterverse lends each a distinct and autonomous character. Reading between the lines, twitterfic.com seems have to grown out of the True Blood community. For my part, the anarchic, ephemeral, and emergent quality of a twitter network -- precisely what distinguishes it from more formalized RPG systems -- has been what makes the Battlestar Galactica collective compelling. If what I wanted was centralization and elaboration I would have taken my creative energies elsewhere in the first place. But if the True Blood crew and others are motivated to expand their options for interactive storytelling, more power to them for making that a reality.
Notable among creative appropriations of twitter has been its popularity as a platform for parodies and interpretations of celebrities and fictional characters. While some "fakers" are relatively free-standing caricatures, others have congregated into interactive networks of accounts based on the ensemble of a TV show or movie.
I have been actively involved in the Battlestar Galactica twitterverse for going on a year now. I play Tory Foster and also took it upon myself to do some den mothering and archiving -- although I can take little credit for the project's endlessly delightful wit, and most of the participants are still totally anonymous to me. This collaborative fan fictional universe resembles other iterations of character-based role-playing games (RPGs), albeit a very lightweight version, but due to the constraints of twitter it is resistant to outside readers. That is, virtually the only way of following it is to subscribe to all of the 30+ characters with your own twitter account, a commitment that understandably few are willing to make, and there are no good options for preserving the updates collectively for later perusal. I've been struggling to find methods of documenting it and making it accessible to a wider audience, finally setting up a stream in Yahoo! Pipes (although any "digital lifestyle aggregator" that can combine multiple feeds, such as google-owned twitter competitor jaiku, might have served).
Thus, imagine my excitement and confusion when the new website twitterfic.com turned up a few days ago! It has been perplexing and preoccupying enough to inspire me to blog about it, which is no small feat.
First, let me give you the venture at face value according to the unidentified "we" who created it and their twitter account:
- "This site is an extension of all the character portrayals on twitter. It is a more robust arena for fans and characters to interact with each other." (source: Hello Fans!)
- it is "powered by fans" (source: site footer text)
- it is "just for fun" and has no investors or sponsors; it includes google ads in hopes of covering hosting costs (source: twitter queries)
Now, here are some conspicuous absences that gave rise to my confusion:
- no integration with the twitter API (beyond displaying a character's tweets on her individual profile page)
- no developer and software credits for site design
- no Terms of Service
- no outreach and promotion before the launch
Perhaps unfairly, it is the beauty of the site that makes me suspicious. The interface (apparently built on Wordpress, although this information isn't given explicitly) is clean and intuitive; kudos to whoever put the effort into constructing something so professional purely as a labor of love. There's no reason to assume that the oversights aren't a corollary of overeager amateurs rather than shady masterminds.
In the context of online fandom today, however, content creators have good reason to be wary. The infamous FanLib archive, for example, courted writers with similarly collegial rhetoric while backhandedly pandering to corporate sponsors, and eventually left its users high and dry when it couldn't make a profit. LiveJournal and YouTube TOSs accounts willy nilly according to their grossly conservative legal policies. Facebook sparked a wankstorm last week when it tried to claim rights to user contributions in perpetuity, calling attention to the vulnerability of ownership in the maelstrom of social media. The most successful non-profit fan-run alternatives (such as LJ-replacement Dreamwidth and the OTW's Archive of Our Own) are very careful to express their terms and values with maximum openness.
As
grrl_unscripted put it in our conversation about twitterfic, "why no transparency if there's nothing to hide?!"The fact that the site offers few twitter-oriented features contributes to the appearance that it's trying to leverage the popular but decentralized phenomenon of twitter-based RPGs to promote its own agenda. The features it does offer -- blogs, profiles, groups, and friendslists -- are not unique, and would be available through any number of existing platforms (the pan-fandom LJ-based RPG community Theatrical Muse comes to mind).
Now, in actuality, the impulse to create a social network tailored specifically to extending role-playing on twitter is a legitimate and benign one. I am constantly reminded of the diversity of styles of engagement in fandom, and know better than to assume that my own inspirations and fixations are shared by everyone. I imagine that the hermetic structure of a twitterverse lends each a distinct and autonomous character. Reading between the lines, twitterfic.com seems have to grown out of the True Blood community. For my part, the anarchic, ephemeral, and emergent quality of a twitter network -- precisely what distinguishes it from more formalized RPG systems -- has been what makes the Battlestar Galactica collective compelling. If what I wanted was centralization and elaboration I would have taken my creative energies elsewhere in the first place. But if the True Blood crew and others are motivated to expand their options for interactive storytelling, more power to them for making that a reality.
