The internet is a fickle thing. (Could I have come up with a more inane opening line? The alternative is to lead straight into my point, like a news article, but I prefer to string you along. Also this is not news.) So is language, really. Once, our teacher started a game: the class was to create a long sentence by working together. Each person in the chain had to add one word to the phrase - then clause - then sentence - then complex sentence - then mass of meaningless statements.
I have written myself into a patch of swamp. Because if the internet is like that game, my blog is a handful of mud. On the bright side, rather that than one of those deep-sea eyeless fish.
What I mean is that - oh gosh, here's another swamp - the internet is in a sense (note the catch-all disclaimer, folks, and that includes third-party insurance) a demonstration of democracy. Listen before you start throwing things. The game was also a bit like democracy. Everyone adds their two cents with minimal censorship. (I mean, if we'd started adding swearwords, I guess the teacher would have stopped us. Maybe washed our mouths out. Is that even allowed nowadays? Because it was pretty effective.)
In about 2009, Penguin Books hosted an international experiment. They were going to enable internet users to write and edit a novel, and they would publish it. There were forums and guidelines and some limits (otherwise a user could stop sleeping and eating for three days and pound out the bulk of the novel, in theory. Less than theory, in my books (har har) - have you met some of these internet junkies?) All intellectual property rested with them.
The experiment drowned in the swamp of the internet. (And media studies grads everywhere yelled, Told ya' so. We love being right. Because it happens so rarely.) Perhaps they overestimated internet users or language or democracy (there, I said it). Proof that James Joyce didn't just pound out random strings of words, two out of five of which make sense. (It's more like four.) That's not the point though.
The writing was a mash of meaningless statements, that were over-edited (or under-edited depending on how you look at it). Forums were filled with sensitive writers (we're all sensitive) whose work has been 'completely decimated'. (I never partook of the experiment FYI. I prefer to stand on the sidelines and criticise. Constructively. And then feel guilty.) We all became commentators and the project shut down ahead of deadline. Penguin sent out a press release saying they wouldn't publish the novel, but it was there on the website to look at, because we had all learnt valuable things about publishing and the internet.
Now, I can't find the site or any references to it, despite a creative assortment of keywords and Google's ability to know what I meant to search rather than what I did. And I can't remember the name of the darn thing. I have just learnt something about the internet: you can delete all trace of something embarrassing - contrary to the logic that the internet remembers everything and that Google is the set of neuron receptors that lead to the memory.
Hence the internet being a fickle thing, and language too. And James Joyce a genius. (Stop throwing things! Huh, at least its a bushel of broccoli rather than - nevermind.)
Perhaps the experiment would have worked if Penguin had retained its role as a gatekeeper, as it would with print novels. For example, you could have gradings of editors, determined by a series of tests and their editing of the manuscript. They could operate as a hive, with a mediator at the top, verifying the above. Hang on, that's how Distributed Proofreaders, which does the OCRing, editing and proofreading for Project Gutenberg, works and have done for years (I started volunteering in 2005).
Hmmmm I feel there is a lesson here. I can't quite grasp it through the mud. No wait, I'm just heightening the suspense. I always know where My Point is. Always. Always. Always. Does democracy in practice mean anarchy? If you want to destroy the system, be prepared for the backlash. And I say this as a sympathetic anarchist. Even challenging the system and redeveloping marshland where the capitalist gatekeepers built their monuments needs project management. Else you're going to be left with half-demolished building in a pool of mud, like in Planet of the Apes.
Now, I'm always telling you that I'm the dictator here and so I can say and do as I wish (I can't but anyway), but I am just a handful of mud in the swamp. No one quotes me in essays and other such vaguely objective things (heavens above, please don't. Although I'd like to be a credible source one day, I'd prefer if you don't quote me using mud as a metaphor. Rather follow me on Twitter and like my posts). And I abide by Blogger's rules, some of them imposed by the design, others by mediators. (But apparently not on spambots.)
Now that I have gotten to My Point (which I always knew was here. Always. Always. Always) I am not sure I agree with myself. Rules and processes develop for a reason (mostly through trial and error), though some rules and processes have passed their expiry dates and deserve to be broken. Often it takes a skilled gatekeeper to know the difference. Honestly, I'd prefer to have a gatekeeper there to stop children from wandering off at night, and thieves and such wandering in.
But back to business: an experiment requires an hypothesis, guidelines, a process and a placebo. Without these, what do you expect to get except chaos? Do you actually expect to get chaos? Or is this an experiment in chaos? Do you mean to prove that gatekeepers are necessary? Why then has the internet erased all trace of such experiment?
I am overthinking this. Luckily, you probably haven't been able to keep reading through this ridiculously long post. So I can say without recrimination that the democratic nature of the internet sometimes just encourages meaninglessness and chaos. (You get the hint that the same applies to true democracy.) And that this shouldn't always be encouraged or even just played with. I wonder whether, had some more vigorous rules been applied, and perhaps withdrawn in stages, Penguin might actually have come up with something publishable, as well as some useful information.
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