Brave New Twitter

I attended a Twitter chat last night. It was both difficult and fascinating - and not because of what we were talking about, but how we were talking about it.

Let me give you some context. I'm not a big producer of tweets, because I don't have the best mobile phone tech, and I don't tend to narrate my life in quite that manner. But this time I was invited to #scribechat and I figured I'd attend. It took me a while to figure out how to attend, given that I never had, and I'm still not entirely convinced that I did it in the easiest way. But I learned a lot about Twitter interactions.

New technologies don't always allow for established conventions. That's certainly the case with email, texting, and instant messaging, but even more so with Twitter. Sometimes when conventions of communication fail to be translated between media, it can become socially problematic or even dangerous. Let's trace through some developments.

Take email first. It's considered to be a much less formal medium than actual letter-writing. I remember when people first started learning that writing in all capitals meant shouting in the email format. Some people still have trouble grasping this convention. It worked fine for telegrams, because those were usually sent only in emergencies anyway. I know of many cases where people have offended others by going too far into the realm of the informal with emails. It's a medium that resembles letters, but doesn't follow their rules in the area of politeness.

Then there's texting, and instant messaging. Like telegrams, texts are restricted in length by price. It's interesting to note that the conventions for shortening a telegram - which involved leaving out words but not usually shortening the words themselves - more resembled writing headlines for newspapers. Texting conventions took this shortening trend and combined it with the more recent trend for creating acronyms (from company names etc.), resulting in "ROFL" and all sorts of fascinating new expressions. Instant messaging is restricted by a different kind of shortening influence - the desire to get the messages back and forth as quickly as possible. Texting conventions translate easily to this environment, but for those who aren't well-versed in the texting acronyms, you tend to see missed capitals, abbreviations and dropped punctuation. Interestingly though, when you're dealing with a medium of high-speed back-and-forth, misunderstandings can be cleared up much more easily than with email, because the members of the conversation can simply ask questions immediately to clear things up. There's another convention that gets altered too - turn-taking. The high speed of messages means that cross-posting happens, and one person will start a new topic while the other is still about to make a comment. Generally in my experience, that can lead to the situation (more unusual, but not unheard of, in verbal conversation) of two topics being maintained at once.

Twitter is something different. You've got lots of people involved in a chat at once, but here more distinctly, turn-taking rules don't apply well. In Twitter many of the contributions aren't actually replies to any particular person's statement. I figure if a two-person conversation is ping pong, and a multi-person conversation resembles hacky-sack (even in an online chatroom), a Twitter conversation is more like trying to play tennis against a ball machine. I felt like I was in a room with lots of different conversations going on, but even once I chose one to belong to, I still was required to eavesdrop on all the others at the same time.

So here's a summary of some conventions of conversation and letter-writing that get altered by new technologies:

1. turn taking (and topic switches)
2. the link between information and identity
3. conventions of politeness
4. availability of context for disambiguation of message

This is not to say that technology only causes trouble. It has some great advantages. The funniest one I've heard lately was yesterday, when my friend told me that "today in rehearsal, I had to ask kids to text instead of whisper. Crazy thing is, it actually worked."

I'm not about to condemn these new forms of communication. They're actually very interesting as inspirations for the kinds of misunderstandings that can arise in different contexts - and for different modes of narrative. More and more these days I've seen stories take the form of chatroom logs. It works pretty well! There's also the example of the Google ad about the boy and the French girl that was shown during the Superbowl. I'd call that an unusual sort of flash fiction video.

I had a flash of inspiration after the Twitter chat that I'd like to share because in the moment I had it, it felt so true. Being in a room with multiple conversations and having to listen to all of them is precisely the reality that many people describe when they work with species or groups that communicate by telepathy. Our imaginations can give us a lot of insight into how it would "feel" to be in a place where you could hear everything that everyone said - or thought - but if you want insight into the kind of conversation that would occur, or the kind of processing load that would be put on a person unfamiliar with such a context, follow Twitter chats for a while.

I don't think that was my last Twitter chat, though I know that I prefer instant messaging. I'm definitely going to be keeping my eyes open for inspiration - and I hope you can too.

Country Identity

Several recent interactions with friends, as well as the ongoing Olympics, have brought the topic of country identity to my mind. In this case I'm not talking about national symbolism, or flags, but about how people form a concept about another country.

We form patterns quickly. I think it's actually a biological imperative. If an unusual-looking bear is coming at you, and you hesitate because you can't figure out if it's really a bear or not... you get the idea. Typically we suspect a pattern after two data points conform to it, and we feel it's been confirmed when we see a third conforming example. From that, we expand our idea into a generalization that we try to apply in new contexts.

Lately, I've met more than one person who told me they didn't want to go to Australia. Needless to say, I found this surprising, since I'm married to an Australian and have been there lots of times (it's lovely). When I asked why, these people explained (not in precisely these words) that Australia was filled wall to wall with terribly dangerous animals from sting rays to jellyfish to spiders to crocodiles, and that going there would mean certain injury or death. My response? Um, wow. But I didn't ask where they got the idea, because I actually know where they got it. From the news. It doesn't take more than one Steve Irwin to make a big impression; add to that one story of lifeguards wearing panty hose to avoid jellyfish stings, and one story about the Sydney brown recluse spider, and voila! That's a pattern for generalized fear.

Just so you realize I'm not really much better than any of these people, I'll tell you how I felt when I first met my husband. I was incredulous, listening to all his stories about the big city of Melbourne (3 million people). I thought - with some embarrassment, mind you - "Wow, Australia has people?" All my data points came from stories or tv shows about Australian scenery and animals.

I heard another story about a pr video that was being made in France. The first people to judge it weren't impressed, because they wanted to get away from the typical "Baguette, beret, fromage" image. (Fromage is cheese.) France is quite strong in biotech, for example, and in this case, pointing out that fact was far more relevant to the video than the old-fashioned image.

So in general, I'll observe that people's mistaken first impressions of countries don't seem to come from erroneous information so much as bad luck in the first few pieces of data they encounter. When I watch the Olympics, I always feel like it functions as a force for good in world awareness, because at least it will give people a few more data points about a place they don't know well.

So in real life, we might advise people to be cautious about drawing larger generalizations from scant data - but the fact is, people do it. This is where it becomes relevant to writing alien and fantasy worlds. Chances are, residents of a fantasy or alien world will think in much this same way - and draw conclusions about humans, or about their neighbors in another country, accordingly. Think through how people think about each other. If you can, try to go as far as establishing the kinds of major events or rumors that might establish a country's reputation with its neighbors. It will make your whole world feel more real.

Thank You

The Nebula nominations have closed. I got a total of twelve votes - not enough to reach the ballot, but far more than I ever expected. I want to thank all of you who supported me and my story. I'll try my best to live up to your confidence in me and write even better stories in the future.

Thanks also to all my blog followers and readers. You're wonderful, and I am grateful to all of you for your interest in my odd musings. It's been hard for me to post in the last week due to various factors beyond my control, but I'll try to get back to it now.

Juliette

Monuments of Unageing Intellect: A Ridiculously Close Look

I had an interesting experience when I read Monuments of Unageing Intellect by Howard Hendrix. As I began reading, I had an intense feeling of familiarity, as if I'd read the story before. By the time I'd gotten halfway through I recognized the similarity - and in fact, when I spoke with Dr. Hendrix himself, he confirmed that his story is deliberately intended to update and give homage to an older story, The Dying Man by Damon Knight (first entitled Dio, which Hendrix read three decades ago in the Groff Conklin anthology 5 Unearthly Visions).

What does an author do, I wondered, to make us feel the similarity between two stories like this without actually imitating the text directly? And how does one bring a classic story into a new age?

When I spoke with Hendrix at the Nebula Awards last year, he told me he hadn't looked at Knight's story as he wrote this one. I can see how that would be a good idea - avoiding the gravitational pull of the original story is probably a very good idea. On the other hand, there had to be many strong similarities in order for this to be a re-envisioning of the story, rather than a revamping of the premise. So I thought I'd show a collection of points, and demonstrate how each similarity simultaneously evokes and makes a distinct departure from the Knight story.

The premise at the heart of each tale is the same: amidst a society of immortal humans, one person starts dying. Each story has three important characters that drive the tale, those being the dying one, the involved observer (who is the primary point of view character), and the one who can explain what's going on. In fact, I could argue that these are the characters required by a science fictional tale of this nature, for the following reasons:

1. The dying one is the reason for the story
2. The one who can explain helps readers with the basis of the world and its details*
3. The involved observer experiences significant emotional impact from the impending death, and at the same time will outlive the dying one. This makes the observer a natural choice for the primary point of view character, in part because he or she will have a chance to reflect on the event in retrospect, but also because the point of view of an immortal human being is the most "different" from what we are familiar with in our own lives.
*This is a question of information management that I've discussed before; it functions quite effectively in these stories.

Hendrix chooses to create a deliberate difference between his story and Knight's in this area by reversing the characters' genders. Knight's dying person is a man, Dio; his friend is Claire, and the helpful explainer is a man named Benarra. Hendrix's dying character is named Moira, her friend Hisao, and their helper Wilena. The change of gender makes it much easier to keep the two stories distinct.

More similarities lie in scene-setting, imagery and the use of language. Both stories begin with a scene involving sports, the ocean, and flight. In Knight's story, Dio watches a game of ball on the beach, then gets drawn into a flying wresting match. The scene ends with the following image:

"Far out, the comber lifts its head menacingly high; it comes onward, white-crowned, hard as bottle-glass below, rising, faster, and as it roars with a shuddering of earth into the cavern, the Immortals are dashed high on the white torrent, screaming their joy."

In Hendrix's story, the scene opens with a game of ball played over the ocean on flying surfboards, which ends like this:

"She hurled the ball back into bounds, where it was greeted with the laughter of young gods and goddesses, golden Olympians at play, flashing and moving in waves with the ball and the game."

What I find fascinating here is that the mere presence of ocean/ball/game/immortal people in Hendrix's story was so powerfully able to evoke Knight's, to the point where by the end of the first scene I was certain the two stories were linked. Even more interesting for me is the parallel between the word "dashed" and the word "flashing" - a phonological link that gives a common flavor to both pieces.

The parallels do continue. Both Dio and Moira are artists in a sense, and both create sculptures during their stories. There is a continual contrast between the changing and unchanging, and its emotional effect - Hendrix does this well by giving Hisao a strong reaction to the "Persistent Personae", sculptures created by Moira. In both stories, it's inexplicable why one person would suddenly become mortal, and the image of an animal's death (a rat for Knight, a dolphin for Hendrix) plays an important role.

However, once the initial link between the stories is established, the reader can be freed up to pay more attention to the differences that then appear.

In Knight's story, the world he creates is rather dreamlike - an impression contributed to by his use of present tense narration throughout. This impression is furthered by a division he draws between two classes of people: the Players and the Planners. The Players are the most thoroughly immersed in the immortal experience, having no care for the passage of days; they don't keep journals, and don't notice, for example, if the people they meet on a daily basis are people they might have met before three hundred years earlier. The Planners are responsible for keeping track of things, and thus for keeping society running. Dio, even before he becomes mortal, is a Planner - but we only experience his point of view right at the very beginning of the story. Claire, who loves him, is a Player - and her identity establishes a basis for her naïve understanding of his situation and of the world around them, which colors her emotional experience and allows her relationship with Bennara to be so informative (to her, and to the reader!).

Through all this, Knight creates very little sense of how his immortal world came to be, saying only that people no longer die because they never reach full physical maturity (neoteny). When Claire asks how people became immortal, we get the following exchange with Bennara:

"You're saying it happened. But how?"
"It didn't happen. We did it, we created ourselves."
...
[they look at images of disease agents]
"What happened to them?" she asks in a voice that does not quite tremble.
"Nothing. The planners left them alone, but changed us. Most of the records have been lost in two thousand years, and of course we have no real science of biology as they knew it."

By contrast, though he keeps the explanation of neoteny as prolonging life, Dr. Hendrix brings to his tale a keen sense of the technological - a sensibility quite appropriate to modern readers' understanding of science. The flight in his tale is not inherent in neo-human abilities, but comes from technology like the hovering surfboards. In his vision, there was a person behind the "Intervention," Cherise LeMoyne, who brought about the change by releasing nanotechnology called "moteswarms." Wilena describes the swarms as follows:

"'LeMoyne's diagnosis had come too late. She died, but not before giving the motes their ability to swarm-communicate. She connected the 'bots, even gave them links and search capabilities into the human infosphere - apparently hoping everything we humans had ever learned might serve as the motes' classroom, their school, their teacher, their database. She also gave them their most important commands, at least after their Hippocratic "Do not harm" substrate.'
Into the air above her desk Wilena holoed up the twin directives, where they hovered in golden numbers and letters.
1) ELIMINATE HUMAN MORTALITY
2) REPLICATE HUMAN CONSCIOUSNESS"

By giving us these elements, Dr. Hendrix allows his story to move beyond the emotional impact of mortality into the question of what the moteswarms have actually achieved, and whether their presence has helped or hurt humanity on the larger scale (in the areas of psychology and learning). The idea that humans have experienced both physical and psychological neoteny as a result of the work of the moteswarms allows him to arrive, from a totally different direction, at the sort of Player/Planner distinction that Knight takes as a premise. In Hendrix's case, all the immortal humans are characterized by psychological immaturity on a certain level, which leads to hyper-specialization - and only Moira is different, or Deeper.

"The rest all swim in shallow seas....Only Moira moves in deep waters."

The two stories end in very different places, thematically. Knight's story ends with a change in Claire, who has in a sense left Eden behind because she has gained an awareness of death - and sees that while distant, it may still be waiting for her. Dr. Hendrix's story ends with a different kind of change in Hisao, who realizes he will never experience the intensity of life in his endless years that Moira experienced in her few. There's a distinct portrayal of the moteswarms as having escaped human control, and of their influence as not necessarily one that was best for all humanity.

I'd like to thank Dr. Hendrix for his story, and for inspiring me to this post by writing his own monument - a "monument to unageing premise."

I hope you all find this discussion interesting, and have a chance to enjoy Damon Knight's "The Dying Man" and Dr. Howard Hendrix's "Monuments of Unageing Intellect" for yourselves.