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Canadian author Michael Winter, who wrote The Big Why, will release excerpts of his next novel through a series of posts on the Internet site Facebook.

In the 21st Century, readers will turn on and interact with literature that is displayed on affordable, book-sized computers. Electronic fiction forms will include "narrabases" (nonsequential novels that rely on large computer databases); "narrative data structures" that elegantly organize fictional information on eye-pleasing computer screens; complex narrative investigations based on the adventure story model developed in computer games; and stories told collaboratively by groups of writers in online communities. Computers may even store their own observations and use them to tell their own stories in their own words.

'Flight Paths' seeks to explore what happens when lives collide - an airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. This project will tell their stories. 45 Through the fiction of these two lives, and the cross-connections and contradictions they represent, a larger story about the way we live today will emerge. The collision between the unknown young man, who will be both memorialised and brought back to life by the piece, and the London woman will provide the focus and force for a piece that will explore asylum, immigration, consumer culture, Islam and the West, as well as the seemingly mundane modern day reality of the supermarket car park itself. This young man's death/plummet will become a flight, a testament to both his extreme bravery and the tragic symbolism of his chosen route to the West. The initial goal of this project is to create a work of digital fiction, a 'networked book', created on and through the internet.

This post offers a companion to your course in social software and multimedia literacy. See it as that set of short stories or classic essays in the back of the writing text book.

When I grew up in the 50s, reading and writing were activities conducted alone and in silence. Twenty years from now, as my grandchildren come of age, I expect these formerly solitary behaviors will be perceived as highly social - something we do, more often than not, with others. This insight comes in large part from a series of experiments conducted over the past five years with my colleagues at The Institute for the Future of the Book. They strongly suggest that when we move texts from the printed page to a networked screen, the social aspect of reading and writing moves to the foreground.

Improvisational and participational storytelling