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What I'm onto here is writing and researching and thinking about hypertext fiction. For those of you familiar with it already, enough said--you may want to go back to the Contents. For those of you unfamiliar with it, hypertext fiction (aka hyperfiction, interactive fiction, nonlinear fiction) is a new art form that while not necessarily made possible by the computer was certainly made feasible by it. Its creators make use of hypertext--of which the Web is only one widespread albeit limited incarnation--to create fiction with many features uncharacteristic of print fiction: multiple paths through the same text; multiple endings (and beginnings); questions posed to the reader which, once answered, influence what the reader will read; audiovisual attachments; navigable maps; and so on and so on. Readers seeking more extensive definitions of hypertext fiction are invited to browse through the Theory and Criticism section or, better yet, simply start reading a few works--artists always outstrip their would-be definers.

A year ago, I wrote about how we needed to reclaim the phrase "transmedia storytelling" as a community from the plague of buzzworditis that was surrounding it. Sadly, that effort failed: more and more practitioners are future-proofing themselves by moving away - either subtly or explicitly - from the word. Even Creepy Wonka has been getting in on the action. "Transmedia" is on the downward slide of usefulness as a term and it is time to have a frank discussion about why, so that whatever label rises to take its place doesn't suffer from the same excesses and failures. Consider me Brutus in the court of Caesar: I've come to bury transmedia, not praise it.

With hundreds of works of computer mediated fiction or poetry available either on disk, largely through the Eastgate Systems catalog, or on the net, hypernarrative, its definition as open-ended as the many-faceted reading experience it engenders, is a primary way of storytelling in the era of the World Wide Web.

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.

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.

Russell's disappointment in LinkedIn implies that the term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people. Think about the object as the reason why people affiliate with each specific other and not just anyone. For instance, if the object is a job, it will connect me to one set of people whereas a date will link me to a radically different group. This is common sense but unfortunately it's not included in the image of the network diagram that most people imagine when they hear the term 'social network.' The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people.