Very wise: he doesn’t even get into a religious discussion. He says straight away, that what he writes about is true for all religions and myths at the same time.

Numbers in brackets: pages in pdf.

xxi
“It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythol­ogy by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult exam­ples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself. The old teachers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthologist to let their teaching be heard. But first we must learn the grammar of the symbols, and as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern tool than psychoanalysis.”

3
“It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”

13f
“He had converted a public event to personal gain, whereas the whole sense of his investi­ture as king had been that he was no longer a mere private person.”

14
“By the sacri­lege of the refusal of the rite, however, the individual [e.g. King Minos] cut himself as a unit off from the larger unit of the whole community: and so the One was broken into the many, and these then battled each other—each out for himself—and could be governed only by force.”

15
“The hero is the man of self-achieved submission.” -> See On The Waterfront, maybe it wasn’t religious after all?

“As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorat­ing elements. Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.”
-> He talks about Nietzsche’s and Schumpeter’s creative destruction!

16
“In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside”

18
“Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.”

“The [Australian Aranda] word altjira means: (a) a dream, (b) ancestor, beings who appear in the dream, (c) a story (Rôheim, The Eternal Ones of the Dream, pp. 210-211).”

30 (28)
“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

35 (33)
“As we soon shall see, whether presented in the vast, almost oceanic images of the Orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, or in the majestic legends of the Bible, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above de­ scribed: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return.”

37f (35)
“The composite hero of the monomyth is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently he is honored by his society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. He and/or the world in which he finds himself suffers from a symbolical deficiency. In fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain golden ring, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin.
Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic, microcosmic triumph, and the hero of myth a world-historical, macrocosmic triumph. Whereas the former—the youngest or despised child who becomes the master of extraordinary powers—prevails over his personal oppressors, the latter brings back from his ad­ venture the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole.”
-> He distinguished two essential stories: fairytale and myth.

39
“The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is “the king’s son” who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power – “God’s son,” who has learned to know how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

40 (37)
“The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. The miracle of this flow may be represented in physical terms as a circulation of food substance, dynamically as a streaming of energy, or spiritually as a manifestation of grace.”

44 (41)
“The World Navel, then, is ubiquitous. And since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plenitude of both good and evil.”
-> God is in everything, in every blade of grass.

17:54
Definition-story arc:
“analogous to chapter in a novel” -> so in his terminology arcs cannot overlap? -> Not my understanding of story arcs.

Story Arcs

19:48
They started off with influencable stories that branched out, were complicated, and depended on how the audience interacted with them. Later on the stories became much more linear, because these a easier to play. “Leave the story to us… but we’ll still change it anyway.” (slide text) if the audience likes a character, for example -> not player-directed but player-influenced story.

20:16
People like seeing new websites/content.

ARGs require new skill sets -> everything has to happen faster -> storytellers work under a constant deadline -> they’re not used to that, have to adapt

30:48
Mind Candy didn’t create a storyworld bible, but the audience created a Wiki and a Google Maps mashup that became the de facto bible!

64-82
Describes approaches to how a story can evolve:

1. 64-67, Knowledge-based Approach: don’t really understand
2. 67-70, Simple-Link Approach: basically the way hypertext/links work; user clicks his way through a story
3. 70-74, Multiple Character Approach: user interacts with characters (see 72: story engine) and learns the story from them
4. 74f, Puzzle Approach: user moves from puzzles to puzzle and learns the story on the way; ARGs do this -> downside: Sean Stewart: TNAG
5. 75-78, Traffic Circle Approach: user starts at a central place from where he goes down story lanes and always returns to the central place
6. 78fSingle-Stream Cinematic Sequence Approach: moving pictures tell something in their order, even if the user is able to choose in what order to watch them
7. 80-82, Folded Approach: not sure this is a real category (perhaps he just wanted to present his past creative work); a main character tells sth (as a moving picture?) -> user can click on screen anytime -> detail about that scene is then told by 12 characters discussing it -> user can click on on of the 12 to hear his perspective (second fold) -> user can make main character talk to that character (third fold)

72
Definition-story engine:
“the term story engine is used to describe a set of software algorithms designed to make decisions regarding how a computer-based story should proceed.” The user does something and the story engine responds in a certain way.

93
“the metalinear form extends the writer’s narrative voice so the writer can say more things in more ways.”

95
“A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.” William Stafford, from WRITING THE AUSTRALIAN CRAWL, February 1982

201
“Metalinear narrative is the name proposed by this research for this new narrative form. The metalinear narrative is a collection of small related story pieces designed to be arranged in many different ways, to tell many different linear stories from different points of view, with the aid of a story engine which sequences the story pieces.”

202
“Metalinear narrative has three primary components:

• An abstract story structure composed of narrative primitives which a writer can manipulate and rearrange according to her creativity. The story structure provides the narrative framework, or spine, for the many linear narratives to be produced from the metalinear narrative
• A representation of story granules to be resequenced in various ways. This repre­sentation includes annotations of how each granule fits into the story structure and the narrative relationships between the story granules
• Methods of resequencing story granules based on their representation and the pro­vided abstract story structure. The story engine chooses granules which fit the sto­ry structure according to predetermined narrative styles

My thesis is that a writing tool which offers the author these three key elements, as well as knowledgeable feedback about narrative construction and context during the creative process, is essential to the task of creating metalinear narratives of significant dimension.”

205
“Met­alinear narrative may make it easier for all of us, not just a few of us, to tell our stories.” -> empowerment

“How do I motivate audiences to cross platforms?”

Definition “story”, “storyworld”, “experience”
“Think of the story has having two components:

• “the story” – the whole world that’s created with all the characters stretching out in chronological order
• “the experience” – how the storyworld is revealed to the audience (timing and platforms).

Note that the story might be much larger than the project you’re working on now.
Our objective throughout this process is to have the story and the experience of the story integrated with the business model.”

Although you started with the story in mind, platform selection has rightly focused on the experience. Now is the time to sanity check the experience and see if there’s any missing story, story that now needs adapting or story + experience that can be improved.
For example, now you have a roll-out strategy for your platforms (the experience), iterate back through the story and looking for these types of opportunities (in no particular order and please add more of your own):

• Twists
• Surprises
• Cliff hangers
• Inciting incidents
• Reunions
• Breakups
• Conflict
• Discovery
• Exposition
• Reversals
• Suspense
• Threats
• Complications
• Conclusions”

He says “roll-out strategy” = “experience”.
Jeff Gomez (I think in the interview with Lance Weiler) said “bible” = “roll-out strategy”.
Is the bible the experience? No. Is it the blueprint of the experience? I think so.

“When I think about these [story/media] outlets, I think about them in terms of like OK if they have the individual arc and then I have the overall arc in the full story, and it becomes about how I pace it, how I get it to an audience, and how I have them interact with it.”

Definition “story architecture”:
“Story architecture to me is kind of the idea of what effectively is a kind of fluidness of creative, technology in terms of how you actually deliver these things, how do you scale them, how do you get them to these various outlets. How do you make it an experience that somebody is going to be engaged by and want to continue to you know hopefully tell somebody else about. And then, you know, business. The last part is kind of entrepreneurial, you know, how do you actually derive your revenue streams from this. How do you actually look at it in a meaningful way, so it is ?impactful? [5:26 min] for yourself.”

“Once you have the data, and it is the future of everything, you know, if we look and we say search was the future, you know, a number of years back, it really is about discovery, it really is about filtering. And a lot of this discussion throughout the day, throughout this whole thing, you know, this conference, is going to be about how do people discover and find you in a world that is swelling with content.”

“What is interesting is, like, normally we started with like a three act structure in a screenplay. In the case of some of the work we have been developing it starts with the build of a universe, bible, game bible, show bible, where we kind of go through and define the world, define the interactions, define the characters, define the rules, and then from there it becomes this amazing kind of depth of information where you know more about the subject than you ever did before.”

“By adding varied pathways to the same destination, you allow your audience to create their own journey.”

“Even within a group of visitors, each member may have an experience unique to them. An experience they can share, but that is still distinctively theirs.” An EA can do the same.

“Tell them where they’re going,
Tell them where they are, and
Tell them where they’ve been.”
“This little bit of nudging does not have to take up very much of the game players’ time, but strategically placed reminders throughout your game will keep them on the right track and make them less apt to lose interest in where they are going.”

121
“I want to introduce an important third term into this discussion – spatiality – and argue for an understanding of game designers less as storytellers and more as narrative architects.”

122f
Definition “environmental storytelling”: see Carson, D ~ Environmental Storytelling. I think Jenkins calls this “embedded storytelling”, p128?

124
“Increasingly, we inhabit a world of transmedia storytelling, one that depends less on each individual work being self-sufficient than on each work contributing to a larger narrative economy.”
“One can imagine games taking their place within a larger narrative system with story information communicated through books, film, television, comics, and other media, each doing what it does best, each a relatively autonomous experience, but the richest understanding of the story world coming to those who follow the narrative across the various channels. In such a system, what games do best will almost certainly center around their ability to give concrete shape to our memories and imaginings of the storyworld, creating an immersive environment we can wander through and interact with.”
“Spatial stories are not badly constructed stories; rather, they are stories that respond to alternative aesthetic principles, privileging spatial exploration over plot development.”

125
“Eisenstein used the word “attractions” broadly to describe any element within a work that produces a profound emotional impact, and theorized that the themes of the work could be communicated across and through these discrete elements.” Jenkins calls these elements “micronarratives”. A story can consist of story chunks that consumers put together themselves in their own minds.

126
“As inexperienced storytellers, [game designers] often fall back on rather mechanical exposition through cut scenes, much as early filmmakers were sometimes overly reliant on intertitles rather than learning the skills of visual storytelling. Yet, as with any other aesthetic tradition, game designers are apt to develop craft through a process of experimentation and refinement of basic narrative devices, becoming better at shaping narrative experiences without unduly constraining the space for improvisation within the game.”
“Russian formalist critics make a useful distinction between plot (or syuzhet) that refers to, in Kristen Thompson’s (1988) terms, “the structured set of all causal events as we see and hear them presented in the film itself,” and story (or fabula), which refers to the viewer’s mental construction of the chronology of those events (Thompson 1988, 39-40).”
“Read in this light, a story is less a temporal structure than a body of information.”
The “classical Hollywood narrative [...] the law of three suggests that any essential plot point needs to be communicated in at least three ways.”

129
Kevin Lynch (1960, The Image of the City, p116) describes city planning as “the deliberate manipulation of the world for sensuous ends.” City planning is like storyworld/-bible building!
“In each of these cases, choices about the design and organization of game spaces have narratological consequences. In the case of evoked narratives, spatial design can either enhance our sense of immersion within a familiar world or communicate a fresh perspective on that story through the altering of established details. In the case of enacted narratives, the story itself may be structured around the character’s movement through space and the features of the environment may retard or accelerate that plot trajectory. In the case of embedded narratives, the game space becomes a memory palace whose contents must be deciphered as the player tries to reconstruct the plot. And in the case of emergent narratives, game spaces are designed to be rich with narrative potential, enabling the story-constructing activity of players. In each case, it makes sense to think of game designers less as storytellers than as narrative architects.“

2
This book is about the relationship between three concepts – media convergence, participatory culture, and collective intelligence.”

2f
Definition-convergence
“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the migratory behavior of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences they want. Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial,cultural, and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they think they are talking about.”

13
Definition-medium
“Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files, and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies.”

13f
Definition-medium
“[...] on the first [level], a medium is a technology that enables communication; on the second, a medium is a set of associated “protocols” or social and cultural practices that have grown up around that technology. Delivery systems are simply and only technologies; media are also cultural systems. Delivery technologies come and go all the time, but media persist as layers within an ever more complicated information and entertainment stratum.” Here he references Gitelman, Lisa ~ Always Already New. I need a better definition of medium! READ IT!

20f
Definition-transmedia storytelling
“Transmedia storytelling refers to a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence – one that places new demands on consumers and depends on the active participation of knowledge communities. Transmedia storytelling is the art of world making. To fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experience.”

23
Since most of the people depicted in this book are early adopters (for the US that means white, ale, middle class, college educated), the explained cultural practices probably won’t remain the same. Larger parts of the population will join in and they will expect different things.
I think ARGs for example will remain primarily for geeks, but the mainstream population will want less time-consuming/involving entertainment. That’s where I come in! Dialogue yes. Consumer participation yes. But also: a central story and storyteller yes!

24
Convergence is no result, it’s a process. And it won’t be finished anytime soon.

26
“It is at a moment of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them.”

27
Definition-shared knowledge
“information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group”
Definition-collective intelligence
“the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question”
Both definitions from Lévy, Pierre ~ Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace, p214f.

54
“The question was whether, within a knowledge community, one has the right to not know-or more precisely, whether each community member should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it. Levy speaks about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations; yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without regard to any­ one else’s preferences holds a deeply totalitarian dimension.”

58
“the interests of producers and consumers are not the same. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they conflict. The communities that on one level are the producer’s best allies on another level may be their worst enemies.”

61f
Definition-affective economics
“a new config­uration of marketing theory, still somewhat on the fringes but gaining ground within the media industry, which seeks to understand the emotional underpinnings of consumer decision-making as a driving force behind viewing and purchasing decisions.”
Economics trying to catch up with cultural studies, but from producer’s, not consumer’s, perspective.

62f
“Here’s the paradox: [...] Those groups that have no recognized economic value get ignored. [...] Those groups that are commodified find themselves targeted more aggressively by marketers and often feel they have lost control over their own culture, since it is mass produced and mass marketed. One cannot help but have conflicted feelings because one doesn’t want to go unrepresented – but one doesn’t want to be exploited, either.”

78
“a trend that runs across all contempo­rary television-a movement away from the self-contained episodes that domi­nated broadcasting for its first several decades in favor of longer and more com­plicated program arcs and more elaborate appeals to series history. Serialization rewards the competency and mastery of loyals. The reason loyals watch every epi­sode isn’t simply that they enjoy them; they need to have seen every episode to make sense of long-term developments.”

95f
Definition-transmedia storytelling:
“A transmedia story unfolds across multiple media platforms, with each new text making a distinctive and valuable contribution to the whole. In the ideal form of transmedia storytell­ing, each medium does what it does best-so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics; its world might be explored through game play or experienced as an amusement park attraction. Each franchise entry needs to be self­ contained so you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa. Any given product is a point of entry into the franchise as a whole. Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy bums up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experi­ence refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty. The eco­nomic logic of a horizontally integrated entertainment industry-that is, one where a single company may have roots across all of the differ­ent media sectors-dictates the flow of content across media. Different media attract different market niches. Films and television probably have the most diverse audiences; comics and games the narrowest. A good transmedia franchise works to attract multiple constituencies by pitching the content somewhat differently in the different media. If there is, however, enough to sustain those different constituencies­ and if each work offers fresh experiences-then you can count on a crossover market that will expand the potential gross.”

103f
“By the standards of classical Holly­ wood storytelling, these gaps (such as the failure to introduce The Kid or to explain where Niobe came from) or excesses (such as the reference to “the last transmission of the Osiris”) confuse the spectator. The old Hollywood system depended on re­dundancy to ensure that viewers could follow the plot at all times, even if they were distracted or went out to the lobby for a popcorn refill during a crucial scene. The new Hollywood demands that we keep our eyes on the road at all times, and that we do research before we arrive at the theater.”

104
“So let’s be clear: there are strong economic motives behind transme­dia storytelling.”
“Everything about the structure of the modem entertain­ment industry was designed with this single idea in mind-the con­struction and enhancement of entertainment franchises.”

105
“Under licensing, the cen­tral media company-most often the film producers-sells the rights to manufacture products using its assets to an often unaffiliated third party; the license limits what can be done with the characters or con­cepts to protect the original property. Soon, licensing will give way to what industry insiders are calling “co-creation.” In co-creation, the companies collaborate from the beginning to create content they know plays well in each of their sectors, allowing each medium to generate new experiences for the consumer and expand points of entry into the franchise.
The current licensing system typically generates works that are re­dundant (allowing no new character background or plot development), watered down (asking the new media to slavishly duplicate experi­ences better achieved through the old), or riddled with sloppy contra­dictions (failing to respect the core consistency audiences expect within a franchise). These failures account for why sequels and franchises have a bad reputation. Franchise products are governed too much by economic logic and not enough by artistic vision.”

106
“So far, the most successful transmedia franchises have emerged when a single creator or creative unit maintains control.” Like Indiana Jones or Star Wars, he says.

107
“While the technological infrastructure is ready, the economic pros­pects sweet, and the audience primed, the media industries haven’t done a very good job of collaborating to produce compelling transme­dia experiences. Even within the media conglomerates, units compete aggressively rather than collaborate. Many believe that much greater coordination across the media sectors is needed to produce transmedia content.”

109
“By contrast, the Wachowskis sought animators and comic-book writers who already had cult followings and were known for their dis­tinctive visual styles and authorial voices. They worked with people they admired, not people they felt would follow orders.”

114
“More and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single medium. The world is bigger than the film, bigger even than the franchise-since fan speculations and elaborations also expand the world in a variety of directions. As an experienced screenwriter told me, “When I first started, you would pitch a story because without a good story. you didn’t really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a charac­ter because a good character could sup­port multiple stories. And now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media.”"

115
“As the art of world-making becomes more advanced, art direction takes on a more central role in the conception of franchises.”

116
Definition-story arc
“Part of what makes a site like Dawson’s Desktop possible has been a shift in the ways narratives operate in American television.”

118
“Most film critics are taught to think in terms of very traditional story structures. More and more, they are talking about a collapse of story­telling. We should be suspicious of such claims, since it is hard to imag­ine that the public has actually lost interest in stories. Stories are basic to all human cultures, the primary means by which we structure, share, and make sense of our common experiences. Rather, we are seeing the emergence of new story structures, which create complexity by ex­panding the range of narrative possibility rather than pursuing a single path with a beginning, middle, and end.”

119
“Film­ goers educated on nonlinear media like video games were expecting a different kind of entertainment experience. If you look at such works [like The Matrix, Fight Club, The Blair Witch Proj­ect, Being John Malkovich, Run Lola Run, Go, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, all 1999] by old criteria, these movies may seem more fragmented, but the frag­ments exist so that consumers can make the connections on their own time and in their own ways.”

123
[Electronic Arts game designer] “Neil Young talks about “additive comprehension.” He cites the example of the director’s cut of Blade Runner, where adding a small segment showing Deckard discovering an origami unicorn invited viewers to question whether Deckard might be a replicant: “That changes your whole perception of the film, your perception of the ending…The challenge for us, especially with the Lord of the Rings is how do we deliver that one piece of information that makes you look at the films differently?”"

127
“There has to be a breaking point beyond which franchises cannot be stretched, subplots can’t be added, secondary char­acters can’t be identified, and references can’t be fully realized. We just don’t know where it is yet.”

128
“Criticism may have once been a meeting of two minds-the critic and the author-but now there are multiple authors and multiple critics.”

129
“So far, our schools are still focused on generating autonomous learners; to seek information from others is still classified as cheating. [...] Our schools are not teaching what it means to live and work in such knowledge communities, but popular culture may be doing so.”

130
“The key point is that going in deep has to remain an option-something readers choose to do-and not the only way to derive pleasure from media franchises.”

133
“The constraints on interactivity are technological. In almost every case, what you can do in an interactive environment is prestructured by the designer.
Participation, on the other hand, is shaped by the cultural and social protocols.”

135f
Definition-mass culture
“a category of production”

136
Definition-popular culture
“a category of consump­tion”
“popular culture is what happens as mass culture gets pulled back into folk culture.”

137
“The older American folk culture was built on borrowings from various mother countries; the modem mass media builds upon borrowings from folk culture; the new convergence culture will be built on borrowings from various media conglomerates.”

149
“[George] Lucas wants to be “celebrated” but not appropriated.
Lucas has opened up a space for fans to create and share what they create with others but only on his terms. The franchise has struggled with these issues from the 1970s to the present [...]”

158
“”Corporations have a right to keep copy­right but they have an interest in releas­ing it. The economics of scarcity may dictate the first. The economics of plentitude dictate the second.”" in McCracken, Grant ~ Plenitude, p85.

158f
“McCracken argues that those companies that loosen their copyright control will attract the most active and committed consumers, and those who ruthlessly set limits will find themselves with a dwindling share of the media marketplace.”

167
“What you can do to make the game more successful is not to make the game better but to make the community better.” Will Wright in Jenkins’ interview, 2003.

176
Skills children need to become full participants in con­vergence culture:

• “the ability to pool knowledge with others in a collaborative enterprise (as in Survivor spoiling)”
• “the ability to share and compare value systems by evaluating ethical dramas (as occurs in the gossip surrounding reality television)”
• “the ability to make connections across scattered pieces of information (as occurs when we consume The Matrix, 1999, or Pokemon, 1998)”
• “the ability to express your interpretations and feelings toward popular fictions through your own folk culture (as occurs in Star Wars fan cinema)”
• “the ability to circulate what you create via the Internet so that it can be shared with others (again as in fan cinema)”
• “role-playing both as a means of exploring a fictional realm and as a means of developing a richer understanding of yourself and the culture around you”

179
“Authorship has an almost sacred aura in a world where there are limited opportunities to circulate your ideas to a larger public. As we expand access to mass distribution via the Web, our understanding of what it means to be an author-and what kinds of authority should be ascribed to authors-necessarily shifts. This shift could lead to a heightened awareness of intellectual property rights as more and more people feel a sense of ownership over the stories they create. Yet, it also can result in a demystification of the creative process, a growing recognition of the communal dimensions of expression, as writing takes on more aspects of traditional folk practice.”

182
“Historically, young artists learned from established masters, sometimes contributing to the older artists’ works, often following their patterns, before they developed their own styles and techniques. Our modern expectations about original expression are a difficult burden for anyone at the start of a career.”
“”The problem with world building is that there is so much backstory to play with. I like filling in holes. … See if you can figure out a plausible way that would fit into the established canon to explain why Snape left Voldemort and went to serve Dumbledore. There are so many explanations for that but we don’t know for sure yet, so when we find out, if we find out, there are going to be so many people reading for it and if someone gets it right, they are going to go, yes, I nailed it.” Quote of somebody.

183
“Schools are still locked into a model of autonomous learning that contrasts sharply with the kinds of learning that are needed as stu­ dents are entering the new knowledge cultures.”

189
“Nobody is sure whether fan fiction falls under current fair-use protections. Current copyright law simply doesn’t have a category for deal­ing with amateur creative expression.”
“Industry groups have tended to address copyright issues primarily through a piracy model, focusing on the threat of file sharing, rather than dealing with the complexities of fan fiction. Their official educa­tional materials have been criticized for focusing on copyright protec­tions to the exclusion of any reference to fair use. By implication, fans are seen simply as “pirates” who steal from the studios and give noth­ing in return.”

190
“In the short run, change is more likely to occur by shifting the way studios think about fan communities than reshaping the law, and that’s why the collaborative approaches we’ve seen across the past two chap­ters seem like important steps in redefining the space of amateur par­ticipation.”

220
“we can see the logic of convergence politics at play here: the effort to use grassroots media to mobilize and mainstream media to publicize.”

244
“Betsy Frank and other industry thinkers still tend to emphasize changes that are occurring within indi­viduals, whereas this book’s argument is that the greatest changes are occurring within consumption communities. The biggest change may be the shift from individualized and personalized media consumption toward consumption as a networked practice.”

246
“In the late 1980s and early 1990s, cultural scholars, myself included, depicted media fandom as an important test site for ideas about ac­tive consumption and grassroots creativity. We were drawn toward the idea of “fan culture” as operating in the shadows of, in response to, as well as an alternative to commercial culture. Fan culture was defined through the appropriation and transformation of materials borrowed from mass culture; it was the application of folk culture practices to mass culture content.”

248
“The politics of criti­cal utopianism is founded on a notion of empowerment; the politics of critical pessimism on a politics of victimization. One focuses on what we are doing with media, and the other on what media is doing to us. As with previous revolutions, the media reform movement is gaining momentum at a time when people are starting to feel more empow­ered, not when they are at their weakest.”
“Concentration is bad because it

• stifles competition and places media industries above the demands of their consumers.
• lowers diversity-important in terms of popular culture, es­sential in terms of news.
• lowers the incentives for companies to negotiate with their consumers and raises the barriers to their participation.

Big concentrated media can ignore their audience (at least up to a point); smaller niche media must accom­modate us.”
“Right now, conver­gence culture is throwing media into flux, expanding the opportunities for grassroots groups to speak back to the mass media. Put all of our efforts into battling the conglomerates and this window of opportunity will have passed. That is why it is so important to

• fight against the cor­porate copyright regime,
• argue against censorship and moral panic that would pathologize these emerging forms of participation,
• publicize the best practices of these online communities,
• expand access and participation to groups that are otherwise being left behind,
• promote forms of media literacy education that help all children to develop the skills needed to become full participants in their culture.”

249
“Media com­panies don’t need to share our ideals in order to change their practices. What will motivate the media companies is their own economic inter­ests.”

250
“The old model, which many wisely dismissed, was that consumers vote with their pocketbooks. The new model is that we are collectively changing the nature of the marketplace, and in so doing we are pressuring companies to change the products they are creating and the ways they relate to their consumers.”

251
“The polar opposite of a bureaucracy, an adhocracy is an organization characterized by a lack of hierarchy. In it, each person contributes to confronting a particular problem as needed based on his or her knowledge and abilities, and leadership roles shift as tasks change.”
256
“mass media has tended to use its tight control over intellectual property to reign in competing interpretations, resulting in a world where there is one official version. Such tight controls increase the coherence of the franchise and protect the producers’ economic interests, yet the culture is impoverished through such regulation. Fan fiction repairs the damage caused by an increasingly privatized culture.”
“Fans reject the idea of a definitive version produced, authorized, and regulated by some media conglomerate. Instead, fans envision a world where all of us can participate in the creation and circulation of central cultural myths. Here, the right to participate in the culture is assumed to be “the freedom we have allowed ourselves,” not a privilege granted by a benevolent company, not something they are prepared to barter away for better sound files or free Web hosting. Fans also reject the studio’s assumption that intellectual property is a “limited good,” to be tightly controlled lest it dilute its value. Instead, they embrace an understanding of intellectual property as “shareware,” something that accrues value as it moves across different contexts, gets retold in vari­ous ways, attracts multiple audiences, and opens itself up to a prolifer­ation of alternative meanings.”
“Nobody is anticipating a point where all bureaucracies will become adhocracies. Concentrated power is apt to remain concentrated.”

257
“As we move closer to the older and more mass market media industries, corporate resistance to grassroots participation increases: the stakes are too high to experiment, and the economic impact of any given con­sumption community lessens.”
“The power of the grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broad­ cast media is that it amplifies. That’s why we should be concerned with the flow between the two: expanding the potentials for participation represents the greatest opportunity for cultural diversity. Throw away the powers of broadcasting and one has only cultural fragmentation. The power of participation comes not from destroying commercial cul­ture but from writing over it, modding it, amending it, expanding it, adding greater diversity of perspective, and then recirculating it, feed­ing it back into the mainstream media.”

258
“Over time, freedom of press increasingly came to rest with those who could afford to buy printing presses. The emergence of new media technologies supports a democratic urge to allow more people to create and circulate media.”

259
He mentions transmedia entertainment: “the complexity of transmedia entertainment”

260
“Consumers will be more powerful within convergence cul­ture-but only if they recognize and use that power as both consumers and citizens, as full participants in our culture.”

“For both artists and audiences, art’s capacity to ensnare attention is crucial: for the artist, to accrue status; for the audience, to motivate engagement.”

“engagement in the activity—matters before meaning”

“Repetition is the simplest form of elaboration, but since pure repetition holds little interest, repetition of a bold idea with variation offers him the best prospects of holding the attention of listeners with the imaginative resources he has.”

“Yet if we normally engage in art simply because it can command our attention, meaning, in academic contexts, elbows its way to the fore, because the propositional nature of meaning makes it so much easier to expound, circulate, regurgitate, or challenge than the fluid dynamics of attention.” Academia analyses meaning in art, because attention is fluid and dynamic and difficult to hold still and analyse.

“The average shot length in Hollywood movies has been shrinking as viewers have learned to assimilate film faster and to cope with the information rush of the modern world. Nabokov has influenced writers from acclaimed oldsters (Italo Calvino, W. G. Sebald, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk) to feisty youngsters (Zadie Smith, Marisha Pessl) by introducing into fiction something akin to modern film’s reduction in shot length, its rapidity of changes of subject or perspective.”

“Character is one kind of pattern particularly significant for social animals: identifying individuals and discerning consistent differences of personality”

“Character clues come thick and fast in fiction.”

“At a more general level, humans are extraordinary open-ended pattern detectors, because we so compulsively inhabit the cognitive niche. Art plays with cognitive patterns at high intensity. The pleasure this generates is an essential part of what it is to be human and matters both at the individual level, for audiences and artists, and at the social level, for the patterns we share (in design, music, dance, and story). The pleasure art’s intense play with patterns affords compels our engagement again and again and helps shape our capacity to create and process pattern more swiftly. Perhaps it even helps explain the so-called Flynn effect, the fact—and it seems to be one—that IQs have risen with each of the last few generations”

“And with their high intensity of pattern and their fixed form, works of art should provide ideal controlled replicable experiments for the study of both rapid and gradual pattern recognition in the mind.”

33
EP = Evolutionary Psychology
EACA = Evolutionary Anthropology and Cognitive Archaeology

34
“These relative spans are important because they establish which set of environments and conditions defined the adaptive problems the mind was shaped to cope with: Pleistocene conditions, rather than modern conditions.”

35
“The EP model of human evolution is a model not of change but of stasis.”

39
“the originating force in the revolution is some crucial development in the capacity for language.”
“In the EP model, all the adaptive structures that had developed in the course of hominid evolution stabilized during the Pleistocene, and they stabilized in adaptive adjustment to a specific ecology, that of hunter-gatherers. The hunting and gathering way of life provided the regularities against which natural selection shaped the human motivational and cognitive system. In the EACA model, in contrast, human evolution did not stabilize in a structure of adaptations genetically molded to the hunter-gatherer way of life.”
“Hominids in the direct lineage of modern humans accumulated an ever-expanding repertory of adaptations designed to provide them with the capacity for flexible response to unstable ecological and demographic conditions, and that capacity for flexible response culminated in the Human Revolution.”
“The Human Revolution produced an exponential increase in the human capacity to manipulate its own ecology, including its social organization, and that revolutionary alteration in human power rendered the total human environment still more unstable, more variable and complex, more rapidly changing, than it had ever been before. The pace of change fuelled by technology keeps increasing, but so far, human motivational and cognitive structures have kept pace marvelously well with those changes.”

41
“The arts, including the oral antecedents of literature, would serve a vital adaptive function—that of organizing human motives and thus ultimately regulating behavior.”

42
“”There was not enough time for human heredity to cope with the vastness of new contingent possibilities revealed by high intelligence. . . . The arts filled the gap.“”
“”With fiction unleashing our reactions to potential lives and realities, we feel more richly and adaptively about what we have not actually experienced.“”

43
“The experience of reading—or the auditory equivalent in the oral antecedents to literature—has some parallel with the experience of dreaming and also with the experience of “virtual reality” simulators. It is an experience of subjective absorption within an imaginary world, a world in which motives, situations, persons, and events operate dramatically, in narrative sequence. Unlike dreams, most literary works have a strong component of conscious conceptual order—a “thematic” order. But like dreams, and unlike other forms of conscious conceptual order—science, philosophy, scholarship—literature taps directly into the elemental response systems activated by emotion. Works of literature thus form a point of intersection between the most emotional, subjective parts of the mind and the most abstract and cerebral. This feature of literature is not incidental to its adaptive function. Literature provides imaginative structures within which people can integrate the ancient, conserved elements of their nature—elements conserved from pre-mammalian systems of approach/avoidance, mammalian affectional systems, and systems of primate sociality—with the conceptual, thematic structures through which they make abstract, theoretical sense of the world in which they live.”

43f
“Given that literature is a human universal, more particular evidence can be derived, in almost limitless quantity and diversity, from every culture on earth, for the way literature enters into the total motivational life of individuals, shaping and directing their belief systems and their behavior.”

44
“literature has a profound impact on the emotions and ideas of its consumers.”
“The distinguishing characteristic of literature is that it creates an imaginative order in which simulated experience can take place. None of the secondary purposes [like to make money, to impress people, and perhaps sometimes even to attract sexual partners] has any particular affinity with that characteristic, and as a result none accounts for the profound psychological and cultural effects of literature. In seeking to identify adaptive benefits for literature as a universal and reliably developing human behavior, we should not let secondary purposes draw our attention away from the distinguishing characteristics that can help us to identify the primary adaptive functions of the behavior.”

45
“Writers are people, and people construct imaginative scenarios in order to satisfy their own psychological needs. The most general such need is the need to articulate and affirm the writer’s own characteristic stances or ways of coping with the world—his or her own beliefs, values, and attitudes. The total set of these beliefs, values, and attitudes constitutes a “point of view,” a certain perspective on the world. In this broad sense, there is a distinct point of view implicit in all literary art. Characters in a literary representation, like people in real life, need to affirm their own distinct points of view, but the author mediates among all represented points of view and encompasses them within a single, comprehensive interpretation. The ultimate shaping force behind any imaginative construct is thus the individual identity of the writer. It is for this reason, as Henry James declares, that “the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer.“” The pieces of an entarch may vary in style, point of view, etc, but the entarch has to unify them into a whole.
“All individual identities are shaped partly by innate characteristics—the elements of human nature that vary within the range of individual differences—and partly by the conditions of experience.”

45f
“Collective and public conditions include climate and physical ecology, the forms of social organization, the modes of production, and collective imaginative structures such as religions, political ideologies, moral doctrines, philosophical ideas, and literary traditions. The total set of such collective imaginative structures is a chief part of what we commonly call “culture.””

46
“every literary text constitutes a distinct arrangement of the symbolic meanings available within a given cultural order, including its literary traditions.” An entarch has to be based in a culture if it want to appeal to people from this culture.
“all individual writers introduce some element of individual uniqueness or creativity into the symbolic order of their own cultures.” Especially the first entarchs will introduce VERY new elements.