In the Google offices, there supposedly is an LCD screen behind the receptionist's desk that acts as a sort of real-time ticker tape display of the noosphere. Parading across the screen are actual search phrases that people are typing into google.com at that very moment: "terrorist bombing"... "Britney Spears"... "freestyle topiary sculpture techniques"... the queries march on like a live, perpetual glimpse into the collective mind of the World (Wide Web). Net artist T. Whid declared this piece to be the best work of net art ever, and he may be right if you define net art in its strictest sense -- as art which could not exist apart from the network. The online equivalent of this google LCD screen is metaspy.com. With such conceptually rich implications built directly into pre-existing commercial net technology, all that's left for the aspiring net artist to do is take the technology and "contextualize" it (a.k.a. surround it with the requisite academically aware artist statement, wrap it in a visual style that suppresses any residual search engine commercialism, and get some grant money for it). Thomson & Craighead have done just that with their automated_beacon project. It's basically metaspy.com dressed up for the net art crowd. To their credit, the artists have added a radio broadcast component to further remix the concept, but the richest component of their project is still derived directly from existing commercial search engine technology. If it's true that the network itself is more interesting than any individual art project on the net, then the most interesting net art is probably not being made by media activists with Foucault fetishes. It's probably being made by Internet geeks so immersed in the every day communicative uses of the network as a normal lifestyle that they don't even realize they are pushing the network into hypertrophy. All that's left is for some new media critic to shine the spotlight on such uber-geek activity and recontextualize it as net art.

One of the most difficult genres of new media art (for both "reader" and "writer") has always been non-linear narrative (which encompasses the sub-genres of hypertext literature, hypermedia literature, interactive narrative, and certain forms of gaming). There are all sorts of theories that attempt to explain why creating a forking, write-your-own-story story should be so tricky. The most optimistic say it is a relatively new genre that is still struggling to find its voice and its audience. The most pessimistic say there is something inherently linear about narrative (we live in time and therefore relate to stories set in time), which a multiple-trajectory, user-navigated plotline necessarily thwarts. In his book Pause & Effect, hypermedia artist and writer Mark Stephen Meadows describes several non-linear narrative structures, one of which is multiple perspectives of the same event. Unlike Run Lola Run, which consists of multiple events from the same perspective, this approach is more akin to Kurosawa's Rashomon -- the same event from multiple perspectives. However, unlike Rashomon (which is, after all, a linear film), a true non-linear multiple perspective approach allows the reader / viewer to switch perspectives mid-narrative. Meadows' story Crutch is an early online example. Now imagine one of these multiple-perspective, non-linear stories -- not fiction, but based on an actual event -- written not by one author but collaboratively by multiple authors. Imagine this story exists online, across multiple URLs. Imagine the story consists not only of text, but also of photographs of real-world space. And imagine that the authors themselves aren't really meaning to write a story at all. I've just described the blog and Flickr coverage of the 2005 South by Southwest Interactive Conference.

Far more interesting than the weblogging was the attendees' use of flickr.com as a kind of group photoblog. Flickr lets you upload your own digital images to be viewed by anybody. Furthermore, Flickr lets you tag and index your pictures topically. You can even annotate your actual images with notes (like cartoon thought bubbles), so when someone rolls over your friend's head in that group photo shot, your friend's name (or "bad hair day!"), or whatever pops up. Finally, other Flickr users can add their own comments to your images. Thus I'm able to locate a photo of myself playing music at an Austin bar and discover that Jeffrey Z. thinks I'm not a bad performer. This is just the tip of the interactive narrative iceberg. Add Flickr's indexability (database media) and interactivity (multi-user media) to a common event like a conference (particularly an "interactive" conference with a bunch of digital camera-clicking, wireless laptop-toting, online junkies), and you get something very close to Rashomon-esque non-linear narrative.

You Got to Be In It To Win It
Do these group photobloggers know they are harbingers of possibly the most innovative form of collaborative non-linear narrative since Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths?" Yes and no. They know they are participating in a form of collective storytelling. They are hoping that others will interact with their particular perspective on the group story. There is even a kind of celebrity tourism involved. One blogger described how people would walk right up to CSS guru Eric Meyer and have their picture taken next to him, without even asking, as if he were Mount Rushmore. Not in order to keep the picture in their private scrapbook, but to show to their friends on Flickr that their own narrative trajectory had crossed paths with one of the consensually agreed "star" characters of the common narrative. What makes all of this the least bit interesting is that I was actually there, so at Flickr I am able to discover locations, events, narrators, characters, and objects that were somehow related to my real-world personal experience. And the time-shifted, cross-referenced database allows me to expand my personal experience (locationally and temporally) into perspectives previously not possible. For instance, I ate dinner with so and so at such and such a restaurant -- where did so and so go and what did they take pictures of after that meal? Who took pictures of so and so? Who else ate at such and such a restaurant? What did they take pictures of after their meal? In one instance, I was even able to view the same dinner party from multiple diners' perspectives. Such common-event, indexed photoblogging is engaging in the way that Role Playing Games are engaging. If you have ever observed a session of Dungeons & Dragons without actually playing, it can be pretty boring. But when it's your imaginary character who needs to roll an 18 in order to escape the dragon flames, the narrative tends to be a bit more engaging. Now imagine it's not your imaginary character, but you are the actual character. True, there are no dragon flames, but there is your geeky micro-scene reputation and your blog traffic at stake! It's a kind of micro-Hollywood or micro-Washington DC for the masses. In Hollywood and politics, you get media coverage by spinning your activities to the news and entertainment media (which traditionally operate as one-to-many media). In the blogosphere, you can cover your own story (many-to-many media), and you can read your friends' stories. You become simultaneously journalist, star, and fan. Or, to put it more literarily, you become simultaneously narrator, character, and reader.