These are three examples of
collaborative writing projects with different text settings.
In every case, the project lives on in the transformation of
readers into authors. Every reader is invited to continue
the story or to contribute to the assemblage of texts. This
normally happens by sending the contribution to the project
leader who might evaluate, modify or reject the offered text
and who then posts it on the web. The project leader,
moderator, or administrator therefore is responsible for the
quality of the whole. However, collaborative writing
projects normally work without intervention of the
administrator's power due to the web's ideal of free
interaction without restriction by any "police of discourse"
as happens enough in the world outside the web. Needless to
say, collaborative writing is only as good as its weakest
contribution. That does not mean that there are no valuable
examples of collaborative writings. However, I intend to
draw your attention from the focus on results to the focus
on the process. Collaborative writings are most interesting
regarding the fact of collaboration.
The first project "Beim
Bäcker" is a very good example of this. What we can
witness here is a fight for and with words. After the first
author has introduced the female main character another
writer, a man, fills in some gaps. He turns the character in
a direction the first author does not agree with at all. Now
this author tries to rescue her figure and to abuse the
character the male author created. However, she can not just
erase the former contribution, she has to take into account
what has been said so far. This situation makes her both
angry and inventive. It is interesting to see how she uses
the information in the other author's contribution to get a
different result, and how she implies some common prejudices
about the male sex to get at her opponent.
It gets even more
interesting when other readers turn into authors and jump
in. Soon we can find all kinds of characters, not as much
within the text as among the authors. There is the clumsy
one, who does not really know how to pull it off. There is
the obsessed one, who tends to find sexual connotations in
everything. There is the inhibited one, who does not know
how to deal with this. There is the politically correct one,
who brings up racism and argues for solidarity. There is the
social one, who complains about the mess and calls for more
cooperation and there is the genius, who easily brings all
the threads together again. In the end, we also realize that
a new author hardly takes into account the legacy left by
his predecessors. If they set up a meeting between two
characters, if they close a contribution with an unexplained
incident, the incident will not be solved or the characters
will not meet if the author who opened this track does not
bring it to completion. Thus it turns out that collaborative
writing projects are actually playgrounds for self-centered
people, except for a few who suffer because of this and
nevertheless demand cooperation.
The joy of a collaborative
writing project therefore is not as much the story itself as
what the text gives away about its authors. There is a text
beyond the text in which the authors are the characters. The
real story, we may say, is the dynamic between the authors.
The enterprise of collaborative writing is communication
itself. Because of this the aesthetics of collaborative
writing should be considered 'social aesthetics'.
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