Pre-dawn Monday morning and I am perusing a new copy of Screen Plays magazine, which isn't exactly what it sounds like. This incomprehensible gazette details goings-on in new media — from technology to content, employing terms and acronyms (DRM, CPE, etc.) for which I have absolutely no frame of reference. But it is always fascinating stuff — that is, what I can make heads or tails of!
The lead feature in the new issue is written by CSI creator Anthony Zuiker, whose intention to transcend mere episodic, once-weekly hours of network-owned television drama was a revelation to me. This is no news to fans of the show, but last year Zuiker published what's called a "digi-novel," Level 26: Dark Prophecy, concerning a forensics-proof serial killer. Here's the wrinkle — Every twenty-five pages, the reader is invited to go to a website, enter a code and watch a chapter-bridging video, what the author calls "a movie inside the book."
"And then you go to Level26.com," Zuiker continued, "where you control hundreds of thousands of people that bought the book, and we're able to elaborate story lines, connect with our fans and really control the people who come to our site and also monetize the situation."
In Zuiker's brand new media world, the buzz-phrases are "cross-platform storytelling" and "the extinction of television as we know it." Episodic TV is a mere "launching mechanism" that spawns web, gaming and mobile iterations of the same characters you learned to love as they chased mysterious DNA leads and smudged fingerprints. Digital carry-out culture, hot and ready whenyaplease! Shucks, Maw, and I thought them sturries just came on the idiot-box!
Okay, so hours later I'm in the car, driving in silence as I do early in the day — no chattering voices or urgent music just yet. I recall Zuiker's article as I see people staring down at their smartphones as they walk. All in a great flash I think back to being seventeen and reading Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment as I roamed the streets — my old-school, analog version of focusing one's eyes on a series of characters — hungry for content or connection as they call it now. Oh, I got content alright! On a canvas as big as the sky, Fyodor D. wrote a riveting, psychologically acute portrayal of a killer that Freud called the greatest novel ever written. Close, though I liked The Brothers Karamazov equally....
My next thought was admittedly nostalgic, a pining of sorts for the good old days of depth and complexity over horizontal expansion, or "cross-platforming." Thank Jove the nineteenth century didn't have tablets or tweets or texts — people actually thought and felt things deeply, perhaps even considered themseves organically connected as fellow denizens of the planet. Dostoevsky was one of the only channels available at the time and he filled it with soul-stirring and compassionate portraits that rhyme in spirit and profundity with the works of Rembrandt and Beethoven, all of whom made art for the ages, on just one "platform" and were not passingly concerned with filling our idle moments with cotton-candy distractions.
Call me a Luddite, call me a square, call me a fossil, I can't argue with you there. But the very thought of otherwise sane individuals indulging in multi-media spinoff-flotsam from banal cop procedural shows (for instance — I got nothing against the very fine CSI-franchise!), well, is it just me or are people way too focused on their little whatsits? Folks, take up a rake or a tennis racquet, learn how to speak Swahili, volunteer at a food bank or even click on my man Fyodor Dostoevsky while you're waiting for the bus. It's free and it will free your soul...