According to the Mayan calendar — as translated by new-age hippies I used to know, and depicted by Roland Emmerich — the year 2012 is alleged to herald the apocalypse. Perhaps this collective unconscious sense of mass destruction is what’s driving the popularity of turn-of-the-millennium musings about the end of the world. In June 2008, Adbusters’ cover story was, literally, titled, “Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization.” Three and a half years later, Vanity Fair’s first issue of 2012 asks, “You Say You Want a Devolution? From Fashion to Housewares, Are We in a Decades-Long Design Rut?” While these two publications could arguably not be further apart on the target audience spectrum, they’re singing the same doomsday tune. As Kurt Andersen writes in the Vanity Fair piece, “The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present.” The last line of the article concludes, “I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper.” But has cultural evolution really come to a grinding halt in the 21st century, or are we simply looking in all the old places, not realizing it’s moved on?

In Adbusters, Douglas Haddow sets up the alleged apocalypse like so:

Ever since the Allies bombed the Axis into submission, Western civilization has had a succession of counter-culture movements that have energetically challenged the status quo. Each successive decade of the post-war era has seen it smash social standards, riot and fight to revolutionize every aspect of music, art, government and civil society. But after punk was plasticized and hip hop lost its impetus for social change, all of the formerly dominant streams of “counter-culture” have merged together. Now, one mutating, trans-Atlantic melting pot of styles, tastes and behavior has come to define the generally indefinable idea of the ‘Hipster.’

Echoing that sentiment in Vanity Fair, Andersen writes:

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900.

Writing about the Adbusters piece in 2008, I pointed to a central flaw in the premise: the emergence of what Chris Anderson, in his 2006 book of the same name, calls, The Long Tail. Digital technology, Anderson writes, has ushered in “An evolution from an ‘Or’ era of hits or niches (mainstream culture vs. subcultures) to an ‘AND’ era.” In this new, rebalanced equation, “Mass culture will not fall, it will simply get less mass. And niche culture will get less obscure.” What Adbusters saw as the end of Western civilization was actually the end of mass culture; a transition to a confederacy of niches. So, if mass culture, as the construct we, and Adbusters, had known it to be was over, what was there to be “counter” to anymore? (While, more recently, Occupy Wall Street has thrown its hat into the ring, it’s not so much anti-mass culture as it is pro-redefining the concept: the 99%, through the movement’s message — let alone mathematics — is not the counterculture. It IS the culture.)

Unlike Haddow, Andersen doesn’t blame the purported cultural stagnation on any one group of perpetrators. Rather, the “decades-long design rut” has descended upon us all, he suggests, like an aesthetic recession, the result of some unregulated force originating in the 1960′s and depreciating steadily until it simply collapsed, and none of us noticed until it was too late. “Look at people on the street and in malls,” Andersen writes, “Jeans and sneakers remain the standard uniform for all ages, as they were in 2002, 1992, and 1982. Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new.” And yet, “during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.”

Or is it?

In a 2003 New York Times article titled, The Guts of a new Machine, the design prophet of the 21st century revealed his philosophy on the subject: “People think it’s this veneer,” said the late Steve Jobs, “That the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

Think about it. Picture it. Those big, bulbous cars Andersen describes, with their late-moderne fenders and fins, so unmistakably different from 1952 to 1977, just how different were they, really, in how they worked? Not that much. In the 20th century you could pop open the hood of a car and with some modicum of mechanics know what it was you were looking at. Now, the guy in the wifebeater working on the Camaro in his garage is an anachronism. You’ll never see that guy leaning over the guts of a post-Transformers, 2012 Camaro. Let alone a hybrid or an electric vehicle. “With rare exceptions,” Andersen argues, “cars from the early 90s (and even the late 80s) don’t seem dated.” And yet, there’s no way anyone would confuse a Chevy Volt with anything GM was making 10 years ago, or a Toyota Prius with what was on the road in the early 90s, or voice recognition capability, completely common in a 2012 model, as anything but a science fiction conceit in a show starring David Hasselhoff, in 80s. While it’s debatable that exterior automotive styling hasn’t changed in the past 30 years (remember the Tercel? The station wagon? The Hummer? A time before the SUV?) it’s indisputable that the way a 2012 automobile works has changed.

For the majority of human history the style shifts between eras were pretty much entirely cosmetic. From the Greeks to the Romans, from the Elizabethans to the Victorians, what fluctuated most was the exterior. It wasn’t until the pace of technological innovation began to accelerate in the 20th century that design became concerned with what lay beneath the surface. In the 1930s, industrial designer Raymond Loewy forged a new design concept, called Streamlining. One of the first and most widespread design concepts to draw its rationale from technology, Streamlining was characterized by stripping Art Deco, its flamboyant 1920′s predecessor, of all nonessential ornamentation in favor a smooth, pure-line concept of motion and speed. Under the austerity of the Depression era, the superficial flourishes of Art Deco became fraudulent, falsely modern. Loewy’s vision of a modern world was minimalist, frictionless, developed from aerodynamics and other scientific concepts. By the 1960′s Loewy’s streamlined designs for thousands of consumer goods — everything from toasters and refrigerators to automobiles and spacecrafts — had radically changed the look of American life.

What began in the 20th century as a design concept has, in the 21st, become THE design concept. Technological innovation — the impact of which Andersen breezes past — has become the driving force behind aesthetic innovation. Design is how it works. Aerodynamics has paved the way for modern considerations like efficiency, performance, usability, sustainability, and more. But unlike fluctuating trends in men’s facial hair or collar size, technology moves in one direction. It does not vacillate, it iterates, improving on what came before, building incrementally. The biggest aesthetic distinctions, therefore, have become increasingly smaller.

Consider, for example, this optical illusion:

What, exactly, is the difference between the two things above? Rewind twenty years, and it’s already unlikely most people would have been able to really tell a difference in any meaningful way. Go back even further in time, and these things become pretty much identical to everyone. Yet we, the inhabitants of 2012, would never, ever, mistake one for the other. The most minute, subtlest of details are huge universes of difference to us now. We have become obsessives, no longer just consumers but connoisseurs, fanatics with post-industrial palates altered by exposure to a higher resolution. And it’s not just about circuitry. In fashion, too, significant signifiers have become more subtle.

The New York Magazine writeup for Blue in Green, a Soho-based men’s lifestyle store reads:

Fifteen hard-to-find, premium brands of jeans—most based in Japan, a country known for its quality denim—line the walls. Prices range from the low three figures all the way up to four figures for a pair by Kyuten, embedded with ground pearl and strips of rare vintage kimono. Warehouse’s Duckdigger jeans are sandblasted in Japan with grains shipped from Nevada and finished with mismatched vintage hardware and twenties-style suspender buttons. Most jeans are raw, so clients can produce their own fade, and the few that are pre-distressed are never airbrushed; free hemming is available in-house on a rare Union Special chain-stitcher from an original Levi’s factory.

(Sidenote: it’s not just jeans. Wool — probably not the next textile in line on the cool spectrum after denim — is catching up. Esquire apparently thinks wool is so interesting to their readers they created an illustrated slide show about different variations of sheep.)

“Our massively scaled-up new style industry naturally seeks stability and predictability,” Andersen argues. “Rapid and radical shifts in taste make it more expensive to do business and can even threaten the existence of an enterprise.” But in fact, when it comes to fashion, quite the opposite is true. To keep us buying new clothes — and we do: according to the Daily Mail, women have four times as many clothes in their wardrobe today as they did in 1980, buying, and discarding half their body weight in clothes per year — styles have to keep changing. Rapid and radical shifts in taste are the foundation of the fashion business; a phenomenon the industry exploits, not fears. And the churn rate has only accelerated. “Fast Fashion,” a term coined in the mid-2000′s, means more frequent replacement of cheaper clothes that become outdated more quickly.

“The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives,” Andersen writes, “Our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.” But what has truly become old-fashioned in the 21st century, whether we’ve realized it or not, is the idea of a style being able to define a decade at all. It’s as old-fashioned as a TV with a radial dial or retail limitations dictated by brick and mortar. As Andersen himself writes, “For the first time, anyone anywhere with any arcane cultural taste can now indulge it easily and fully online, clicking themselves deep into whatever curious little niche (punk bossa nova, Nigerian noir cinema, pre-war Hummel figurines) they wish.” And primarily what we wish for, as Andersen sees it, is what’s come before. “Now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.” To be fair, there is a deep nostalgic undercurrent to our pop culture, but to look at the decentralization of cultural distribution and see only “a cover version of something we’ve seen or heard before” is to miss the bigger picture of our present, and our future. The long tail has dismantled the kind of aesthetic uniformity that could have once come to represent a decade’s singular style. In a confederacy of niches there is no longer a media source mass enough to define and disseminate a unified look or sound.

As with technology, cultural evolution in the 21st century is iterative. Incremental changes, particularly ones that originate beneath the surface, may not be as obvious through the flickering Kodak carousel frames of decades, but they are no less profound. In his 2003 book, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, Richard Florida opens with a similar time travel scenario to Andersen’s:

Here’s a thought experiment. Take a typical man on the street from the year 1900 and drop him into the 1950s. Then take someone from the 1950s and move him Austin Powers-style into the present day. Who would experience the greater change?

On the basis of big, obvious technological changes alone, surely the 1900-to-1950s traveler would experience the greater shift, while the other might easily conclude that we’d spent the second half of the twentieth century doing little more than tweaking the great waves of the first half.

But the longer they stayed in their new homes, the more each time-traveler would become aware of subtler dimensions of change. Once the glare of technology had dimmed, each would begin to notice their respective society’s changed norms and values, and the ways in which everyday people live and work. And here the tables would be turned. In terms of adjusting to the social structures and the rhythms and patterns of daily life, our second time-traveler would be much more disoriented.

Someone from the early 1900s would find the social world of the 1950s remarkably similar to his own. If he worked in a factory, he might find much the same divisions of labor, the same hierarchical systems of control. If he worked in an office, he would be immersed in the same bureaucracy, the same climb up the corporate ladder. He would come to work at 8 or 9 each morning and leave promptly at 5, his life neatly segmented into compartments of home and work. He would wear a suit and tie. Most of his business associates would be white and male. Their values and office politics would hardly have changed. He would seldom see women in the work-place, except as secretaries, and almost never interact professionally with someone of another race. He would marry young, have children quickly thereafter, stay married to the same person and probably work for the same company for the rest of his life. He would join the clubs and civic groups befitting his socioeconomic class, observe the same social distinctions, and fully expect his children to do likewise. The tempo of his life would be structured by the values and norms of organizations. He would find himself living the life of the “company man” so aptly chronicled by writers from Sinclair Lewis and John Kenneth Galbraith to William Whyte and C.Wright Mills.

Our second time-traveler, however, would be quite unnerved by the dizzying social and cultural changes that had accumulated between the 1950s and today. At work he would find a new dress code, a new schedule, and new rules. He would see office workers dressed like folks relaxing on the weekend, in jeans and open-necked shirts, and be shocked to learn they occupy positions of authority. People at the office would seemingly come and go as they pleased. The younger ones might sport bizarre piercings and tattoos. Women and even nonwhites would be managers. Individuality and self-expression would be valued over conformity to organizational norms — and yet these people would seem strangely puritanical to this time-traveler. His ethnic jokes would fall embarrassingly flat. His smoking would get him banished to the parking lot, and his two-martini lunches would raise genuine concern. Attitudes and expressions he had never thought about would cause repeated offense. He would continually suffer the painful feeling of not knowing how to behave.

Out on the street, this time-traveler would see different ethnic groups in greater numbers than he ever could have imagined — Asian-, Indian-, and Latin-Americans and others — all mingling in ways he found strange and perhaps inappropriate. There would be mixed-race couples, and same-sex couples carrying the upbeat-sounding moniker “gay.” While some of these people would be acting in familiar ways — a woman shopping while pushing a stroller, an office worker having lunch at a counter — others, such as grown men clad in form-fitting gear whizzing by on high-tech bicycles, or women on strange new roller skates with their torsos covered only by “brassieres” — would appear to be engaged in alien activities.

People would seem to be always working and yet never working when they were supposed to. They would strike him as lazy and yet obsessed with exercise. They would seem career-conscious yet fickle — doesn’t anybody stay with the company more than three years? — and caring yet antisocial: What happened to the ladies’ clubs, Moose Lodges and bowling leagues? While the physical surroundings would be relatively familiar, the feel of the place would be bewilderingly different.

Thus, although the first time-traveler had to adjust to some drastic technological changes, it is the second who experiences the deeper, more pervasive transformation. It is the second who has been thrust into a time when lifestyles and worldviews are most assuredly changing — a time when the old order has broken down, when flux and uncertainty themselves seem to be part of the everyday norm.

It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it. And I feel fine.

For those of you following along at home, you may recall that Gather is the creation of one, miss Katie Kay, whose former occupations include being a co-designer at Skingraft, business partner to Amanda Palmer, and Lucent Dossier performer. She first opened Gather in Downtown LA back in July of 2010, and this summer the LA Weekly fashion issue had this to say about it:

Nearly everything in the store is an expression of what Kay calls the “slow fashion” movement, which favors one-of-a-kind pieces over mass production in China. Slow fashion is about creating a lifestyle as a designer rather than building a “career” it’s about being indifferent to “trends” because, most likely, you’re making them. “This may be fashion, but I’m very open to being genuine about things,” Kay says.

I first met Katie when we were both living in San Francisco over a decade ago and our lives have been intertwined in some strange and wonderful ways since. I came on board with Gather just as it opened its new location, at the intersection of Hollywood and Sunset, a couple of weeks ago. More than just a store, Gather is an articulation of a new kind of relationship we have with the things we buy. Our lives have become ever more like art galleries, both physical and virtual. And we are the curators. The pieces we select tell the story of who we are and where we’ve been. These things, the things we buy, are no longer consumed… they’re gathered.

Images courtesy of Los Angeles, I’m Yours, which had some very nice things to say about the opening.

Visit: Gather

*Totally Fucking Crazy

Boston Latin School, my alma mater, is the oldest (and longest existing) public school in the country. 141 years older than the country, in fact. Ben Franklin went there before he moved to Philly. Alumni include Sam Adams, John Hancock, Joseph Kennedy, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Bullfinch, you get the idea. There’s an admission test, but it’s free to attend for Boston resident teens. All students at are still required to study Latin for three or four years, and many study Greek as well. It’s a school that consistently ranks among the top in the country, bringing a Classics education into the 21st century.

Last night I saw the video below, made by current BLS students, making the rounds on Facebook through fellow alumni, and it’s just so totally epic I had to post it here. Never mind the sense of nostalgia seeing the old hallways in the background, these kids have done a better job of branding the iconography of my alma mater than my class ever considered. Watch out, marketers, the next generation will soon be doing a better job at our jobs than we are.

Sumus Primi!

Been quiet on SocialCreature the past month as I’ve been head-deep down the MirrorLAnd rabbit-hole. Surfacing for a quick nod to the remix contest that just launched with the release of Chapter 2.

If you or someone you know are a knob-fiddler type person, and you’d be interested in having your music become the soundtrack for the new video by Khameleon808, the creator of the Glitch Mob’s Tron:Legacy “Rerezzed” video, then you should check out:

The MirrorLAnd “White Rabbit” remix contest…

A year ago I wrote a piece called “Your Lifestyle Is An Alternate Reality Game.” An ARG, for short, is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants’ ideas or actions. Lifestyle, I suggested, with its proscribed media content, its insider signifiers, its ever-evolving subcultural narrative, is the alternate reality game all of us in the modern world are already playing. Having grown up in the rave scene and then produced nightlife events and music festivals for a decade this similarity was instantly apparent. Since writing that post, I’ve actually seen pioneering ARG creators, Jordan Weisman and Sean Stewart, each, individually liken ARGs to a quintessential alternative culture / music festival experience: Woodstock. (Called it!)

This year, however, the new buzzword gaining popularity for this type of multi-platform narrative is “transmedia.” (On the schedule for the New York DIY Days conference a couple of months ago, the word “transmedia” appeared literally a dozen times in the descriptions for no less than 5 different sessions during the course of the 1-day event). And as the terminology becomes more encompassing — no longer strictly a gaming-specific thing — last year’s thesis needs an upgrade as well: In the digital age, transmedia isn’t just how we create lifestyle narratives, it’s how we experience the narrative of our lives.
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In 1985, a student at Bennington College named Bret Easton Ellis published what would become a best-selling debut novel called Less Than Zero. It’s a story told in first person by a narrator named Clay, home for Christmas break from a fictional New England liberal arts college, as he wafts through L.A.’s endlessly dissolute desert of affluence, parties, rampant drug use, meaningless sex, and progressively increasing depravity. The book was so insidious and disturbing that by 1987, just two years after its publication, it was turned into an inevitably much less insidious and disturbing movie starring Andrew McCarthy as Clay, Jami Gertz as his ex-girlfriend, Blair, and, notably, Robert Downey Jr. as Clay’s heroin-addicted best friend from high school, Julian, who’d turned to prostitution to pay off his drug debt. Now, 25 years and 5 novels (including The Rules of Attraction and American Psycho) later, Ellis’s newest book, Imperial Bedrooms, out June 15, catches up with Less Than Zero’s original cast of poster-children for morally vacant, excess-addled, existentially corrupted youth in present day, as they inhabit middle age. Once again, Clay is the narrator, once again, he’s just returned to Los Angeles after a semester-length absence, and the first thing Clay says — as classically laconic as his “People are afraid to merge on the freeways in Los Angeles” line that opened Less Than Zero two and a half decades earlier — is: “They had made a movie about us.”

The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren’t changed and there was nothing in it that hadn’t happened….

[The author] wasn’t close to any of us… He was simply someone who floated through our lives and didn’t seem to care how flatly he perceived everyone or that he’d shared our secret failures with the world, showcasing the youthful indifference, the gleaming nihilism, glamorizing the horror of it all….

I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its theatrical release, in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent Burroughs and Julian, who wasn’t clean yet and kept biting his nails, squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation…. The movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything — all the pain I felt, the betrayal — I couldn’t help but recognize a truth while sitting in that screening room. In the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn’t disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it, whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. (It was also a bummer: very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive, and it didn’t recoup its cost when released that November.) In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn’t blond, I wasn’t tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie’s moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone’s drug use and trying to save Julian. (“I’ll sell my car,” I warn the actor playing Julian’s dealer. “Whatever it takes.”) This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair’s character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group — jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. “Be good to her,” Julian tells Clay. “She really deserves it.” The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room.

As the movie glided across the giant screen, restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience — the book’s actual cast — quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same black light the book did. The movie was begging for our sympathy whereas the book didn’t give a shit. And attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted quickly from 1985 to 1987 (and a regime change at the studio didn’t help) so the source material — surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality — had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern eighties noir — the cinematography was breathtaking — and I sighed as it kept streaming forward…. But the thing I remember most about that screening in October twenty years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand that had gone numb on the armrest separating our seats. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived but in the movie’s new scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That’s what the movie demanded. (Later, as a screenwriter, I learned it’s what all movies demanded.) When this scene occurred, in the last ten minutes, Julian looked at me in the darkness, stunned. “I died,” he whispered. “They killed me off.” I waited a beat before sighing, “But you’re still here.” Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended, the credits rolling over the palm trees as I (improbably) take Blair back to my college while Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away.

The real Julian Wells didn’t die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track. The real Julian Wells was murdered over twenty years later….

I’d seen what had happened to him in another — and very different — movie.

Transmedia, as USC media studies professor Henry Jenkins describes in his book, Convergence Culture, is storytelling that spans across multiple forms of media, with each element expanding the viewer’s understanding of the story world and creating a new “entry point” through which to become immersed in it. Beyond Ellis’s sheer meta-mindfuckery (and the full, unabridged intro is even moreso), by incorporating the existence of the Less Than Zero movie into Imperial Bedrooms — even detailing the various characters’ reactions to its sanitized inconsistencies with the original novel — he’s effectively turned the film into something other than just the compromised adaptation it’s been for the past 23 years. It’s now a legitimate, if suitably ironic, “entry point” into the Less Than Zero world.

A couple of weeks ago, Jenkins wrote a post called “He-Man and the Masters of Transmedia,” about another fictional world spawned from the 80′s which may have had a lasting affect on my generation:

In many ways, Masters of the Universe was already a transmedia story, at least as much as the technology of the day would allow. He-Man not only appeared in the Filmation-produced cartoons but his story was extended into the mini comic books which came with each action figure, on the collector cards and sticker books and coloring books and kids books.

Once they were removed from their packages, these toys could be mixed and matched to create new kinds of stories….Kids would move from re-performing favorite stories or ritualizing conventional elements from the series to breaking with conventions and creating their own narratives.

I never understood the parents who feared such toys would stifle my son’s imagination because what I observed was very much the opposite – a child learning to appropriate and remix the materials of his culture.

When I speak to the 20 and 30 somethings who are leading the charge for transmedia storytelling, many of them have stories of childhood spent immersed in Dungeons and Dragons or Star Wars, playing with action figures or other franchise related toys, and my own suspicion has always been that such experiences shaped how they thought about stories.

From the beginning, they understood stories less in terms of plots than in terms of clusters of characters and in terms of world building. From the beginning they thought of stories as extending from the screen across platforms and into the physical realm.”

It’s why the website for Imperial Bedrooms has a playlist of songs “from the book” featuring tracks by Randy Newton, Bat for Lashes, Duran Duran, The Fray, Bruce Springsteen, and others — music has always been a key element in Ellis’s fiction: Less Than Zero got its title from an Elvis Costello track, as does its sequel, and there are constant references to songs throughout his novels, cueing a soundtrack in your mind as you’re reading the story. (In fact, all of Ellis’s books now have playlists.) It’s why the Los Angeles Magazine website has an interactive Google map of the locations featured in Imperial Bedrooms and it’s accompanied by Clay’s guide, in his own words, to these various haunts. It’s why Clay has ended up on Facebook and his profile photo — still bearing a decided resemblance to Andrew McCarthy — is also included with his city guide. Here, for instance, is Clay’s take on Hollywood Forever Cemetery:

The most beautiful cemetery in Los Angeles. It’s behind the Paramount lot and it can be disorienting to walk off Gower Avenue into this lush, paradisiacal place. I remember going to movies there during the summer; Psycho, The Muppet Movie, Carrie. I was there last for a funeral where the only person I talked to was Blair.

Meanwhile, in a different genre section of the bookstore, there’s yet another author blurring the lines between fiction, reality, media formats, you know, the ushe: Richard Castle.

OK, so, technically he’s a TV character played by Nathan Fillion on the ABC show, Castle, which follows the best-selling mystery writer and his unlikely partner, a tough, sexy, NYPD detective named Kate Beckett, as they solve Manhattan murders. The show’s first season story-arc saw the release of Heat Wave, Castle’s new novel about (you know this) a tough, sexy, NYPD homicide detective named Nikki Heat, which also happens to be an actual Hyperion book.

Amazon’s product page for Heat Wave reads:

About the Author

Richard Castle is the author of numerous bestsellers, including the critically acclaimed Derrick Storm series. His first novel, In a Hail of Bullets, published while he was still in college, received the Nom DePlume Society’s prestigious Tom Straw Award for Mystery Literature. Castle currently lives in Manhattan with his daughter and mother, both of whom infuse his life with humor and inspiration.

But Castle isn’t just on TV and bookshelves. Like any 21st century writer who knows what’s up, he’s also on Twitter –

– posting updates to more than 28,000 followers on his writing progress (the second book in the Nikki Heat series is due out in the Fall — “Want to read the first chapter?“), personal life (“Found a button in one of my shoes this morning. And another in a glass of water. Wonder where the other ones flew….“), and personally relevant current events (“Dennis Hopper… iconoclast and patron of the arts… you will be missed.”) You know, like how anyone who isn’t a fictional TV character would use Twitter.

Castle has obviously been designed as a deliberate transmedia narrative, but Imperial Bedrooms wasn’t — it’s just a novel. Either way, it’s inevitable. The human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction, and it’s incredibly channel agnostic. Once upon a time, the Ancient Greeks heard thunder and believed it to be the sound of Zeus’s thunderbolt. Today, our media formats are just more sophisticated. Our lives are inundated by digital technology, content platforms, network applications — it’s not narratives that travel trans-media: we do. And we bring the stories along for the ride. It’s 2010. All media is transmedia. Deal with it. Rock ‘n’ roll.

Like Sean Stewart says:

Your computer doesn’t care what the 19th century production mechanism for producing your entertainment was. Record, book, it doesn’t care. It’s all 1′s and 0′s to your computer. Video, music, pictures, text, and let’s not stop there, let’s include other things that you can now incorporate as part of your entertainment, like web-pages or searches or email or phone calls directly to your audience. Here’s a simple mnemonic: any way that human-kind has invented to lie to one another should be part of your storytelling toolkit.

But fictional narratives aren’t what this toolkit is strictly limited to. As tech blogger Robert Scoble writes in his recent post, “The ‘like, er, lie’ economy“:

The other day I found myself over at Yelp.com clicking “like” on a bunch of Half Moon Bay restaurants. After a while I noticed that I was only clicking “like” on restaurants that were cool, hip, high end, or had extraordinary experiences.

That’s cool. I’m sure you’re doing the same thing.

But then I started noticing that I wasn’t behaving with integrity. What I was presenting to you wasn’t reality.

See, I like McDonalds and Subway. But I wasn’t clicking like on those. Why not?

Because we want to present ourselves to other people the way we would like to have other people perceive us as.

I’d rather be seen as someone who eats salad at Pasta Moon than someone who eats a Big Mac at McDonalds.

This is the problem with likes and other explicit sharing systems. We lie and we lie our asses off.

We are all storytellers now, all the authors of our own life stories (no big surprise, we’re taking some “creative liberties”). The array of media tools through which to “present ourselves” is already ubiquitous, and constantly expanding. Social networks, personal blogs, microblogs, digital cameras, location-based social applications — for some reason Time Magazine singled out Foursquare as one of the 50 Worst Inventions for being “just another tool tapping into a generation of narcissism,” as if, inexplicably, it’s particularly worse than the cesspools of self-focus that are Facebook or Myspace. With every status update and photo upload and location check-in and “like” we click, we are producing an endless stream of new “entry points” into our personal narratives. And, in turn, like Ellis’s, aptly named, Clay, we are all shaped by the resultant media representations of our selves. In the digital age, transmedia isn’t simply the default for how we experience entertainment, it is how we experience the story of our lives.

Sean Bateman

Student at Bennington College

Albany, New York Area

Education

• Bennington College

Connections

2 connections

Industry

Music

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Sean Bateman’s Summary

I’m a Senior at Bennington College, though we mostly refer to it as Camden and pretend that it’s in New Hampshire. I live at Booth house, with a Frog roommate and a House Pigs house band. Sheer sensations.

My brother demanded I sign-up to “explore business opportunities”, but I’m not into that. I have ulterior motives, and her name is Lauren Hynde. I’m in the Computing Center, where Lauren once hung out, but she’s left, gone, history, vapor. The only problem is I still dream about her, and she’s all blue. It always ends up this way. No Big Surprise.

Every time I looked at at her I was struck by great-looking she is. And standing close to her, even if it was only for something like a millisecond, I overloaded on how great-looking that girl is. She looked at me in what seemed like slow motion. I could rarely meet her blue-eyed gaze back. She’s a little too gorgeous. Her perfect, full lips locked in on that sexy uncaring smile. She’s constructed perfectly. She used to smile when she noticed me staring and I smiled back. I’m still thinking, I want to know this girl. Being around her was sort of.. I don’t know what sort of is.

I’ll take all this down if she wants. I’ll deal with it. Show must go on. Rock’n'Roll.

Sean Bateman’s Specialties:

I plug in my Fender and play girls songs I’ve written myself and then segue into “You’re Too Good to Be True” and I play it quietly and sing the lyrics slowly and softly and they’re often so moved that they start to cry and

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Sean Bateman’s Education

• Bennington College

  Music, Rock’n'Roll, 2004 — 2008

  Majoring in Rock’n'Roll (before I was a Lit major, before I became a Ceramics major, before I become a Social Science major). I may switch to Computers. Whatever.

  There some things that I will never do: I will never buy cheese popcorn in The Pub. I will never tell a video game to &@#$ off. I will never erase graffiti about myself that I happen to catch in bathrooms around campus. I will never play “Burning Down the House” on a jukebox. I will never be one of the last people hanging out at a Camden party. Those people remind me of kids being picked last for teams in high school. It’s weak. Really improves one’s sense of self-worth.

  Activities and Societies:

  Hanging out (The Carousel, Commons, The Pub, The Brasserie, Burger King, Dining Hall, Ann Arbour is where it’s at).

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Additional Information

Sean Bateman’s Interests:

Coffee without cream (to feed my impending ulcer), girls (classy yet sexy), smoking, riding my motorcycle into town, watching people argue about Nazis, Planet of the Apes (I recently signed into Netflix), watching TV in the commons, playing my Fender for girls, music (Velvet Underground, Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Iron Butterfly, Zep, The Animals)

Sean Bateman’s Groups:

Sometimes I check out the AA meetings in Bingham

Netflix is absolutely an anachronism to 1987, when the book was published and one of the most important activities of the day was returning videotapes, plus the Sean Bateman of Ellis’s book was definitely not in college between 2004-2008, as this Sean Bateman appears to be. But who cares? The overall character tone, and many major and minor details are completely true to the original–not to mention hilarious in the context of LinkedIn–and even to the story behind the book. The college the characters in The Rules Of Attraction attend, Camden, is, in fact, based on Bennington (which is Ellis’s Alma Mater), and Sean is totally into Lauren Hynde. I’m even positive there’s a chapter in the book that Ellis straight up just ends on the word “and” like “Sean Bateman’s Specialties” section does above, so this Sean Bateman, who supposedly graduated Camden this year, nevertheless still even comes across like Ellis’s Sean Bateman who graduated 20 years ago, and if you dig a character, isn’t that all that really matters?

As soon as I got over how amusing it was that Sean Bateman had a LinkedIn profile I remembered that the character in Ellis’s American Psycho is Patrick Bateman, Sean’s older brother, and since Sean mentions his brother demanded he join LinkedIn, it came as no surprise, that–check this out!–Patrick Bateman, the protagonist of American Psycho is on LinkedIn. His profile actually is a lot more serious, and not as funny as Sean’s, so I won’t bother re-posting it, but if you happen to be a huge American Psycho nut, go over there and knock yourself out. He’s interested in “getting back in touch” evidently.

Social media as a platform for “characters” is as ancient as Friendster (man, whoever was responsible for the unbearably hilarious “San Francisco” profile back in like 2002, you were a complete riot!) and with the arrival of Lonelygirl15 and cewebrities like Jeffree Star, web 2.0, is veritably rife with “characters,” fictional and stranger-than-fictional. And, of course, there is the widespread social media “fan-fiction” of sorts, where people create unofficial profiles for characters they love, like the aforementioned LinkedIn profiles. But I’m thinking about something different from all this. I’m thinking of characters from character-driven stories on traditional media (books, movies, TV) living on in social media. I mean, really living there. Inhabiting the social media space with the same seamless familiarity that characters from novels cross over to the big screen. Communicating with us in their own voices, and with their own personalities that we have come to know and love, but in a new medium.

Michael Patrick King, director of the Sex and the City TV show and movie, would often talk about how great it was that they could really make the show authentically of New York because they could shoot scenes in actual existing restaurants and venues around the city (yes, I did watch the director’s commentary on a bunch of episodes, so?) The result was, indeed, a world that felt unmistakably New York, and establishments that no doubt were only too happy to reap the benefits of publicity in exchange. As an example of what’s possible with creating a living profile for a fictional character, an official Carrie Bradshaw profile, one written in her voice, that would generate content which would comply with the show’s bible and story arcs, could, for instance, feature a blog post mentioning a new restaurant she’d been to as a supplement to the show’s narrative. Suddenly the profile becomes not just promotion for the show, but, in fact, it’s own kind of channel. Creates the opportunity to start thinking about stories and character development in a completely new, almost infinite dimension that, of all the prior formats, perhaps only comic books came anywhere close too before, but this medium comes with something absolutely unbeatable: the opportunity to interact with these characters as well! If we are down to be friends with bands we love on Myspace, I’d bet we’d be into keeping up with characters we love too. Say, Bruce Wayne on Twitter? Or… Zoolander on Facebook? James Bond on BrightKite? Juno on Xanga?

Not that I’ve looked too far into this, I mean, maybe there are already plenty of major fictional characters out there living their daily lives on social networking sites, (I won’t be surprised if they’re Hannah Montana or iCarly or something) but I’m now totally fascinated by this whole idea. If anyone does know of examples of this actually being implemented: Fictional characters from stories in traditional media being (officially) brought to life with their true voice and personality, living and digitally breathing alongside us on social media, let me know.

Oh, and I’m back from my travels.

Hi.

UPDATE: Just discovered (thanks, David) that Mcsweeny’s is apparently totally on top of this idea, with their adaptation of HAMLET: FACEBOOK NEWS FEED EDITION:

Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.

Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.

Hamlet thinks Ophelia might be happier in a convent.

Ophelia removed “moody princes” from her interests.

Hamlet posted an event: A Play That’s Totally Fictional and In No Way About My Family

The king commented on Hamlet’s play: “What is wrong with you?”

Hilarious.