{"id":2383,"date":"2008-05-01T22:34:50","date_gmt":"2008-05-02T03:34:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=2383"},"modified":"2008-05-01T22:34:50","modified_gmt":"2008-05-02T03:34:50","slug":"online-fiction-facebook-and-transparency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/05\/01\/online-fiction-facebook-and-transparency\/","title":{"rendered":"Online fiction, Facebook and transparency"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I wasn&#8217;t at CaseCamp the other night, but I came across a minor storm of Twitter messages (I refuse to call them &#8220;tweets&#8221;) both during and afterwards, about one of the presenters &#8212; namely, an online fiction\/marketing experiment called Story2Oh.com. Apparently, some people weren&#8217;t too pleased when they found out that the characters involved in Story2Oh were friending people on Facebook without making it clear that they were, well&#8230; <a href=\"http:\/\/eatingsandwiches.com\/?p=303\">fictitious creations<\/a>. At least, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been able to gather from the dustup in various places.<\/p>\n<p>Eden Spodek, who writes the Bargainista blog, has written about the whole contretemps <a href=\"http:\/\/www.onedegree.ca\/2008\/05\/facebook-keeps.html\">at the One Degree blog<\/a>. She was one of the people at CaseCamp who challenged Story2Oh creator Jill Golick about the issue of &#8220;transparency&#8221; &#8212; although she told me and others that she also admired the creativity of the enterprise. She&#8217;s the one that Jill <a href=\"http:\/\/story2oh.com\/2008\/04\/30\/deleted-by-facebook\/\">refers to<\/a> as &#8220;the woman with dark hair&#8221; in her blog post about the event, which appears to have led to Facebook deleting the profiles of her imaginary characters (the site has a policy against fake profiles).<\/p>\n<p>One of the most visceral responses &#8212; and I think pretty over the top &#8212; came <a href=\"http:\/\/heywriterboy.blogspot.com\/2008\/04\/brave-new-world-not-fully-distributed.html\">from screenwriter Denis McGrath<\/a>, who blogs at Dead Things on Sticks. He writes about how he hates people who &#8220;don&#8217;t get it,&#8221; and how they are &#8220;uptight idiots&#8221; (and worse), who hold up progress for the rest of us. In the comments, he calls the response at CaseCamp &#8220;cowardly and hypocritical.&#8221; The word &#8220;fucktard&#8221; appears a lot. Is that really necessary? I don&#8217;t think so, but obviously a simple difference of opinion isn&#8217;t good enough unless it turns into a holy war.<\/p>\n<p>In a follow-up post, Jill <a href=\"http:\/\/story2oh.com\/2008\/05\/01\/i-hear-ya\/\">writes about<\/a> how she doesn&#8217;t feel the issue of transparency was as important as others feel it should have been with Story2Oh, because her purpose wasn&#8217;t business but art, and blurring the boundaries between the real world and fantasy was part of the point behind the experiment. For my part, I think experiments like that are fascinating &#8212; in part because of the strong reactions they produce. I guess Jill found that out the hard way.<\/p>\n<div class=\"syndication-links\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I wasn&#8217;t at CaseCamp the other night, but I came across a minor storm of Twitter messages (I refuse to call them &#8220;tweets&#8221;) both during and afterwards, about one of the presenters &#8212; namely, an online fiction\/marketing experiment called Story2Oh.com. Apparently, some people weren&#8217;t too pleased when they found out that the characters involved in &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2008\/05\/01\/online-fiction-facebook-and-transparency\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Online fiction, Facebook and transparency&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2383\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}