IMAGINARY YEAR : A Serial Web Novel

Information Prose :: A Manifesto in 47 Points :: Version 1.0

by Jeremy P. Bushnell

:: ideological freeware :: distribute at will
:: Download a plain text copy of this manifesto

1. Human beings are thinking creatures. In order to write about human beings in a complete fashion, one needs to write about how human beings think.

2. The ability of language-based stories to depict thought is precisely what keeps them competitive in a world flooded with stories. Image-based stories— movies, television programs —can depict how people act in ways that are seductive and successful, but very few possess an aesthetic mechanism complex enough to reliably depict the nuances of human thought.

3. Human thought reacts to its environment. Writing accurately about the way people think therefore involves writing accurately about the environment in which people live.

4. Human beings live surrounded by information. To write completely about human beings therefore means taking on the duty of writing about information.

5. The human mind references its own memory banks incessantly. Writing that seeks to document the human mind will reflect this.

6. The literary device of the extended flashback is not an illustration of the way we actually experience memory. We live in a perpetual wash of microflashbacks.

7. The memory stores remembered experience in the form of a collage of information drawn from hundreds of thousand of sources. Many of these sources are media sources. Many of our stored experiences are experiences of watching, reading, or listening to media, in either a primary or a supplementary capacity.

8. Media matters to people. It contributes to how we define and understand ourselves.

9. You can learn a lot about a person from a mixtape.

10. When at someone’s house for the first time, you tend to look at their bookshelves.

11. Fiction which builds characters without taking this into account has its head in the sand.

12. The primary goal of the information prose writer is to document the contemporary mind and environment in a way that takes the contemporary importance of media and information seriously.

13. Many contemporary fiction writers are afraid or otherwise unwilling to do this. I submit as evidence the large numbers of contemporary novels set in environments which lack informational richness: rural areas, the past, "magical realism" worlds.

14. Information prose does not attempt to depict a simplified version of the world. Information prose attempts to contain as much of the complexity of the world as possible.

15. "Do you understand how tremendously dense? A minute in a room, together." — Don DeLillo, Valparaiso

16. A fictional American present in which no one watches TV, listens to the radio, or checks their e-mail is sentimental and false.

17. Information prose writers should not aim to write work which is timeless. The value of documentary work never lies in its timelessness.

18. When writing about characters who inhabit dense fields of information (both remembered and newly-experienced), the value of quoting, sampling, and appropriation rapidly becomes apparent.

19. Creative work utilizing techniques of appropriation has been produced with regularity for nearly a hundred years now, in all forms of media. Information prose writers should no longer need to defend these techniques against charges of novelty.

20. A partial primer, organized in a rough chronology: the Comte de Lauteamont’s Maldoror, Dada collages, Tristan Tzara’s cut-up poems, William S. Burroughs’ cut-up and fold-in novels, Robert Rauschenberg’s media silkscreens, Bern Porter’s found poems, Situationist detournement projects, the poetry of John Ashbery, Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts, the novels of Kathy Acker, the albums of Public Enemy and Negativland, and the films of Craig Baldwin.

21. All evidence indicates that much of this work is of lasting merit.

22. All evidence indicates that these techniques of appropriation are exactly the ones necessary to create a recognizable picture of the contemporary present.

23. "As artists, our work involves displacing and displaying bites of publicly available, publicly influential material because it peppers our personal environment and affects our consciousness. In our society, the media which surrounds us is as available, and as valid a subject for art, as nature itself." —Negativland’s Tenets of Free Appropriation

24. Information prose writers should not be afraid to plagiarize. It is not their duty to write citations. Our memories and experiences do not usually come attended by complete bibliographies.

25. Information prose writers should not overlook the technique of the fragment. Our experience of the textuality of the surrounding world is largely fragmentary; information prose should strive to reflect that.

26. Our daily thoughts appear whole only within contexts which run deep and often go unthought: were anyone to inspect the running ticker of our mental dialogue, much of it would seem to be fragments. Writing which purports to be interested in the complexity of other human beings must reflect this.

27. Incorporating uncited or decontextualized fragments and samples into a creative work brings a certain level of noise into the signal. This admittedly runs the risk of creating confusion in the mind of the audience.

28. The initial communication of new information always creates some confusion. But that confusion indicates promise to certain recipients.

29. There is no evidence that what audiences want most from a creative work is the clear transmission of simple information. Audiences will accept high levels of noise in a creative work if the creative work is achieving other effects or satisfying other needs.

30. "[We take] the text, with its unreliable transmission of information, to be a component of a larger system, that of cultural circulation, in which what seemed like a dysfunction at a first level of communication would turn out to be a positive element contributing to the complexity of the larger system." —William Paulson, The Noise of Culture

31. To remove it from a creative context for a moment, consider: one reason meeting new people is appealing is because they may know things that you don’t know, or they may understand things in a different way from you. The process of communicating with someone who thinks differently from you (because their thoughts are defined by different contexts) carries with it a necessary degree of noise, but the process of translating that noise into new meaning can be immensely rewarding, intellectually, emotionally, and creatively.

32. "[Disorder and noise] can become information to us, can bring us to more subtle forms of understanding, because it is the unexpected, the radically different to which we can respond only because we are already complex beings capable of yet more complexity." —William Paulson, The Noise of Culture

33. Experiencing characters in a work of fiction should be rewarding in that same fashion. Reducing the noise in the signal simplifies out human difference for the sake of accessibility and creates work that is pleasant but does not bring us to new understanding.

34. Information prose writers must write for an audience that finds noise and its attendant uncertainty stimulating. Much contemporary writing neglects them.

35. "[Young people] are more tolerant of being out of control, more tolerant of that exploratory phase where the rules don’t all make sense and few goals have been clearly defined. The hard work of tomorrow’s interactive design will be to explore that tolerance — that suspension of control — in ways that enlighten us." —Steven Johnson

36. Currently, the writers doing the most work towards some of information prose’s goals are hypertext writers.

37. Hypertext writers are not necessarily information prose writers, and not all information prose writers will seek to be hypertext writers, but hypertext has merits that should be considered by writers of information prose.

38. Some hypertexts consist solely of navigable webs of interlinked fragments. Some information prose writers may find this approach fruitful. But hypertextuality need not be incompatible with more traditional narrative. Utilizing hypertext does not mean that writers need to relinquish the many obvious merits of a linear story; the comfort of a prescribed order, of a beginning, middle, and end.

39. There is nothing about hypertext that demands that a story incorporating it must be written with forking paths and multiple endings.

40. Hypertext writers who write "closed" hypertexts — works that only contain links to other parts of themselves — deprive hypertext of its most radical feature: the ability to refer to information outside of itself. The bibliography is the model here.

41. Information prose writers should embrace the elements of hypertextuality which aid documentary. Think of the hypertextual features long used by encyclopedias (cross-references).

42. Information prose writers should, furthermore, embrace the elements of multimedia which amplify the power of documentary. Compare an encyclopedia with illustrations to one without. Compare a traditional encyclopedia to Encarta.

43. To put it in the words of a friend: "You can now footnote a sound."

44. Inasmuch as the Web supports hypertextuality and (to a lesser extent) multimedia, the Web helps to make information prose possible.

45. However, the Web is not the only thing that makes information prose possible. Information prose is not dependent on hypertextuality, and hypertextuality is not dependent upon computers. Think of indexes, think of tables of contents, think of the numbers in the corners of pages.

46. Aside from the merits of supporting hypertextuality and multimedia, there are other advantages of writing for the Web, two of the most obvious being the ability to make unlimited copies and the ability to distribute copies worldwide at minimal (or no) expense. These merits have been amply written on elsewhere. There are obvious disadvantages as well. Information prose writers should support and contribute to efforts to overcome these, which will help to secure the Web as a vital medium for their future expression.

47. The present is here. It it time to begin. Pass it on.

—Jeremy P. Bushnell :: jeremy@invisible-city.com

November 26-27, 2000