Elana raised an excellent point here: both that a 2-3 minute clip (In Media Res’ usual media artifact length of choice) is awfully difficult to use from the soap opera, where typically any given 2-3 minutes in and of itself means much less than it would in a sequence in a primetime show…but also that the genre’s meanings and ways of storytelling are so different than that of primetime television that the many layers of meaning packed within, especially for soap opera fans with years of experience watching the genre, is difficult to understand "from the outside."
Of course, the idea of externally located content is not new, nor is it exclusive to soaps (one only has to look to visually rich filmic traditions like the Western or Western literary traditions to see a great deal of extratextual referencing. But I think it is, as Chris put it, the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the poignant that makes the complexity of soaps especially hard to see from those who aren’t intimately familiar with the genre.
I also think Elana’s point about the different feel for each show is key. I compliment OLTL because it, like B&B and a few others, have maintained the feel for their show, where-as some shows have struggled with a revolving door of creative talent to stick with what differentiated them.
Most of all, I appreciate your sharing this clip because I, like Aymar, was not an OLTL viewer and was especially hesitant to get involved in another soon-to-be-cancelled soap after ATWT ended.
Without knowledge of the characters, I can say the clip is still compelling! Its poignancy and self-referentiality comes through. Judging from Chris’ description, it looks like OLTLhad it both ways: a serious ending set up by meta-hilarity (this clip) and a meta/hilarious ending with a hint of seriousness about the genre (the Lazarus cliffhanger). Very smart.
I remember being upset when All My Children ended on a cliffhanger, but I’ve come around since then. You’re completely right about how fitting it is for a soap to end on a cliffhanger. OLTL’s ending was so fantastic that I couldn’t quite believe it had happened.
Of course now I wonder what will happen when some of OLTL’s characters are integrated into General Hospital. GH can’t just ignore the events of the OLTL finale. I wonder if the continuation of these characters on another soap will affect how we remember or feel about the OLTL finale. Soaps have had crossover characters before but never like this. Llanview will live on in this crop of characters coming to Port Charles, but I have no idea how the producers and writers will pull it off.
The role of search is the big question, I think. Right now, there’s still too much money in search to abandon it, but if Google is successful in reaching these niches and selling them to advertisers, I wonder if the money from that will offset losses for shifting the search experience as well. I’m sure there’s some profit-loss calculations going on in HQ, but ultimately it seems there are just two different paradigms at play: randomness (which the web does best) and curation/marketing (what TV excels at).
Chris, so glad you chose this, as it is an amazing clip that illustrates beautifully the range of emotion one can find in daytime soaps. I wonder how meaningful the clip is to those with no knowledge of the characters? (I often wonder/worry about this with soap examples.) There is also so much extratextual knowledge that makes a clip like this compelling. For me, that includes Ilene Kristen’s 1970s role on Ryan’s Hope, and the end of Santa Barbara, when exec producer Paul Rauch walked out of the empty studio.
Also, while your clip is a great illustration of qualities that I think all soaps share, it is also a great example of the distinctiveness of each soap, something those outside the genre tend not to notice. OLTL is (was!) more meta, more self-aware, and more comedic than many others, and this clip (and the entire end to the show) highlights that.
John, thanks for finishing off our week with music and fireworks. I, for one, also entertain that old crank, who tends to get most cranky after I’ve wasted an hour going down the YouTube spirial. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m interested in the psycho-physio effects of the digital medium on its users. I’d like to see it used to cultivate attention, even absorption: an experience less like an endless Vegas buffet, with too many choices and too little substance, and more like a blue drift through the city at night.
Many thanks, Eric, for putting together this line-up on digital lit, and for this final thoughtful post. The problem of attention, this temptation of ours to abandon difficult works online in favor of, say, this supremely satisfying creation by Israeli composer Kutiman, or some other document less noble but no less spectacular, is unprecedented in our lifetime. Digital has granted the consumer—of art, of everything—with something like low-level omniscience. We have so many choices, now, in what we look at, read, watch, buy, create, believe. But has this expanded range of choices made our lives better? It’s gotten hard for me to dismiss the old crank who sizes us up today’s Digital Man and determines that he has the attention span of a child. That’s the kind of lit I fear. And I sometimes feel implicated by that line from Greg Brown: “It’s a drifting time, people are fascinated by screens… No idea what’s on the other side.” This dispersal of our attention, of our consciousness, is beginning to feel like the story of our time. But I’m off topic. As is right.
Circa mid-Nineties Daft Punk were the first artists to shake me out of the prohibitively close association I drew between 8-bit sound and video games… and perhaps, too, the Commodore Vic-20 I first typed "goto" commands into. To this day, that sawtooth aural texture puts me right back in the arcade, an association viznut, with his side-scrolling visual sensibility, seems to encourage. What I found most compelling, Nick, was the experience of listening to these sounds, here and at SuperCollider. Thanks for the introduction.
Eric, I didn’t Google "YouCode" myself, so I’m relieved to see that the top results aren’t porn sites or something like that.
I do a good deal of computational work and a good deal of collaborative work. I’m glad my practice invovles both, but I don’t think either of these are absolutely required for interesting electronic literature. I certainly teach my students to work with language computationally, and I arrange for them to collaborate, but there are plenty of other interesting capabilities of the computer (and the network) to learn about.
I do think that if there are institutional biases against computation or collaboration, they should be removed. If a literary magazine that you otherwise liked prohibited multi-author contributions, wouldn’t you want to see that ban lifted? As a reader of interesting texts, that is, even if collaboration isn’t your thing? I think the way popular systems and certain other systems foreclose on computation is a problem. When people download my Python programs to run them, they get warning messages about how they might harm the computer. I can discuss a video here, but (unless I cleverly pick a video of a program running) I can’t discuss a program. I see computation frequently being pushed aside or into ghettos. And so, quite apart from the issue of whether everyone needs to learn how to program, I would like to remedy that and let us talk about programs, as we use our computers, as fluidly as we talk about conventional media forms.
Nick, thanks for this interesting post. I confess that on seeing its title earlier this week, I immediately Googled “YouCode,” expecting to find some thriving, code-centric, social network. I suppose my knee-jerk turn to Google makes your point: the ways we interact digitally are being more and more circumscribed by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and similar systems, and these looming Tigers, Leopards, Snow Leopards, and Lions not only limit what we imagine we can do, but also obscure the nature of the machines on which we’re doing it. Apple and Microsoft certainly aren’t designing operating systems that encourage the creation of generative music or literature. (For those readers who might not know, some of Nick’s work does with words what Viznut’s codes do with music. Check out, for example, “ppg256,” which generates an endless poem from a code that’s 256 characters long.) I do wonder how the literary possibilities of the demoscene can open up, in a more influential way, the work we’re creating and reading? Which I suppose is a way of asking a question about all of the pieces from this week: to what extent should coding, audio editing, and video production be skills a 21st century writer should master? Born Magazine, with its emphasis on collaboration, offers one possible model for bringing a variety of expertise from various artists to one piece, but I like the idea of poets learning prosody and Perl. Here’s a thought: how about a generative poem that scans, with variables for rhythm and meter?
Elana raised an excellent point here: both that a 2-3 minute clip (In Media Res’ usual media artifact length of choice) is awfully difficult to use from the soap opera, where typically any given 2-3 minutes in and of itself means much less than it would in a sequence in a primetime show…but also that the genre’s meanings and ways of storytelling are so different than that of primetime television that the many layers of meaning packed within, especially for soap opera fans with years of experience watching the genre, is difficult to understand "from the outside."
Of course, the idea of externally located content is not new, nor is it exclusive to soaps (one only has to look to visually rich filmic traditions like the Western or Western literary traditions to see a great deal of extratextual referencing. But I think it is, as Chris put it, the juxtaposition of the ridiculous and the poignant that makes the complexity of soaps especially hard to see from those who aren’t intimately familiar with the genre.
I also think Elana’s point about the different feel for each show is key. I compliment OLTL because it, like B&B and a few others, have maintained the feel for their show, where-as some shows have struggled with a revolving door of creative talent to stick with what differentiated them.
Most of all, I appreciate your sharing this clip because I, like Aymar, was not an OLTL viewer and was especially hesitant to get involved in another soon-to-be-cancelled soap after ATWT ended.
Without knowledge of the characters, I can say the clip is still compelling! Its poignancy and self-referentiality comes through. Judging from Chris’ description, it looks like OLTL had it both ways: a serious ending set up by meta-hilarity (this clip) and a meta/hilarious ending with a hint of seriousness about the genre (the Lazarus cliffhanger). Very smart.
I remember being upset when All My Children ended on a cliffhanger, but I’ve come around since then. You’re completely right about how fitting it is for a soap to end on a cliffhanger. OLTL’s ending was so fantastic that I couldn’t quite believe it had happened.
Of course now I wonder what will happen when some of OLTL’s characters are integrated into General Hospital. GH can’t just ignore the events of the OLTL finale. I wonder if the continuation of these characters on another soap will affect how we remember or feel about the OLTL finale. Soaps have had crossover characters before but never like this. Llanview will live on in this crop of characters coming to Port Charles, but I have no idea how the producers and writers will pull it off.
The role of search is the big question, I think. Right now, there’s still too much money in search to abandon it, but if Google is successful in reaching these niches and selling them to advertisers, I wonder if the money from that will offset losses for shifting the search experience as well. I’m sure there’s some profit-loss calculations going on in HQ, but ultimately it seems there are just two different paradigms at play: randomness (which the web does best) and curation/marketing (what TV excels at).
Chris, so glad you chose this, as it is an amazing clip that illustrates beautifully the range of emotion one can find in daytime soaps. I wonder how meaningful the clip is to those with no knowledge of the characters? (I often wonder/worry about this with soap examples.) There is also so much extratextual knowledge that makes a clip like this compelling. For me, that includes Ilene Kristen’s 1970s role on Ryan’s Hope, and the end of Santa Barbara, when exec producer Paul Rauch walked out of the empty studio.
Also, while your clip is a great illustration of qualities that I think all soaps share, it is also a great example of the distinctiveness of each soap, something those outside the genre tend not to notice. OLTL is (was!) more meta, more self-aware, and more comedic than many others, and this clip (and the entire end to the show) highlights that.
John, thanks for finishing off our week with music and fireworks. I, for one, also entertain that old crank, who tends to get most cranky after I’ve wasted an hour going down the YouTube spirial. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m interested in the psycho-physio effects of the digital medium on its users. I’d like to see it used to cultivate attention, even absorption: an experience less like an endless Vegas buffet, with too many choices and too little substance, and more like a blue drift through the city at night.
Many thanks, Eric, for putting together this line-up on digital lit, and for this final thoughtful post. The problem of attention, this temptation of ours to abandon difficult works online in favor of, say, this supremely satisfying creation by Israeli composer Kutiman, or some other document less noble but no less spectacular, is unprecedented in our lifetime. Digital has granted the consumer—of art, of everything—with something like low-level omniscience. We have so many choices, now, in what we look at, read, watch, buy, create, believe. But has this expanded range of choices made our lives better? It’s gotten hard for me to dismiss the old crank who sizes us up today’s Digital Man and determines that he has the attention span of a child. That’s the kind of lit I fear. And I sometimes feel implicated by that line from Greg Brown: “It’s a drifting time, people are fascinated by screens… No idea what’s on the other side.” This dispersal of our attention, of our consciousness, is beginning to feel like the story of our time. But I’m off topic. As is right.
Circa mid-Nineties Daft Punk were the first artists to shake me out of the prohibitively close association I drew between 8-bit sound and video games… and perhaps, too, the Commodore Vic-20 I first typed "goto" commands into. To this day, that sawtooth aural texture puts me right back in the arcade, an association viznut, with his side-scrolling visual sensibility, seems to encourage. What I found most compelling, Nick, was the experience of listening to these sounds, here and at SuperCollider. Thanks for the introduction.
Eric, I didn’t Google "YouCode" myself, so I’m relieved to see that the top results aren’t porn sites or something like that.
I do a good deal of computational work and a good deal of collaborative work. I’m glad my practice invovles both, but I don’t think either of these are absolutely required for interesting electronic literature. I certainly teach my students to work with language computationally, and I arrange for them to collaborate, but there are plenty of other interesting capabilities of the computer (and the network) to learn about.
I do think that if there are institutional biases against computation or collaboration, they should be removed. If a literary magazine that you otherwise liked prohibited multi-author contributions, wouldn’t you want to see that ban lifted? As a reader of interesting texts, that is, even if collaboration isn’t your thing? I think the way popular systems and certain other systems foreclose on computation is a problem. When people download my Python programs to run them, they get warning messages about how they might harm the computer. I can discuss a video here, but (unless I cleverly pick a video of a program running) I can’t discuss a program. I see computation frequently being pushed aside or into ghettos. And so, quite apart from the issue of whether everyone needs to learn how to program, I would like to remedy that and let us talk about programs, as we use our computers, as fluidly as we talk about conventional media forms.
Nick, thanks for this interesting post. I confess that on seeing its title earlier this week, I immediately Googled “YouCode,” expecting to find some thriving, code-centric, social network. I suppose my knee-jerk turn to Google makes your point: the ways we interact digitally are being more and more circumscribed by Google, YouTube, Facebook, and similar systems, and these looming Tigers, Leopards, Snow Leopards, and Lions not only limit what we imagine we can do, but also obscure the nature of the machines on which we’re doing it. Apple and Microsoft certainly aren’t designing operating systems that encourage the creation of generative music or literature. (For those readers who might not know, some of Nick’s work does with words what Viznut’s codes do with music. Check out, for example, “ppg256,” which generates an endless poem from a code that’s 256 characters long.) I do wonder how the literary possibilities of the demoscene can open up, in a more influential way, the work we’re creating and reading? Which I suppose is a way of asking a question about all of the pieces from this week: to what extent should coding, audio editing, and video production be skills a 21st century writer should master? Born Magazine, with its emphasis on collaboration, offers one possible model for bringing a variety of expertise from various artists to one piece, but I like the idea of poets learning prosody and Perl. Here’s a thought: how about a generative poem that scans, with variables for rhythm and meter?