The Future of Writing
David Artsmith - Social networks are in essence a place to tell a story. Its your tale, the story of your life shared with friends and family. Twitter is a way of giving status updates about your daily life, and facebook is a more complex way of doing the same thing.
The next step in using these social networks is to tell not a real story, but to document the life of a fictional character. Through the use of status updates, pictures, videos, and blog posts, you can actually record the day to day life activities of someone that you made up.
You can also take this a step further, such as the community RolePages has done.com, or on some of the groups found on Bebo or Facebook, where everyone involved is a fictional character. This gives you a new opportunity as a creator of fiction, endowing you with the ability to add a multimedia masterpiece to the story of your character, making them more real and dimensional than they could be on flat 2d paper.
The potential here is that your story doesn’t have to be static, living only on the page and in your head. Instead you can breathe life into it, allowing it to grow naturally, nurtured by a whole group of people rather than just the efforts of a single author.
The problem of course is that you don’t own this story anymore. It becomes a community project, equally owned by everyone who participates. The result of this is that you don’t have complete control over the outcome. You have some influence, depending on your contributions, but the final story is a chaotic mishmash of random input from every person that participates.
Social networking represents the cutting edge in fictional storytelling. It's a community event, a combination of talents in a living moment working together to tell a story. Its still young, but its on its way to making a real mark in the world of fiction.