A few stray thoughts after the first two weeks of the Story Lab…

• So much of this is being facilitated by the internet and the way it facilitates community and knowledge. It’s the flip-side of my grandmother’s conviction that our brains are turning to goo because we don’t need to remember things a, ny more. Maybe not, but we need to be able to make connections and links, think laterally, more than ever before. We have all the information at our fingertips, in the huge database of the general internet, and need to use deduction and problem-solving skills to wade through it, follow relevant paths, and retain the essential information that makes it possible to figure out what’s happening and where to go next.

• I have a new appreciation for the nerds of the 20th century. It’s easy to be a nerd these days. If you’re interested in something, you can really leap into it. You don’t have to write in to Making a Murderer Fan Club PO Box 11, Milwaukee WI; you just find the subreddit, buy a creepy shirt from Etsy, and you’re good to go. If you’re interested, you can easily branch out further into the genre, listen to the Last Podcast on the Left like the loser you are, buy another creepy t-shirt, watch the documentary they recommend and then leave a scathing Rotten Tomatoes review about it. But the director had potential, so you Google what else they’ve done, read their blog, write about it on your own blog, and so the whole cycle continues. The leaps that we make so quickly must have been agonising before the internet. My brain can’t comprehend it. Where did people leave their scathing film reviews?

• I’m also amazed that cult films — or even confusing films– flourished before the internet. “Did you get it?” is a question I don’t even bother to ask anymore, because I know that someone else has Yahoo Answer’d my question before I even touch the computer. I guess that’s why my dad saw Star Wars so many times at the cinema. He probably had to take notes. And he didn’t have the collective weight of the internet behind any madcap theories he might have formed; just the Friends of Middle Earth society at uni. I’m so glad I don’t have to rely on people at uni to listen to my fervent belief that the Zodiac Killer was the Unabomber all along.
• Going along, then, I’d like to think more about the relationship fan communities have with transmedia