Category: Other Page 105 of 182

This will be a short entry, but a potentially important one.

While authors in the US have to buy ISBN numbers to publish books (or get one via a company they publish through, like Amazon, etc.) in Canada, Canadian authors get ISBNs distributed to them for free through an agency called Collections Canada.

What’s interesting here is that not only can you get an ISBN (or many) for free from the government, enabling you to publish books & other media “officially” (whatever that means now, I’m not sure), but that you can do so without even having your mailing address verified.

Yes, you have to enter an address and presumably it has to be located within Canada (I didn’t test if you can enter ones from outside), but at no point are you sent a piece of mail at the address to prove you live/work there. So, in practice, the system is wide open to abuse. Perhaps the risk is deemed relatively low in relation to the cost of having to send out mailers with verification codes, but it’s there nonetheless.

So basically, once you have your book published with you free ISBN and your unverified and potentially false & untraceable address, you can then also pretty much publish whatever you want on self-publishing sites, and then sell them “officially” through global distribution. Provided nobody reports the content to the printer, and that it doesn’t obviously break whatever their content guidelines are, we live in an age where ANYONE CAN SAY ANYTHING IN A BOOK.

Perhaps we already lived in that age, but at one time the barriers to entry were much higher, even for self-publishing or “vanity” presses as they were once more commonly called. There were much higher costs involved (Lulu.com for example lets you get set-up for free, and only takes a cut on sales), and for conventional publishing, there were editors, proof-readers, and people who would at least to some degree vet or approve content so that it at least fit within their brand or business.

Now it is just a hyperreal free-for-all.

So once you’ve published your book that can literally say anything, including counter-factual or hyperreal assertions, you can then use that as a reference during your more mutable online campaigns. People can even go and check the reference, and get a copy for themselves to examine.

Of course, the shorter path through the woods in all of this is just to invent arcane or difficult to find alleged “sources” and scatter references to them throughout your hyperrealist campaign. Most people won’t check your sources anyway and will just take it on faith that they exist, or it won’t matter to them in a hyperrealist sense whether they exist or not.

I looked at various levels of press releases in early parts of this series, ranging from cheap Fiverr distribution buys (usually guest posts that claim to rank in Google News), to some of the cheaper syndication sites like PRUnderground.

While experimenting with inciting incidents, and hoping to be able to piggyback off other viral cultural content out at the same time, I sent a sample release to a low to mid-range PR distro site, asking if they would run it (so I didn’t have to waste my money if no).

I’m including a partial excerpt of the reply I received here (but excluding the source name), because it is both educational & reflective of an “old media” mindset about press releases and their purpose/function. Since it was a business communication about their service, I post it under the assumption there is a lower expectation of privacy associated with it than there would be with a personal private communication.

…we don’t allow any ‘hoax’ content of any kind, only actual factual news, since a press release needs to be news coming from you, not fake article about you, or commentary on other things not related to your actual service/book/project.

The ‘found atlantis’ on Google maps is an old old thing that comes around again and again, so generally not really relevant to anything legitimate. Remember a release is going to legit media, not the public and it’s not a blog post for click-bait.

I will leave off any additional commentary I might have here for the time being.

Okay, let’s say you’ve built up a somewhat convincing or at least interesting web of inter-connecting hyperreal web artifacts using a combination of SEO & other transmedia storytelling tricks & outright social media hacks on Reddit, Medium, and wherever else.

They’re out there, they’re great, just waiting to be found… and waiting… and nobody is finding them. The web is never “activated” and no one ever tumbles down the intricate system of rabbit holes dug out for them by the hyperreal excavator.

What’s missing? What’s stopping this particular Event Ladder from rising up out of Preality substrate & “going viral” into this timeline?

I think of these missing catalyzing elements as “inciting incidents.”

There are many ways to cause an inciting incident to occur, and I’m an expert in none of them. I only know what I’ve done, or what I’ve inferred from what I’ve come across via the work of other hyperreal artists working in networked narratives & transmedia storytelling.

An inciting incident could be as simple as a tweet that takes off (archived), and that leads users to a trailhead, from which they can “do their own research.”

Or it could very well be a press release that the hyperrealist storyteller sends off to various editorial departments or journalists at “legacy” or next-gen online media.

It might also be a blog post that “goes viral” and which then gets reported on by higher-up levels of media.

Whatever it is, there needs to be a “thing” that activates the hyperreal web, and causes end users to spontaneously make & share their discoveries with one another.

By way of Henry Jenkins:

Transmedia storytelling expands what can be known about a particular fictional world while dispersing that information, insuring that no one consumer knows everything and insure that they must talk about the series with others

To be continued, as I gather my thoughts on this subject further.