Every once in a while I have a chain of thoughts that connects seemingly unrelated
things together into a new set of ideas. One of those happened to me over the last week or so. I’ve previously complained that the creation of our “culture” is increasingly a manufactured entity: that our music and stories are increasingly the result of commercial interests carefully screened for marketing purposes rather
than the stories and music that we create as individuals. We have become a world of watchers rather than doers.

But there are some interesting counterexamples. One that I’ve begun to find interesting is fan fiction and art. Recently Slashdot ran an interesting story on
Star Wars Second Strike,
a fan fiction story rendered as an audio play in the style of old time radio. It is
a fascinating attempt at collaboration: over 40 actors in five countries participated in producing the first hour long episode. I’ve listened to just a bit
of it (the rest will wait for my anticipated long trip to Monterey next week), but
the production quality is quite high. Audio dramas present interesting challenges for story telling, but this would seem to be an area where amateurs could make
significant and interesting new contributions using the Internet as a collaborating
medium. I dug around a bit, and discovered an interesting set of links for
Radio Drama Resources. The idea of creating new dramatic works in the audio format
seems very compelling, and more within the budget and resources of amateur
productions.

I’ll ponder it some more…