Cell phone novels

I have been intrigued about alternative uses for cell phones ever since hearing poet and New Yorker reporter Dana Goodyear give a talk about Japanese cell phone novels. In this arguably new form of literature, authors (often young women) compose entire novels out of tiny cell phone texts. These texts are all sent to websites where they can be viewed publicly, and in fact some have been conventionally published and sold quite well. The nature of texts lends itself to episodic storytelling, and the visual aspects of texts becomes very important. For example, a lot of text with many capital letters evokes a different feeling than a text containing a singular word (such as "lonely"). This type of novel can start heated discussions - is it saving literacy or killing it - and it is related to the use of cell phones in education. (The subjects of the stories, incidentally, bring up interesting questions about the role of women in society, but that's another story). Ms. Goodyear wrote a very readable article about this for the New Yorker that I highly recommend: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/22/081222fa_fact_goodyear. In addition, she is a co-founder of Figment, an online community for teen writers. It looks like it could also be appropriate for middle school: http://figment.com/.

Finally, after our discussion about copyright and the web, I wanted to bring to everyone's attention these resources about Joi Ito, founder of Creative Commons. In a speech at Japan Society in 2008, he gave a great, short rundown of the history of the internet and explained the six different types of creative commons licenses. The summary is here: http://www.japansociety.org/content.cfm/creative_commons_the_sharing_economy. From the same speech, here's a clip where he explains how Niconico douga (a site similar to youtube), got kids engaged in the government and critiquing politicians.