Long story short: microculture in print

Could you write your memoir in just six words?  That was the challenge SMITH magazine put to a batch of well-known celebrities and a bundle of regular-folk Twitterati.  A bit over a year, 11,000 responses and a book deal later, SMITH presents 1,000 or so of the best six-word memoirs in Not Quite What I Was Planning.

Watch this trailer to get a sense of what Not Quite is all about. (I had originally embedded the video in this post but it wasn't workingproperly in Internet Explorer so unfortunately you'll have to click over and return for the rest of the post.)

I haven't read the book yet, but at first pass here's what I like about the concept:

Like others that spend (admittedly far too much) time with social media, I firmly believe that microcontent (or micromedia) is having a major impact on how people think, connect and communicate (online for sure, but probably offline as well.)  Projects like this one promise to extend microcontent beyond geeksville, even if it means doing so with the help of the old fashioned printed (yes PRINTED!) word.

Not Quite is an interesting experiment in crowdsourced creativity.  This is a running theme for SMITH, which is as much a community built around its members' creativity as it is a proper magazine.  But for this project, I really like the make-up of the crowd from which the content is sources.  Celebrities and regular people just like you and me are on equal footing.  Stephen Colbert doesn't get an extra word and, even looking at the stories highlighted in the trailer, the consumers come to the table with some powerful stuff.

It is next-gen literature for the overworked, overscheduled and speed obsessed.  Not that I'm saying people shouldn't read books, but the truth is more and more people simply can't find (or won't make) the time to do so in our velocity-obsessed culture.  We digirati who feed our minds with pithy blog posts, short form video and whatever we can catch via RSS are probably the worst offenders.  I used to plow through a novel or two every week.  Now, who has the time?  Not Quite is a no-excuses kind of book.  You can certainly make time for six-words - even if it takes you a year to get through the entire book.

Not Quite appears to be more than just a stunt (as these things so often turn out to be) -- it looks like a sequel is already in the works.  You can contribute here.  Not sure if I'd be able to pull it off, given how many words it took me just to blog about six-words! 

I suppose my post could have simply been, "Cool concept.  Promising book. Visit Amazon." Maybe I should pick up this book too.

Hat tip to Very Short List - itself a brilliant exercise in microcontent.