The world is small. Art has known this for centuries and embraced a tradition that goes all the way back to Zen: the ability to reduce the complexity of the world into small things and short forms, geared towards niche audiences. Poets, novelists, sculptors, painters, and composers have always had an affinity for the beauty of small things and short forms -- sonnets; Cycladic figurines; La Rochefoucauld's Maximes; the two-and-a-half minutes of Webern's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 10; photomicrography; Very Small Buildings in architecture; or the Japanese haiku. All these artifacts are tiny in scale, short in duration, and excessively modest in the claims they make on our attention. They occupy very little time or space and imprint themselves only lightly on the human senses -- like a stinging ray of light that illuminates hearts and minds for the blink of an eye and celebrates the presence of absence.
A particularly moving example is Hemingway's super-short tale "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The loquacious laconic of Hemingway's micro-story has now been given a new congenial forum with the emergence of micro-blogging -- an obvious match. New York Times writer Matt Richtel is writing a "Twiller," a murder mystery story in 140-character increments starring hookers, killers, and (surprise!) Barack Obama (more about him later). Other micro-story attempts on Twitter include Small Places, Slice, novelsin3lines, GoodCaptain, Twittories (a "Twiller" wiki), and Copyblogger's Twitter writing contest from earlier this year. Moreover, there are off-Twitter programs such as Wired Magazine's Very Short Story collection from 2006 (that featured six-word stories by renowned futurists and science fiction writers), mobile phone novels (so called "keitai shousetus," big in Japan), Nokia's (Wieden + Kennedy's) ad campaign "Somebody Else's Phone," Shortfolio (a blog that publishes stories with less than 500 words), Facebook application Just Three Words, and Brave New Fiction, a web site that helps writers compose entire stories by writing one 140-character line every day. Baby steps towards "War and Peace." And this is just the top of a whole long tail of short tales…
For (micro-) novelists, structural constraints (which, as we all know, fuel creativity) may result in "saying more with less," but how do you express big ideas such as, say, philosophical treatises, in micro-formats? That seems more of a challenge -- although one could argue that "what cannot be twittered, must remain in silence" (to paraphrase Ars Technica's cute paraphrasing of Wittgenstein).
This raises a bigger question: What if, on a philosophical level, the need for conveying big ideas is on the decline? What if the short tale is replacing the grand old narrative and in fact remains the only appropriate format in a small world that creates a growing number of small ideas in the absence of the big one(s)? Has the "end of history" (Fukuyama) bred the beginning of our stories? Are Twitter novels (and other micro-formats) perhaps the manifestation of a new plural, a new relativism that is not only salient in the fragmentation of media outlets ("Global Voices" instead of "Voice of America") but also the intellectual discourse itself? Or do they rather represent an activation and visualization of a plurality that has been latent anyway?
In a riveting BBC radio talk (listen to the full recording below), TED curator Chris Anderson (whose conference's mission is to promote "Ideas Worth Spreading") and philosopher and writer Alain de Botton recently discussed whether "the age of big ideas is over." De Botton opined that "I share the nostalgia for big ideas, but I'm also weary of them to some extent. I think that part of the problem of a big idea, as it's sometimes defined in the media, is that it has a certain simplicity and naivety to it. Many of the best ideas are really quite secular and quite small and have to do with very small but very important improvements to certain areas of life: an aspect of how to teach mass, a side of how you improve insulation in a building. These are not necessarily things that will get people out in the street, but they are significant ideas nevertheless."
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But what about Obama? Wasn't his entire platform built on "big ideas?" Doesn’t his election contradict de Botton or at least suggest that big ideas will enjoy a renaissance? De Botton offers a nuanced answer to this: "He didn’t say 'I've got one big idea.' He said 'We can make a change.' And I think that’s the right way to do it. If you say you've got one big idea, and that idea somehow comes on stock as one big idea normally does, then you're in trouble. Much better to say we can find inspiration and we can make a change, and then look for the smaller ones."
Hemingway on Obama: "Big challenges, many ideas, little time."
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