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This week, I seem to be reading heavily on a theme of interactivity — gone both good and bad — in narrative construction.

• There’s been some talk lately about the lawsuit again Toyota over their “prank” campaign, much of which has been fairly negative. I would love to see any examples of the emails people received, or the opt-in statement that they apparently agreed to to get a better sense of the level of transparency that was practiced.
• I wonder too if this particular effort was meant to create a sense of intimacy between the brand and its consumers, given the feeling expressed by Toyota CEO that their decline is the result of the brand becoming “too big and distant from its customers.” On a side note, it is somewhat amusing/telling that the justification all these articles cite for assuming the campaign character was real is the existence of a myspace page.

• A quick write-up in AdAge Mediaworks about branded, short-form content on the web, focusing on HBO Imagine. While I haven’t had a chance to explore the HBO project in-depth, the description of “Rashamon meets Choose Your Own Adventure” reminded me of the structure of early hypertext novels.
• That led me to revisit the article “Just Tell Me When to Stop: Hypertext and the Displacement of Closure,” from the collection The End of Books or Books Without End: Reading Interactive Narratives by Jane Yellowlees Douglas. The article analyzes several pieces of hypertext fiction, including the classic Afternoon by Michael Joyce, focusing on the question of closure in narratives that don’t have set orders.
• Speaking of hypertext and lack of order, a colleague of mine from CMS who is currently at Duke sent me this from Postmodern Culture. I find it equal parts intriguing and incomprehensible.

• On an even more (more?) egg-heady front, I’ve come by a cache of readings on biopolitics and political economy, courtesy of another colleague of mine. I’m starting out with Robert Mitchell’s “The Laws of Mo(o)re: waste, biovalue, and information ecologies,” chapter 3 from his 2006 book with Cathy Waldby Tissue economies: blood, organs, and cell lines in late capitalism