New ways of story-telling

The Doc Web is a now-lost piece that survives in the Internet Archive, written by Elan Kiderman Ullendorff, about how any tool can be transformed into something to write with. Yelp reviews will be co-opted to publish blog posts; Venmo payments will be co-opted to publish poems; spreadsheets will be co-opted to publish personal websites; maps will be co-opted to publish magazines. The article focuses specifically on Google docs, with examples of some of the things that have been produced (including ‘a poetry mixtape’ from the pandemic). The piece describes the ephemerality of these docs: “Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it has changed. Know that you may visit this page tomorrow and find that it is gone.” But, in the end, that is the fate of all writing, including Elan Kiderman Ullendorff’s original piece. I’ve written about interesting new formats in the past. Where to publish your stories? is a summary of a talk by Chris Parkinson in 2014. At the end of his…