The apocalypse is nigh. At least, that’s what is being reported by a little-known village newspaper in England — the Paddlesworth Press (paddlesworthpress.co.uk), a newly launched online venture.
According to research leaked to the Press by a rogue astrophysicist, the Earth will be wiped out by an solar flare in 10 weeks’ time.
If this sounds like baloney, well, that’s because it is. The Paddlesworth Press, the journalists who write for it and the events it chronicles are mostly works of fiction. Although named after a real village in southeast England, the Paddlesworth depicted on the site is a fake, the world probably won’t end in December and the Press’s co-editors — technology buff Major Robert Fitzroy-Howard and churchwarden Mary Burgess — aren’t real people.
Here’s the other twist: fictitious though the paper is, a lot of what it reports does seem to be enmeshed in reality. Root around on Google, for example, and you’ll find Burgess and Fitzroy-Howard on Twitter. Run an internet search for some of the pubs and restaurants mentioned on the Press’s Web site, and you’ll find reviews for them on Qype. Many of the locals featured in the articles have Facebook accounts and internet trails going back months. One Paddlesworth musician has recorded some tracks on a MySpace page.
The site’s real-life founders say the narrative we’re about to witness over the next 10 weeks is the “world’s first mixed-media, collaborative novel.”
Actually, it’s more like an interactive online play — where the stage is the internet, and the audience is as much a part of the drama as the characters themselves. What’s unique about the Paddlesworth Press is the way it both sprawls across an unlimited series of Web sites and encourages interplay between reader and writer.
Each of Paddlesworth’s 50-odd characters will be played by individual contributors — who include comedian Jack Whitehall and artist Frank Paul — and readers will be able to interact with them all on social media as they would with their friends in the real world.
“If people want to research it,” says one of the founders, trainee lawyer David Story, “they’re going to discover a whole world beyond the Paddlesworth Press.”
As Paddlesworth rumbles towards Armageddon, readers can even influence events by voting on village decisions at crucial turning-points in the plot.
We will, for instance, be forced to take sides between the two editors, Burgess and Fitzroy-Howard. The major, says Story, “wants to expand the Press out into the world — whereas Mary Burgess wants to look inward, and bring the community together and as the end of the world draws near, the tension between the two is going to become very interesting.”
Co-founder and television researcher Stephen Eisenhammer says the project is as much about exploring the creative possibilities of the Internet as the apocalypse narrative itself. “What we’re really doing is seeing how the Internet can help us build a whole fictional village,” Eisenhammer says. “The village isn’t just built from the Paddlesworth Press. It’s built from Facebook, Twitter, and online reviews. The Internet is the vehicle for the whole idea.”
Story elaborates: “In the last few years, the Internet has often been perceived to be tied to reality. There is a certain amount of trust in the online space, and trust in the things that are detailed on that space, and, in part, this project is exploring how that trust is misguided.”
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