A Review of a Review of a Book by Ellen Ullman

Wow. The screen shot below is from an interactive review of a book about programming written in JavaScript, part of Robin Sloan’s Summer Reading series.

The incredible thing is the video guides you through the open-endedness of a blank JavaScript prompt without being didactic. The text of the review is beside the point though; the experience is what makes the review connect with the material covered. (Which, by the way, is Close to the Machine by Ellen Ullman.)

At one point, the console output informs you that if you’ve finished reading a particularly long passage, you may type a command to make the video skip ahead. I wish, however, that Sloan went further with the interaction between video and interactive review: that different videos could be queued up, or that you could pause and restart the video from the console.

Ultimately though, I want more of this. This is what we should be experimenting with on the Web. We should take advantage of new possibilities for interactive works. In a strange way, this is reading that’s more like writing—you have to contribute something (if even just a short JavaScript expression) to coax out more content. I’ve had enough of online journalism that’s nothing more than blog posts written by newspaper interns, vapid listicles that are blatantly fabricating pageviews, and articles interspersed with more ads than content. We need more bold experiments that ask us to rethink how we read and write.

(And yes, I know that interactive fiction is an old idea, but until now I haven’t seen it done in an accessible and exciting way. Or maybe I’m just out of the loop.)