Cultural institutions often author experiences that stretch over longer time scales (e.g. multi-year religious coming-of-age rituals). But mass mediums rarely do.
That’s an unfortunate limitation: mass mediums give authors enormous reach!
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Books have a longer time dimension, but it’s generally unauthored.
Books often take months to read. But they almost never have an *authored* time dimension like that of films or plays. The days and weeks are rarely specified by the author the way minutes are by a filmmaker.
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I think you undersell the authored time dimension of a novel. If it exists in the other media you mention, then it definitely exists in a book.
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Is there a particularly representative book in which you feel the author was strongly conducting the time dimension of the reader's experience over a long time period?
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I pointed to the Odyssey. Beyond this, I think I’m having trouble understanding what you mean by strong conducting the time dimension. Can you help to understand better? My thinking is that a plot necessarily manipulates the reader along some time dimension to tell the story.
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I think the Odyssey is a great example, but its interesting properties arise because it wasn't authored as a book!
In general, book plots do manipulate the reader along time dimensions, but I think few intentionally design multi-month time scales as e.g. social institutions do.
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I see your point about multi month timelines. What about religious books?
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My rough sense here is that the books themselves don't really encode a lengthy authored time dimension, but the social institutions around them absolutely do.
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It depends upon what you mean by authored. Many books are intended to be read multiple times, and some are meant to be read ritualistically. This doesn’t always occur by explicit intention, but maybe by something orthogonal (eg the night before Christmas).
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This made me wonder about your thoughts as to whether or not a group of friends playing a table top role playing game over the period of years has an authored time dimension. How about the Marvel cinematic universe? Does the intent have to be didactic? Or, can it be experiential?
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Former certainly has a time dimension, but not a particularly authored one, as far as I’ve seen. Marvel movies do, weakly, via same mechanism as soap operas etc (see this sub thread twitter.com/nsfmc/status/1)
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Replying to @andy_matuschak
Do soap operas really not count here? They span decades in an amazingly accessible format that often rewards long time consumers investment without alienating newcomers.