This is a semi-regular update on my progress to document the history, perspectives, and narratives of the metaverse.
Current book word count: 169,295
Writing
Structural editing is about saying “No!” to make the book leaner, more streamlined, better to read. Field Notes of the Metaverse started out as a book in three parts: The history of the metaverse, the narratives of the metaverse and voices of the metaverse.
The last part was the first one to go, based on sheer size. It was supposed to hold the interviews I conducted for the book, but those turned out to be too massive to include.
The second part was supposed to contain a model to better understand how individual metaverse narratives diverged from each other, where they overlapped, and what people actually meant when they used the term “metaverse.” And so, I proposed an interpretive framework for metaverse analysis. Basically an extended and more refined version of the one I came up with in 2023.
I thought I needed that framework to analyse the space of existing metaverse narratives to then identify clusters of the most popular narratives, as a justification why I chose a number of specific narratives to further discuss. But you know what? It totally broke the flow.
The entire thing felt like a completely different book, a separate thing, tonally different. Interesting, sure, but just not fun.
And so we cut it and just kept the narratives as a summary and condensation of the storylines of the book. It works so much better.
And just like that, the book lost 30k words.
Actually, now I have a “Snippets” file that contains everything that was cut, weighing in at 35k words. You never know. Maybe there is a time and place for them after all.
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