The Atassi family's quarter in Homs, Syria

Against a backdrop of political intrigue and coups, one scholar defies his elders to uncover the true origins of his family, the once-powerful Atassis of Syria, now shattered by exile into an international diaspora.  Dan Brown thriller?  Look again: it’s the discussion page of the “Atassi” entry on English Wikipedia.

Family matters

Wikipedia may be the last place to look for the emergence of true digital art: its mission is explicitly classificatory and pedantic and its administrators at times take on all the creativity and zest of a state archive’s apparatchiks.  Yet one mothballed discussion page has preserved a gripping family drama and, in the process, offers us a rare but hopeful example of how digital texts might achieve the raw spiritual and emotional power of books.

The discussion page for the article on the famous Atassi family of Syria, whose members played a prominent role in Syrian politics after the end of the French mandate in 1936 and whose roots go back well into Ottoman times, details two cousins, one named Bassel and another unknown, engaged in a dispute over their family’s history.  As the dialogue goes on, we learn more about each author.  Bassel is a bit of an underdog, and he “was literally told by some that I have no right to write about the family, given that I had never lived in Homs”, the home city and traditional power base of the Atassis in Syria since Ottoman times.  His opponent writes in broken English and remains mysterious, and one subplot that develops is Bassel’s ongoing attempt to learn his name, so that he may “have the honor of addressing you by your first name, the way you are addressing me by mine, since we are trying to be honest with each other.”  At one point, Bassel tries to force an admission by signing with his full name, “Bassel ibn Ahamd Habib ibn Ziad ibn Khalil ibn Khaled ibn Mohammah Atasi”, but in the end the unknown writer refuses and makes a remarkable confession:

“Basel

I cannot share my name with you especially because you had attacked me repeatedly …I know that we came to agree at the end but yet again, you questioned my motives already which put me in an awkward position with my other Atassi friends . I know of you and I know many of your cousins and I don’t want to cause senilities. Let’s keep it professional and informative.

Regards”

At times the fight can get nasty, and Bassel’s opponent compares Bassel’s tone to the “Mukhabarat of Syria”, the infamous Syrian intelligence agency no doubt used by the Assad family to hunt down and ferret out the Atassis and other dynasties in their quest for power (what anger must that name strike in Bassel’s heart?)  Yet there are also remarkable signs of cooperation and conciliation when the two parties work together, as when Bassel writes “In show of cooperation, I will not make these changes and will wait for you to do them yourself as you see fit” regarding the origins of the Atassi family’s name.

Flouting Wikipedia

Above all, however, what makes this dialogue such a gripping read is its utter disregard for the format of the medium and Wikipedia’s conventions.  In their intentions, both writers are wildly off from the discussion page’s purpose as a venue for voicing editorial concerns, which is translated so vividly into a stark ignorance of how to use the tools and the markup language provided for them to insert subsections, signatures, and so on.  The very first thing the reader encounters at the top of the page is an absurd table of contents:

Contents [hide]

1 Naqabat Al Ashraf

1.1 =====================================================================
1.2 =================================================================================
1.3 ===========================================================================
1.4 ============================================================================

…

This psuedo-introduction arrests anyone who is used to the standard formatting of Wikipedia like a casual reader flipping through Tristram Shandy for the first time.  There is a whiff of crisis here, not only in the content that follows but immediately here in the medium as well, a distinct flavor of dada.  Unlike dada, however, this is no conscious rebellion, and when one checks the “edit this page” tab it is clear that the authors decided to separate their epistles to one another with lines of dashes, like so: ——————————————–.  These are interpreted as being the titles of subsections, hence the strange autogenerated table of contents.  Indeed, using lines is a necessary strategy to keep their correspondence organized since neither appears to be aware of the four tildes (“~~~~”) shorthand, which associates a username and a timestamp with each change to the page.

The resulting play between notation strategies and hierarchical organization effectively alters the content, and not simply in the sense that differences in notation affect the text.  On an interpretive level, the content informs the reader as he begins to question the author’s formatting choices, and vice versa.  Why would she use the dashes when the edit page explicitly reminds writers to “sign off” each change with the four tildes?  Could they have wanted to keep their identities secret, especially the unknown writer who hesitates to tell Bassel his name?  Was the decision simply a result of their ignorance of the medium?  Consider the frank admission in the first letter,

“test

I am not sure how to engage in a discussion here….this is an attempt.”

The shock of failed expectations, the importance of format, or the triumph of content?

Such formatting errors suggest a polarity between the reader’s expectations and the format’s structure, or perhaps more broadly between the subjective and formal qualities involved in the reader’s perception of the narrative.  Without a doubt, the mistakes arrest you in a haunting way, as if one had gone into their storage shed out back and saw the boxes unpacked, the spare folding table unfolded, and the dishes and silverware perfectly set out for dinner.  We may be seized with terror, pleasure, or any another emotion, but when we take pause is it only because of the incongruity of a table with place settings in a shed or also because the arrangement possesses something gripping and remarkable?  Is our astonishment due to a passing cognitive dissonance, or does the cramped, intimate, and fume-drenched environment inspire a new dining experience, one that might even call for new recipes (what Riesling goes best with the odor of acetone)?

Time breaks down the betrayal of preconceptions, allowing room for the true potential of a medium to sprout.  But how much time will the Atassi discussion page need?  It poses the problem of canonization reduced to scale: will this Wikipedia page still haunt us a week from now, and fifty years from now could we write about it as the ancestor or prototype of digital literature?  Or will it disappear into the white noise of Wikipedia, blogs, and history?

Yet beyond these experiential considerations there is still the obvious issue of whether this narrative might be gripping purely because it is just good drama.  The ephemeral nature of Internet discourse is so often due to its banality, from the great wastes of 4chan to the canned humor of bash, not to mention the lack of narrative, period.  More specifically, the fractured nature of the interwebs lacks the unity of action so critical to plot, to which the Atassi discussion page is a rare exception.  The format, perhaps, is less relevant.

It would behoove the world to conduct large scale studies to see how the experience of reading literature is affected by the medium and the layout of the content.  Studies have been done within a usability context, but not to my knowledge with “literary” literature and certainly not with an eye toward emotional and spiritual effects, let alone comparisons with the effect of other media like paper.

My hypothesis is that content and format are distinct but exist symbiotically the way mind and body or, going back to the storage shed analogy, Riesling and acetone fumes do.  The extent to which each affects each other and also our reading experience is another question, one that is difficult to evaluate using just the Atassi discussion page as a sample.  Like so many chance discoveries, however, the answer to whether the page offers an solid new model for digital narratives may just depend the brute force of billions of other Atassis putting down the keyboard, giving it a go, and seeing what comes out.

The From the Backstreets of Syria to the Backpages of Wikipedia by Ersin Akinci, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.