[In this post: The Big Plot]
What if you suddenly realize you’re living inside a novel? What if you suddenly realize the person you were talking with yesterday on Facebook is one of the characters of a plot that your chat contributed to evolve? What if you suddenly realize that the Tweet you are reading is the line of a script that someone wrote awaiting for your unconcious reply? Imagine that you live your social  ”internet” life normally, and then you end up finding this. What would your reaction be like?
The huge power of The Big Plot resides in making you wonder whether the story you are reading it is true or not and, being that the case, how you can escape from it. Event though Bachtin already said something similar back in the XX century about the suspension of disbelief the reader has to perform before entering a text , The Big Plot requires from us something more: we have to abandon the distinction between real and digital, so to discover that our lives in the web are not less real than the one we are used to call “real”.
Thus, The Big Plot is more than just  a magnificently developed project both of web art and web narrative: it is also a deep and smart insight on how we act, react and enact ourselves and our lives in the infosphere – as its author Paolo Cirio calls it. In other words, The Big Plot is not something you can merely “read”. You have to be caught in it and surrender and take part in its events – and when I say “you” I mean “you” as your Facebook profile, your Tweets, your Gmail chat. It is even more than interaction, it is real cooperation.
The genre to which his project can be ascribed is “recombinant fiction”:
[. . .] I have tried to define a form of art that combines literature, cinema and theatre through the use of interconnected digital media and popular platforms.
Recombinant fiction is based on (1) the theories of media convergence, (2) the culture of participation and (3) the use of reality as narrative.
But wait, before going any further, I think we need a sort of clearer explanation of what The Big Plot is. As the name suggests, it is a big narrative plot, but it lacks something. The four main characters of the story are the by-product of the relationships that tie them and of the events that they had to face. However, the development of the story is open. It depends on how people like me and you, common Internet users, decide to intersect their digital lives with theirs. Even though there is a sort of director behind it all, his task is just to turn on the narrative machine. He keeps track of every profile, every answer the characters provide, but still, everything depends on the inputs, twists and turns the story gets from its readers. So, if you are among the ones who has always suffered from not having the chance of giving advice to M.me Bovary about her love affairs or comfort Anna Karenina, now you can take your vengeance against  the immobility and impotency that you as reader were bound to so far.
The Big Plot is a major example of how narrative techniques can be improved by using digital tools and social networks. This new apporoach to storytelling helps us reconsider the very idea of text and to give it a new format, which is not just paper and ink but it is spread all around the web. The initial plot  exceeds the boundaries of the story and explodes, its debris are scattered around and fall on our screens that turn out to be narrative, communicative, interactive, participative interfaces through which the story can grow and be grown.
Personally speaking, I’ve found The Big Plot absolutely unique. Generally, spy stories are hard to write because either you miss some detail that pops up at some point later on, and you wonder “where do you come from?” or they become so complicated you cannot follow them. What happens next is that that book lingers on your dusty night table for ages. This can’t and won’t happen when you are in the Plot. So, please, enjoy the pleasure of being caught in it.
