By “social organisation” they mean the same patterns of interconnectedness between people that enable funny videos to become viral marketing phenomena online and which have been popularised by Malcolm Gladwell in his ever-relevant book The Tipping Point. These rules of social organisation suggest amongst other things that we are all prone to “small world” phenomena, where any other person in the world is just six steps away within our social networks, and that these networks are scale free – no matter how big or how small our social communities, the same rules apply.

With regards to Marvel, researchers found these affects were in place quite “randomly” across all the thousands of different comics Marvel have released since the 1930s, written as they are by thousands of different authors and drawn by thousands of different illustrators. Somehow, out of unplanned narrative chaos, order has arisen – the same order and pattern of relationships as displayed by real human beings both in everyday life and in digital social networks like Myspace and Facebook. To quote the article in this month’s Nature:

Not only is the Marvel Universe a so-called ‘small world’, where just about any character can be linked to any other by just a few ‘degrees of separation’ (or friends-of-friends), but it is also a so-called scale-free world, where the distribution of links has a characteristic form that includes a few very highly connected individuals, who are particularly good networkers.

The Marvel Universe, like our own societies, is unplanned: it has grown from the work of many comic-book storywriters who have made no attempt to engineer any overall social network. It seems that this joint effort guided them not towards a random network, as might have been expected, but towards one that (somewhat) mirrors reality. The same thing seems to have happened in classical mythology.

This order-from-chaos makes an interesting point of comparison with DC Comics (the home of Batman and Superman) who have long taken the opposite approach: trying to organise their fictional universe both temporally and spatially into an organised whole, that’s caused more complexities of astrophysical dimensions than the collected works of Stephen Hawking. The DC “multiverse” works on what is in essence a theory of parallel universes: characters can exist simultaneously in different worlds and times and relationships with one another, and each multiplicity is documented. This leads to occasional points of crisis where the overlap of storylines and events in the different publications all become too head-spinning and have to be knitted together in one major storyline that, in effect, “reboots” the DC universe – starting the whole narrative of every character from a new fixed point, before spinning off towards chaos again. This approach is incredibly both incredibly clever (does even Proust have as complex a relationship with time as this?) and incredibly complex (could even Thomas Pynchon think up a temporal-spatial trip as big as this?).

The organic, evolutionary approach of Marvel feels intuitively more “right” somehow – by not attempting to be canonical in their approach, they’ve let their characters and narratives grow into “real” structures which, albeit unconsciously, mirror our own world – no matter how fantastic the adventures of the X-Men.

Why is this relevant? Well, I think it tells us a little bit about why readers can have an enduring love for their favourite fictional characters, and a lot about how we should start to think about new opportunities for publishing.

If the lives, however fantastic, of Wolverine or the Incredible Hulk are randomly obeying the same laws as our everyday lives, then you can see where some of the identification with those characters is coming from: they might have claws embedded in their flesh or incredible strength (and a rather nifty green skin-tone), but on a very important level, they are prone to the same unspoke social constraints as us.

There is much thinking in the publishing world about how to face up to the digital frontier of social networks and ways we might translate the fictions we already work with, and might work with in the future into digital content. This study of Marvel suggests we should be aware that the social relationships between fictional characters and between readers and those characters might need us to be quite clear about how social structures in both fiction and reality work to make the most of these opportunities.

This could affect the way we structure anything from a Facebook application to a collective fiction endeavour, meaning we don’t necessarily need to fully engineer a social structure, but enabling it to create itself.

By working out how best to facilitate fictional social networks, it might be that whole new universes like Marvels, enduring now for over 70 years, could spring into being.

Their A Million Penguins project, launched with De Montfort University, is based on the ‘Wiki’ mechanism of collective writing which has seen millions of self-appointed editors and contributors produce the endlessly brilliant, and sometimes controversial, Wikipedia. Rather than writing encyclopedia-style entries however, this project is about the collective production of a novel, and it’s certainly an interesting concept.

Novel-writing has historically been one of the least collaborative processes imaginable. Reaching its full expression during the Romantic period’s veneration of the solitary artist hero, it has been from Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy to Pynchon and McCarthy a grand task played out in what Pascal called “the horror of the empty room”. What Penguin have done is turn that on its head, and try to see if opening up the writing of novels to the unknown masses can produce something of value.

Interesting? Absolutely. Unexpected? Fairly, although many less high-profile organisations have dipped their toe into these mysterious waters. But well conceived in this context? The execution so far suggests something is seriously missing: with hundreds of characters and ever-mutating situations, there is some evident will to impose discipline and order, but the building blocks to do it are hard to place.

It is still early in the process, and something brilliant may emerge, but right now it feels like a Thomas Pynchon book gone horribly wrong: the Chaos (theory) of narrative sequences too elaborate to follow bewildering both reader and wannabe writer. I think that’s simply the case because the novel is the very last medium in which the power of collective wisdom that has driven digital culture can operate.

Storytelling has always been intensively collaborative. All myths and religions, which are the backbone of the art, developed out of iterative telling and re-telling of base materials. The Gods started out as men and became legends through long millennia of Chinese whispers. What happens to that iteration of stories is that at some point it reaches stability. That happens through the codification of diverse beginnings, middles and endings into a commonly accepted version of events.

Entire cultures can hang off this version, from the Fall of Troy in Homer, to the Christian version of the Flood myth that’s found virtually everywhere in the ancient world. From this point of stability new revisions can take place, but they tend to become complexly reactive to those sources, rather than simply ignoring them and starting again, as the example of Joyce’s Ulysses in relation to Homer’s Odyssey demonstrates.

This process of iterative storytelling that leads inexorably towards stability is something at the core of the Wikipedia project — but it is impossible at this stage to see how it might be introduced into the Penguin version. The endless writing and rewriting of encyclopedia entries by nameless contributors on Wikipedia tends towards an end-point at which the subjective content of opinion is removed and pure fact remains. Everyone’s heard the stories of people slandered on Wikipedia — what not everyone’s heard is that these are filtered out over time to leave a body of diverse reference materials behind matchless in the history of publishing.

How can that happen in novel-writing though, where there is no “fact” to tend towards? A culture can accept a myth as true, but how can a website audience except an invented story as final without some central voice that says, “it’s finished”, or even “this is what the story will be?”. Wikipedia will never be finished, because the truth is always changing — a story has to stop at some point, sometime.

Could it work? What’s missing from this process is something both the Ancient Greeks, and more recently software development practises have found to be vital: the focus-imposing pressure of competition. Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus come down the pipes of history because they won writing competitions — in a hot-house X-Factor atmosphere of the festivals of Dionysus they competed with others to be the main act. They won because they were the best, and fighting off others made them better. Similarly, one of the best ever uses of the internet is TopCoder, which sets programming tasks for high-value prizes from highly-skilled competitors.

Competition works, and A Million Penguins badly need it. As William C. Taylor and Polly LaBarre lay out in their brilliant Mavericks at Work, the Open Source culture which produced Wikipedia is served very well by the survivalist strategies of the marketplace: the best man or woman wins and produces better work by being placed head to head with others. HarperCollins in the States have profited from this through their Avon Fanlit writing competitions. Simplifying the entry process and raising the stakes for submitters, has argubaly produced work of a higher standard than Penguins bold conceptual effort can match.

It is ironic that Penguin has invested in Wiki culture at this moment, because the inventor of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is currently organising a “publication” that may be amongst the most important to yet emerge from the internet age. Wikipedia itself has always been limited by being a new version of an encyclopedia concept with roots in Diderot and the Enlightenment era. That concept of single articles about single subjects never quite harnesses the full power of the internet in the way that Google and the Search Engines have done. So Jimmy Wales has decided to take on the power of search head on with the Wikia project currently in development. As he has boldly put it:

Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And, it is currently broken.

Why is it broken? It is broken for the same reason that proprietary software is always broken: lack of freedom, lack of community, lack of accountability, lack of transparency. Here, we will change all that

He and those who collaborate with him, will do it through replacing the corporate-controlled algorithms that power Google, Yahoo! and the rest with the power of people-powered information. They aim to increase responsivity, usefulness and confidence in the relevance of results: either grand tasks or just very techy depending on your point of view, but based on definite goals. Maybe it’s not as sexy for us literary types, but if we should laud one project coming out of this culture as changing the definition of what “writing” is, it is this. As a true tale for our times, the rise of Wikia might just be the one most worth hearing as it gets told.