Ooh! Back in early February this year I frantically wrote the abstract for my AoIR paper. I wanted to call the phenomenon I was writing about distributed narrative, so I googled the term and found that nobody had used it. I mean there were sentences like “We published a nationally distributed narrative about…” but the two words weren’t used as a descriptive phrase.

Google it now and there are over a thousand usages, most using it the way I meant it! Some of these are references to my talk, but many seem just to be used matter-of-factly with no reference as though one should simply understand.

There’s something rather fascinating about how a term can grow. I bet I had something to do with it, but quite possibly I simply happened to use a combination of words that was sort of ready to emerge from the primordial soup of our brains. Perhaps I’d even heard the term somewhere – I couldn’t find it on Google, but it might have slipped into my mind from somewhere.

And then of course, 1000 references in Google isn’t that much – unless it’s for a weird term that didn’t even exist eight months ago 🙂