Warhol before he was Warhol.
Hmmm... I'm not so sure this is the "right" approach to SU. Stumble away as you will, but "efficient" stumbling seems counter-intuitive!
YA authors write letters to their teen selves.
Derek Powazek's {Fray} has been publishing short non-fiction stories since 1996. Each story has an opening for readers to publish similar stories.
Here's one on SMOKING.
Since 1994, The Plaintext Payers have improvised dramas based on loosely prepared scenarios in text-based environments such as MOOs. The transcripts archived from these online improvisations are ripe with varieties of authorship-bending; some recall the explorations of Modernist playwrights such as Luigi Piradello or Tom Stoppard, whose actors self-consciously meditate on their role as actors; others have little or no precedent in offline theater, as when actors pick up each other's characters interchangeably.
(from a review by Jon Ippolito)
Excerpt:
Digital.Director says, "And now, without further or future ado: Today we are telling the story of Orpheus, the musician who went to hell to get his wife back after she was bitten by a snake."
Zeus drinks another cup of coffee.
Digital.Director says, ""Only the details are being changed to protect the innocent. There will be no snake today. In place of the snake..."
Orpheus says, "No snake? What do you mean, no snake?"
Digital.Director says, "What I said, no snake."
Orpheus exclaims, "Come on-- I wanted to play the snake! Why do I always have to play the dork? The complete idiot? The sucker?"
Is Dora the Explorer driving you up the wall? Are you sick of The Little Mermaid?
Then this list is for you: foreign films for kids aged 8 to 12.
Most people who read a lot also read to satisfy a wide spectrum of moods and hankerings, and sometimes trash (provided it's sufficiently engaging) is just the ticket.
...
Until recently, hardly anyone considered why some readers might actually prefer cliches to finely crafted literary prose. A rare critic who pondered this mystery was C.S. Lewis, who -- in a wonderful little book titled "An Experiment in Criticism" -- devoted considerable attention to the appeal of bad writing for what he termed the "unliterary" reader. Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original:
"because it is immediately recognizable. 'My blood ran cold' is a hieroglyph of fear. Any attempt, such as a great writer might make, to render this fear concrete in its full particularity, is doubly a chokepear to the unliterary reader. For it offers him what he doesn't want, and offers it only on the condition of his giving to the words a kind and degree of attention which he does not intend to give. It is like trying to sell him something he has no use for at a price he does not wish to pay."
Google's massive trove of scanned books could be useful for researchers studying the evolution of culture.