State of the Union – A Closer Look at Two Creative Industries (Part One) by Julia Ingalls
Twitter, with its 140 character limit, could be viewed as a return to structural form in literature, the equivalent of a one-note stanza. Novelist William Gibson, who once wrote a weekly blog on his website, transitioned to Twitter some time ago to express his daily thoughts, as did the bestselling novelist Douglas Coupland, whose 1991 book Generation X not only sandbagged a generation, but redefined what narrative could be in the context of a bestselling book. Gibson’s Twitter posts are often visionary and poetic, while Coupland’s are poignant and intelligent, much like both authors’ longer-form, traditionally published work. The talent does not depend on the medium; the only difference is that these thoughts are being rendered on a platform whose existence is virtual. Should the power go out, or the servers go down, we won’t have a tangible copy of the work.
This, I suppose, would be the argument of the current publishing industry. Hard covers, by their very design, laugh at power outages and battery failure. Once you read a hard cover, you can put it on your bookshelf, use it to prop up an ailing piece of furniture, kill a spider, or even just read it ostentatiously at your neighborhood café to attract the attention of that intelligent-looking fellow at table 9. Most importantly, there’s the reassuring notion that once you buy it, it’s there forever.
An electronic version poses ownership problems. If whatever work you are reading on your Kindle, say, is essentially stored on a company’s master server, who guarantees that those permissions, much like the changing permissions associated with iTunes and its ‘leasing’ agreements, won’t change? Maybe you’ll be able to read War & Peace one day, but you’ll have to ‘renew’ that privilege in the future.
The upshot: Although we are facing the end of mass-produced hard covers, literature will continue. Literature will probably change shape. It may not be pretty. It may not smell very good, or even feel wonderful in your hands. But literature will always remain the fundamental expression of the human experience, even if that experience involves cupping your hand over a battered plastic screen as you attempt to read a few pirated lines of Twitter feed. Go 21st century.
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Forth Writer
Adjustments
“Today was a good day, I blogged a sentence.”
James Joyce
Hawaii 5.0
“E-download’em Danno !”
“I wonder wonder who…
I wonder who..
who uploaded the e-book of love ?”
“Why Johnny Can’t Download.”
“ummm,I don’t have my homework because my dog ate my flashdrive.”
Will a guy who takes illegal bets be called a “lappie”?
I cannot agree with “our entire concept of what makes a great read may itself have changed”. It is nice that Justin now has a book deal but instead of asking “how does one read a book long Twitter feed” the question is rather “why would one want to”? It is one thing to get one of Justin’s Dad crazy statments one at a time, but it would be quite tedious to read, on the page or screen. And Coupland and the others? They had bestselling STORIES, not just random sentences that they blat out at some random schedule to no one in particular. Because of crush and rush of modern urban life the poor guy is reduced to grabbing at a zeigiest that has passed him by and is now entertained by crazy shit Dad’s say.
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