So we’re back from our extended Thanksgiving holiday, and I want to pick up where I left off thinking about some of the insights I’m drawing (or at least attempting to draw) from Erik Davis’s outstanding work, Techgnosis.
Last time, I left you with a quote from Davis in which he posited the notion that technology changes not only the way in which we interact with the world, but by opening new vistas of imaginative possibility, it also truncates old ways of relating to the external world. Davis’s primary illustration is the historic decline of memory as a biological tool for ordering knowledge. Once writing emerged as a viable technology, memory (and specifically, oral memory) became less necessary. Information could be stored in a more reliable and durable form with less work, and as a result, like an atrophied muscle, the techniques developed for fostering a strong oral memory vanished over time.
Memory became, in essence, an outmoded technology, as obsolete as FORTRAN.
With the emergence of written language, the paradigm in storytelling shifted. Once upon a time, storytelling served the purpose of transmitting essential mythic or historical data from one generation to the next. It can be argued that the dearth of whimsy (here defined as stories with no purpose but to entertain) in early storytelling was directly related to the problem of finite data storage. Human memory can only store and retrieve so much information reliably.
The technology of writing radically expanded the data reservoir, and the subsequent invention of the printing press constituted yet another geometric explosion of data storage potential.
It’s significant here to note that the first application of writing technology was transcribing oral histories into text (ref., the Torah, the Epic of Gilgamesh, etc.).
The first application of the Gutenberg press was the widespread printing and distribution of the Bible.
What does that mean? Initially, new technologies emerge as tools to manipulate old ideas. Gutenberg did not foresee the Protestant Reformation as a direct result of placing low cost, ubiquitous copies of the Bible into the hands of laymen any more than the first scribes viewed writing as the death knell for familial tribalism.
The point here is that a change in technology enables different types of storytelling because it either enlarges the potential data set for information storage or it places the creation and/or dissemination of information into the hands of new users. (Which isn’t always a smooth transition. See Sir Phillip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy for an old debate on what kind of stories should or shouldn’t be written when the sluice gates on writing and publishing first began to open. Yes, that was 1595.)
Many millions of bytes have been spilt discussing the democratization of the internet. Anyone and everyone with a PC now has the ability to communicate anything and everything with the entire wired world. We all know this.
What we’re all learning, with varying degrees of success, is that one of the side-effects of the internet is a diminished attention span. Earlier, we discussed some old rules on writing for the internet based on studies of how internet readers read. What that means is that writers have less time to grab a reader’s attention and convince him/her to make an investment.
The idea of blogging a novel in the old form — that is to say, a novel written with the underlying assumption that it would be read on paper within the scope of traditional the traditional storytelling agreement and set of expectation from the reader — may actually represent a Gutenberg Bible of sorts. In other words, it may be an artifact of an outmoded technology merely mashed up to fit the new paradigm (specifically in this case, serialization).
Tomorrow, I want to look at one of the first successful blognovels, plan b, and try to tease out what the writer did right, and what that might mean for how novels in the digital age need to work in order to attract readers.
And, of course, we’ve only begun to mine Techgnosis, so there’ll be more of that, too.
Your Davis quote for the day:
New technologies of perception and communication open up new spaces, and these spaces are always mapped, on one level or another, through the imagination.
D.
Filed under: Blooks and Blognovel Analysis
