June 15, 2004
The Future of Books
2Blowhards, a consistently excellent site, has a discussion about book expos and the evolving design of books. In it, the author suggests:
FWIW, one reason I usually hold back from conversations about what's a great book and what's not is that all the candidates proposed are usually long prose narratives written to be read straight through. And I'm not convinced that, 80 years hence, many people will be spending much time with these books. I can't imagine why they would be. (By the way, I'm not talking about whether I approve of this or disapprove; I'm an enthusiastic book-reader myself. I'm trying instead to be a responsible forecaster.) Based on current developments, it seems to me very likely that, in a few decades, the reading of long-prose-narratives-meant-to-be-gone-straight-through will have become a very specialized and rare taste.
It's an interesting idea and there's certainly some evidence for it, but I'm skeptical. Anytime someone proposes a tectonic shift in anything as entrenched as narrative form, especially when they're proposing it based on some nascent aspect of technology, they're usually exaggerating. Not purposefully, of course, but our ability to extrapolate trends seems to skew towards extremes. I suppose those are just the easiest to see. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the form of many books shift to a less linear one, but it seems unlikely that will become the dominant form. More likely, it will be absorbed as just another way of writing a book. Popular, perhaps, but not a sea change. Long prose narratives have been with us since the beginning of human culture. The drive to tell and to hear stories is a strong one and unlikely to be erased by fancy design techniques.
However, I'm just talking about fiction in general. I think the point they're making is more for non-fiction, information-based books. In that particular case, if people find that such forms make information easier to access and ideas clearer, then I see no reason why it wouldn't be widely adopted. Few people are interested enough in any given field to read long, narrative-like studies on the subject unless the author is particularly gifted. Of course, since the post also points out the small subset of books that literature and, by extension, fiction comprise, perhaps the claims of a radical shift in the structure of books isn't so far-fetched. Maybe we'll go through a period where a majority of non-fiction works are written that way, then see a gradual tapering off to some equilibrium where that form is just another tool, used only when effective, not the default.
It's not that risky a claim when you realize that the novel as we know it is barely 200 years old. Maybe it's an outlyer, product of a fleeting intersection of prosperity and cultivation that is going away forever.
Mmm.. no. The novel as we know it started with the picaresque novels of the 17th century. So it's more like 400 years old. Even so, the linear, narrative structure is far, far older. How else would you describe the Odyssey or Beowulf? They may not be in prose, but that's the only deviation.
Sorry my dates were off - just firing off something quick before lunch - but I think the point regarding long printed narratives as a still at least somewhat new phenomena in human culture stands. Beowulf and the Oddyssey, at their inception, weren't books, and since that's exactly what's being talked about, they're not really germane examples. They, at the time they were performed and composed, had more in common with today's TV - people sat and listened to them being performed, rather than reading them.
I think that's an important distinction, and it leads into what Micheal is talking about. I don't want to make any grand pronouncements, but there are certainly long cultural trends that would seem to spell at the very least an ongoing decline for 'traditional' books. They're certainly already marginal in terms of their place in the culture as a whole - how often do you hear about a book making the sort of splash you see with a film like "Being John Malkovich", or even a video game like "Grand Theft Auto"? Book people are already a miniscule minority with very little overt pull in the marketplace of ideas.
Of course this comes from a lot of things, but I think technology is a big one - not a single small technology like e-books or anthing like that, but big, pervasive changes like, in particular, television. I'm reading Studs Terkel's Hard Times right now, and it's amazing to read about how voracious the working class in the '20s and '30s were when it came to self-education. Of course, this is a freakish situation - most workers and peasants throughout history simply haven't had that kind of access to information. The same goes, to lesser extent, for all classes - in the 20th century, everyone has access to (far, far) more information than their equivalent parts in the past. But that doesn't necessarily translate into a desire to have that information structured and contextualized
I think this change is a tragedy, but I'm not sure. Long written narratives, whether fiction or non-fiction, often require a lot of mental rigor to process, and (particularly in non-fiction form) are a great way to learn how to think about the world. Breaking that up into shards of related information is not, I think, a valid replacement. Then again, there could be something new there that we can't predict. Perhaps having this information presented in a compelling format will have a larger impact than couching the information in a complex framework/argument.
There are two loud fucking conversations going on in the office right now, I can't think for shit, be gentle.
God, that's not very coherent. Seriously, it's like a zoo in here, sorry.
Mallarme's point, and I wholeheartedly agree, is that whether or not Beowulf & Iliad/Odyssey were performed, they still follow the conventional linear narrative structure (as does, for the most part, the books of the Bible, Bhagavadgita, etc). However far back you want to trace books, linear narrative structure obviously goes back thousands of years. I personally consider it to be ingrained into our brains due to their way of understanding of the world, which though we may not be limited to necessarily, will always comprise the bulk of our experience.