I’m writing this as my son and his
partner prepare for the birth of identical twins. What will those two be
reading and writing in twenty years time?
I believe that by 2034 readers will have
forgotten all the strange arguments about what real books were supposed to be
made of.
Who cares for long about the debates over
scrolls versus codex, vinyl versus CD, VHS versus Betamax? What matters in
hindsight is always the quality of the words, music and pictures, what they
were trying to say, who made and watched them, how they were financed and
critiqued.
The twins will grow up expecting stories
on tablets, mobiles and paper books too; stories to touch with moving
illustrations, images triggered by the eye passing over them; transmedia
adventures mingling fantasy lands with the real world; stories you talk to and
which shape themselves differently each time you look at them; stories for
whatever i-gadgets come along – hologrammatical? Multisensory? 3D printer compatible?
Most importantly they’ll need to be critical readers, able to spot quality and
avoid rubbish on whatever new platform it’s delivered.
As a judge for the Bologna Ragazzi
Digital Prize for the past three years, I’ve already seen some beautiful children’s
book apps, inventive and beautifully rendered, and many awful ones too.
Innovation doesn’t guarantee artistic quality.
Will the twins be using the latest
technology to consume another clapped out update of Superman? Probably. Will
great works of literature and other media be preserved and revisited?
Certainly, though it's always hard to predict which will survive the test of
time to be seen as classics – Anna Karenina? Faust? Harry Potter? The Wire…?
The twins will also be enjoying the work
of new artists and storytellers whose genius springs from the affordances of
the media they learn to think and dream with.
Our concept of literature has been shaped
around the book and defined by the limitations of print technology. How many
pages can be glued together, stored and displayed at what unit cost? Now the
text can take whatever shape it likes online, illuminated by digital means.
When my son was a baby I was writing on a
typewriter and posting articles to a newspaper which typeset and printed them
on paper to sell in shops. That once essential production process will be long
gone.
The big change is that we’re all amplified authors now, sharing our
words naturally and digitally, with friends and then a widening circle of
readers via social media, blogging, self publishing and possibly involving
professional intermediaries, for instance publishing companies, but writers won’t
need publishers in the way we once did.
Publishers certainly won’t be able to
define what is or isn’t worthy of being considered ‘real literature’; online everyone
has the right and the ability to share their words for free, but also
responsible for our own quality control. We are nearlywriters, deciding for ourselves when work is cooked enough to
share. The fear readers have of being submerged in a mass of bad writing is a
hangover from the age of print. The web doesn't involve stacks of paper on
groaning shelves. In cyberspace, armed with a good search engine, the reader
can seek out what they want without worrying about the rest.
2014 is the 25th birthday of
the World Wide Web and a time to recognise how revolutionary an invention it was
and is: a virtual place where all can share their words (nearly) for free; fundamentally
a better container for ideas than the printed page. Actually our laptops and digital network had
supplanted print and libraries well before e-books and apps were invented as a
way to sell publishers’ wares online.
And as we’ve come to make and consume
culture on digital devices where text, sound and picture all have their place,
there’s already less need to define what is movie, web, app, i-Hologram or
book. What about the websites we use regularly: do we ever bother to think which
ones are closer to books or TV programmes in format? No. They’re websites.
We don’t require libraries or bookshops
to locate and buy or borrow digital texts. What we will continue to need more
than ever are public places to meet, mingle, think, read and make
together.
Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials
and Society at University College Library and a founder of community hack
spaces, recently proposed on BBC Radio 4 that more important than public libraries
are shared workshops for making things. I believe we need new community spaces
for writers and readers which aren’t defined by their role as storehouses but
as workshops of the imagination.
Readers and writers will expect to be
part of a community, online and off, where they can seek out collaborators and
advisors and friends to help them realise their creative projects and further
their personal studies. These spaces – Unlibraries? Nearlyversities? – will be
flexible, based around the needs of their users as they plan their own journeys
through information and imagination.
Similarly I see major publishing houses being
replaced by smaller production companies providing editorial, design, technical,
legal and marketing skills, but able to tailor their services and business
plans to the requirements of each project. The monoliths of global distribution
such as Google, Apple and Amazon may be inevitable but they must be accountable, transparent - and taxable. These
giant beasts may fall and new ones arise in their place over time; who
predicted twenty years ago that a search engine would become the most powerful
company on Earth? In twenty years time some tiny start up now will be ruling
the corporate world.
We will certainly continue to see
digitised texts being printed out on paper and bound. The paper book is the
souvenir of the reading experience and lately we’ve seen a flowering of
beautiful book design.
We will always want lovely objects around
us that express who are.
I expect breakthroughs in new forms of
giftable literature shortly: like shops selling short runs of pamphlets of new
writing and classic texts, customised for each reader and sold alongside
foodstuffs and ornaments - but always with a code providing access to the
digital text too.
I envisage a future in which a new
literary work begins with a creative idea, a plan for its development defining
what media it should include and what kind of readership it requires with what
level of engagement. From the answers to those questions grows an architecture
for the piece which might end up involving a live event, a transmedia
experience, an app to play with on your i-Whatevernext or, yes, a book printed
on recycled paper.
The big question is whether our
grandchildren will need stories in quite the same way in twenty years time. Today
we’re bombarded with dramatic narratives on TV and film though our lives become
less linear, more connected and virtual. Will we ever lose interest in tales
with beginnings, middles and ends? Will we ever say, “I really don’t care who
did it, whether they fall in love/fight/die.”?
I certainly predict a lot more transmedia
storytelling, narrated across different platforms, building a community of
interest around its characters and themes, incorporating live and online events,
game play elements and active engagement with individual readers. What started
out as little more than a trendy form of viral advertising is growing into a
mature, serious art form. Texts will be
written collaboratively by groups of makers from different artforms setting
their own parameters for how they define the boundaries of their work and terms
of engagement for consuming it.
I see the writer of the future as a
Shaman, making their way through a landscape both real and virtual, creating
magic using whatever elements they need to help us transcend our everyday lives
and go to exciting, challenging and imaginary places.
What will we read these creations on? The
tablet is what those interested in the digital future of the book had really been
waiting for: a pleasurable device with which to curl up in bed and enjoy
literary works that could, if their authors wish, include text alongside sound,
images, video and opportunities to write back to the book too. On the iPad and
its imitators literature can spread its wings and fly up above the confines of
the printed page. Perhaps something better will come along. Perhaps we’ll plug
stories directly into our brains. And perhaps consumers will after all demand a
return to text printed on paper and glued down the side.
I do guarantee that in 2034 there will be
immense nostalgia – not for the book but for whatever device is by then
dropping out of production. People will wax lyrical about its unique qualities
and how the world will be poorer without it, and others will fume about
whatever Big New Thing has been unveiled and how it will brainwash the young
and bring about the death of culture as we know it. But our culture - and our grandchildren - will
be more resilient than that.
- Chris Meade 2014
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