Everything Bad is Good For You

With the difficulty in modern literature finding an audience, it is no wonder that classic literature is having an even more difficult time connecting with readers. Results from marketing research performed by Orion Group publishing were “near-unanimous” in revealing that people thought classic literature to be “long, slow and repetitive” and “many respondents admitted to having an interest in the stories when they had come upon them in another way, like watching a TV adaptation or film that brought alive the story and characters.”

This lead to Orion to consider publishing condensed versions of classic literature:

“Literally, life is too short. Once you get to a certain place in your life, you realize that there is a finite number of books you’re going to be able to read,” [Malcom] Edwards [of Orion] says. He admits to “bouncing off” Moby Dick several times, even though the whaling, the quest and the biblical aspects of the book all sound appealing. Would he have had more success with a shorter, snappier version?

The condensing of classic literature can be seen as a beginning. How long will it be until modern literature is viewed as being slow or repetitive? Already English teachers are using film at some point “as a replacement for a long text, or as a supplement to a written text or thematic unit.” How long before teachers exclusively use movies as an alternative experience of the text, especially when taking into account the finite amount of classes and the seemingly infinite amount of available material? How long before the idea of the text becomes just as important – if not more – as the text itself?

Whether it is the weekly scanning of new comic books for torrent users to download or the re-typing of long novels into unformatted text files or Google scanning and digitizing millions of books from various libraries globally for electronic use, as more and more printed texts become digitalized, text becomes more of an abstraction, evolving something that is barely tangible except for its ability to be held in your hand on paper into something even more intangible. Andrew Herkovic – a Stanford librarian working with Google – considers the aforementioned project to be “one of the great milestones in the shift of our culture from paper-based to electronic.”

With this kind of initiative, it is easy to imagine a generation who will not view J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as seven books or thousands of pages worth of story, but 10MB worth of data.

It is no longer about reading print, instead it is about reading with the option to print.

But notice the common verb: reading. Even as the line between print and digitized text blurs, and despite what publishers would have you believe, people are still reading. Readers have simply relocated for more exceptional and less time consuming experiences. Or as Steven Johnson explains in his book Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making us Smarter:

If our mental appetites draw us toward more complexity and not less, why do so many studies show that we’re reading fewer books than we used to? …Isn’t that a sign of our brains gravitating to lesser forms? I believe the answer is no…most studies of reading ignore the huge explosion of reading (not to mention writing) that has happened thanks to the rise of the Internet. Millions of people spend much of their day staring at words on a screen: browsing the Web, reading e-mail, chatting with friends, posting a new entry to one of those 8 million blogs. E-mail conversations of Web-based analyses of [reality shows] are not the same as literary novels, of course, but they are equally text driven.

Johnson continues by adding, “…yes, we’re spending less time reading literary fiction, but that’s because we’re spending less time doing everything we used to do before,” and thus, bringing us right back to that pesky issue with time.

One can choose a week or more to read through J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books or spend roughly 10 hours watching the movies. This is an example of narrative compression – providing a satisfying narrative experience within the shortest period of time possible without sacrificing any of its complexity. Considering the daunting nature of Tolkien’s books, as well as the amount of time needed to read them, it is no wonder many people find more satisfaction in watching the movies. The same can be said for those who download the individual songs they enjoy rather than the complete albums they do not, or those who TiVo their “live” television programs to fast-forward through the commercials, or who read spoilers of their favorite movies to determine whether they will watch the movie or not.

Warren Ellis

All of the aforementioned examples are symptoms of what Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein, calls “burst culture”. On his subscription email service Bad Signal, Ellis wrote about the variances in print and web texts – seeing them not as a blurring of mediums but as a schism:

I love print. I love magazines that commit and pay for long articles and long fiction. The web rewards neither approach. It’s a packeted medium, a surf medium. Short bursts are the way to go. The web isn’t a replacement medium — it’s another medium. That said, if your concept of a magazine is something designed in one-page bursts, or three pages that only carry 500 words due to the mass of images, then, really, you’re not doing anything the web can’t do better, are you? Every day, millions of people download single lumps of data that take them three minutes to consume. They’re called mp3s. It’s a burst culture. Embrace the idea for a while. Bursts aren’t contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span.

The idea of a burst culture can be both fascinating and frightening depending on which medium you prefer to read from. Writers like Chuck Palahniuk, author of such books as Fight Club and Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey, have been aware of such a culture for quite some time:

When I started writing, I said my goal was to bring people back to reading, people who had given up on reading. So I wrote for people who didn’t read at that point. Today, you have to write books that can compete against video games and music videos and professional wrestling and all the other things people can do with their time. And those people want plot. People don’t want stasis and description. They want the plot to move, they want lots of verbs. You know, verbs on top of verbs.

Watchmen

However, it will take more than an abundance of verbs to get the burst culture picking up books, as writers like Alan Moore, author of the genre defining graphic novel Watchmen, who understood as far back as 1985 that comic books had to provide an experience that could not be obtained in film:

Well, I think to differ upon the filming techniques in comics such as Watchmen. I’ll certainly say that a comic book artist or writer who understands cinematic storytelling is going to be an awful lot better than one who doesn’t. But if at the end of the day you only see comics in cinematic terms then the best that a comic can ever be is a film that doesn’t move. I mean, with Watchmen, what we were trying to do was things that you actually couldn’t do in cinema. It was trying to think of things that could only be accomplished in comics…the incredible amount of detail in every panel that if this was just in a film background being [shown] at 24 frames a second…with the best director in the world, inevitably the audience are going miss most of it.

Ironically, Moore’s Watchmen is currently being turned into a Warner Brothers film by director Zack Snyder for a 2009 release, and one of the most consistent vocal concerns from fans has been just how many changes will be made as they want the experience of reading the book to be translated onscreen as exact as possible.

This is TOO SOON.

Tags: Alan Moore, Bad Signal, Burst Culture, Christian A. Dumais, Chuck Palahniuk, Crooked Little Vein, Everything Bad is Good for You, Fight Club, Google, Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien, print, Rant, Steven Johnson, The Lord of the Rings, Too Soon, Transmetropolitan, Warren Ellis, Zack Snyder

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Movies, Too Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.