Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 couldn’t be written today.  I’m not sure what temperature a Kindle or a Nook would burn at, but it certainly isn’t 451 degrees (233 degrees centigrade for those enjoying a saner temperature standard).  And burning those neat gizmos wouldn’t really do the trick—you’d really have to go after the whole internet.  I can turn on my laptop or Kindle and download just about any book I care to read, but that book still exists on some server somewhere.  You’d have to destroy them all.

Nevertheless, there are two questions that arise when thinking about today’s digital publishing revolution:  (1) exactly what do we mean by a book nowadays? And (2), will we always need books?  The first question relates to language and storytelling.  The second relates to the possible disappearance of the printed word.  There are many wrinkles and subtleties associated with these questions.  My only expertise in answering relates to my love of the written word.

A good computer game often tells a story.  So does a film or a TV show.  The medium in this case is audiovisual and subtracting the visual component destroys much of the information content.  In Bradbury’s work, books were saved for future generations by old-fashioned storytelling where words described everything—the information content was taken up in the words of our language.  In fact, Bradbury’s protagonists were falling back on the most ancient form of storytelling.  The thoughts on the printed page were transferred into human memory.

In communications theory, we talk about lossy channels.  Bradbury’s characters were trying the best they could to create lossless channels in their transfer of information.  It took training.  But the translation of visual information into words is more likely to be very lossy.  So much of our information nowadays, digitized or not, corresponds to visual information, even 3D information, that it is hard to imagine a future Bradbury writing about a secret society that would preserve it by just using what we are all born with, the human brain.

As a thriller writer, I’m reminded of something that many law enforcement officials know: witnesses are very unreliable.  A friend of mine once took a course offered by his local police department.  The detective giving the course walks in with his brief case, takes out his talk, and closes the briefcase.  A few minutes into the lecture, a figure dashes in, shoots the lecturer, snatches up the briefcase, and runs away.  Pandemonium breaks out.  However, the lecturer gets up, dusts himself off, and tells everyone that only blanks were fired.  He then asks the participants what they saw.

You guessed it.  It was like that game telephone where everyone passes a message around the circle.  By the time it gets back to the originator, it’s completely changed.  Similarly, all the witnesses had different versions of the events.  Some thought the perpetrator was a man, for example, and others a woman (it was a woman detective with her hair stuffed into a baseball cap).  Some got the baseball cap but then they disagreed on the team.  Complex information is difficult for the human mind to process—it’s equally difficult to remember it.

So, in this future post-apocalyptic world, human beings would have to do the best they can to translate the visual through the lossy channel to the printed word and then, if needs be, store it in their memories.  This is probably a daunting task and one apt to be unsuccessful.  Nevertheless, it points out the power of language and the written word.  Yet, we may only need the intermediate step, the step that takes the visual information to book form—still lossy, but once recorded, more permanent.

I say book form because, except for the scenario envisioned by Bradbury, this is the most permanent way to store information, at least for now.  Visitors to Dublin have probably seen the magnificent Book of Kells, a rendering of the four gospels produced by Celtic monks around 800 A.D.  These monks, by the way, were ancient incarnations of Bradbury’s characters.  While Ireland and the rest of Europe were fighting wave upon wave of Viking marauders, these Irish monks saved civilization by copying religious and philosophical texts.

Nevertheless, books are not a very efficient way of storing information.  I’m always amazed that all my blog output over the years, all my manuscripts, and so forth, takes up only a few megabytes on a computer.  Visual content takes up much more, but we do it routinely.  However, in a future apocalyptic world, computers won’t necessarily exist.  I’m not sure human beings will either, but, if they do, they will be glad to have books with them.

That said, let’s leave the post-apocalyptic world and ask the same questions for a future world where human beings and computers will be in almost symbiotic existence (some authors call this “the singularity”—for me, the singularity will be more social than technical).  Will storytelling die?  Will deep sleep hypnosis transfer necessary technical information directly to our brains, precluding the need for manuals?  While the second could happen, I don’t think the second can, unless we give up our humanity.

Human beings are first and foremost storytellers.  We won’t need a manual for running a VCR, for example, unless you’re a museum archivist bent on showing how things worked in the last half of the 20^th century.  Yet we will forever need stories.  Our human history is a story.  Language was probably created for many reasons, but you can bet storytelling was one of them.  I often wonder how many wonderful stories were lost in the moldy corridors of time.

The first books were collections of stories.  The Book of Kells contains the four gospels, the story of Christ.  Gutenberg’s bible propagated the Judeo-Christian story throughout Europe and beyond.  The Koran is the story of the Prophet.  Gradually, learned texts became more common, but the recording of stories has always been with us.  Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Don Quixote, the Thousand and One Arabian Nights…the list of stories goes on and on, and how we love them.

A book might last a long time, like the Book of Kells.  Stories can last forever.  The media doesn’t matter, but we need to record the stories in their proper language.  In that sense, pBook and eBook are excellent words—both, the paper book and the electronic book, represent media in which we can record stories.  The permanence of the media is one thing—storytelling is forever.

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 28th, 2011 at 6:13 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.