I was struck this past weekend by the development of a double-screen laptop, as reported by a BBC tech reporter (and with a nod to Smart Mobs). Casting aside the energy and environmental concerns of such devices, it seems like as good a chance as any to explore how and what we will read in the near to immediate future.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this ??? more than usual, which, I concede is already probably too often ??? because of a book I’m reading by an ebook maven named Jeff Gomez, darkly titled Print is Dead.
The book is subtitled “Books in the digital age,” but I get the feeling Gomez wanted to subtitle it, “Oh the possibilities!!” Gomez subscribes to the notion that books are more or less mere boxes, into which writers put their knowledge. The form of the box can change; it can even become digital. It’s the knowledge that’s important. The current printed form and shape “is a concession to the marketplace,” as he puts it.
As double-screen laptops demonstrate, the marketplace is always subject to flux and innovation, particularly technological and digital markets ??? and even more so when the economic sands are violently shifting beneath our feet, as they surely will during the next year or two.
Granted, there’s a significant difference between work and reading. At work, the benefits of double (or triple ??? or, perhance to dream, quadruple!) screens are manifest. I just orchestrated a new double-screen display in my cubicle, and I can’t overstate the benefits. I move through email twice as fast, I effortlessly toggle between applications. So long as workers like me find benefit in multiple screens and other digital technologies, then the market will probably continue to supply them.
The joy of a double-screened work station doesn’t necessarily equate to a pleasant experience on a double-screened laptop, netbook, or laptop. The experiences are different, but the markets overlap. In other words, the market will probably give us these devices anyway, and we may choose to read literature on them.
So maybe we shouldn’t spend as much time asking which technologies readers will embrace ??? “Will we ever love the e-book?” or “Will we read magazines on our phones?” — as which technologies artists will employ to better transmit their work. If a writer knows that she could display her words digitally, and hyperlink the footnotes to appear in a Kindle’s second screen (for instance), or if the next generation’s Kurt Vonnegut knew he could insert animation into the text instead of line doodles, then couldn’t that push forward the art? Imagine a poem written with a specific musical harmony intended to play in the background. Or a novel with different narrative threads intended to display on side-by-side screens at different junctures in the story.
Gomez is not entirely right: form and content are not so independent of each other. The limitations of the former can in fact provoke astonishing artistry in the latter. (Don’t believe me? Check out Anna Karenina in a sestina!) Form inspires the artist at least as much as it seemingly constrains him.
One caveat, however, to exploding current forms with new technologies. Technodeterminism may be, as a professor once told me, a bunch of hooey. It does not necessarily follow that technology will always and unabashedly set creativity free in whole new directions.
It is fun to speculate, though.