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Jason Pontin Argues that "New Technologies of Composition, Not New Media, Inspire Innovations in Literary Styles and Forms"

10/24/2012

On October 24, 2012, Jason Pontin, editorin chief and publisher of  MIT Technology Review published an essay in that journal entitled "How Authors Write: The technologies of composition not new media, inspire innovations in literary styles and forms."

From this I quote a section:

"At a time when new media are proliferating, it is tempting to imagine that authors, thinking about how their writing will appear on devices such as electronic readers, tablet computers, or smartphones, consciously or unconsciously adapt their prose to the exigencies of publishing platforms. But that’s not what actually happens. One looks in vain for many examples of stories whose style or form has been cleverly adapted to their digital destinations. Stories on e-readers look pretty much as stories have always looked. Even The Atavist, a startup in Brooklyn founded to publish multimedia long-format journalism for tablet computers, does little more than add elements like interactive maps, videos, or photographs to conventional stories. But such elements are editors’ accretions; The Atavist’s authors have not been moved, as Baker was, by the creative possibilities of a new technology. Writers are excited to experimentation not by the media in which their works are published but, rather, by the technologies they use to compose the works.

"There have been odd exceptions, of course. In Tristram Shandy, published from 1759 to 1767, Laurence Sterne employed all the techniques of contemporary printing to remind readers they held a book: there is a black page that mourns the death of a character, a squiggly line drawn by another character as he flourishes his walking stick, and on page 169, volume 3, of the first edition a leaf of paper marbling, a type of decoration that 18th-century bookbinders offered their wealthier clients. With this technology, pigments are suspended upon water or a viscous medium called “size,” creating colorful swirls, and are then transferred to a paper laid by hand upon the liquid. Each copy of the first edition of Tristram Shandy thus included unique marbling; the process was so expensive and time-consuming that later editions printed a monochrome reproduction instead. Sterne, an eccentric and tubercular Anglican priest, badgered his publisher, Dodsley, to include the page (which he called “the motley emblem of my work”) in order to suggest something about the opacity of literary meaning.

"Yet such responses to publishing technologies are rare. Besides the way Baker and Wallace used the “Insert Footnote” function in word processing software, writers have more often found inspiration in typewriting, photocopying, blogging, and, most recently, presentation software such as Microsoft PowerPoint and social media like Twitter." 

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