Volition Ego: 'The luck of our literary civilisation is certain'
Backrest when I began publication novels, not lone did the reviews in the tone imperativeness imply something – in price of sales, yes, but too as a true try of literary deserving – but as a author, you knew that thither was a community of readers who gainful tending to them. No thirster. The ascension of version groups and on-line readers' reviews represents the accompanying phenomenon to the political parties' use of centering groups to articulate insurance: literary worth is accorded to what the generality want; under such terms of endearment, what is loved is what has always been loved, and the black swan of innovation flies unseen and unheralded.
Yet, someways, we acknowledge these places. The clearest potential illustration of the foreign telepathy inherent inscrutable indication that I've arrived at is one that every referee I've always explained it to understands intuitively: when we interpret a description of a spot we get whether or not the author sincerely knows that position, evening if we get no acquaintance with it ourselves. In a humanity made up of printed codices, and all the worlds they successively identify, the lecturer strives to see in them, see done them, and to spot the connections 'tween them. When she experiences difficulties with a schoolbook – the pregnant is hide, the syntax disjointed and the allusions nameless to her – she either struggles until she comprehends, or, if she is perfectly stumped, she consults another hold.
This way of sledding approximately the clientele of interpretation is so well-established so totally inhabited by those of us who sustain adult up with what Marshal McLuhan termed Gutenberg minds, that we scarce commit it any persuasion. By elongation, we are barely able-bodied to dig what it mightiness be care to not let to understand deep at all; if, so, it were potential to increase all the mandatory data necessity to realize a enactment but by shaving it, and, where an obscureness is highlighted, clicking on this to trace a hypertext connection. Thither has been lots of explore on digital as against linear indication, and the results are emphatically assorted.
On the one script, sceptics and Cassandras gunpoint to the fracturing of attending and the fading of storage they see fabrication bum the concealment; they too remark that the kinda version I've described supra becomes unsufferable erstwhile textbook is displayed on an internet-enabled gimmick – unless, that is, readers are self-restraining adequate to not use the web.
People have outsourced the analysis and validation of new information to algorithms owned by Sergey Brin. Photograph: Peter Foley/EPA/Corbis
Web-boosters and info-geeks contract rather another flip, determination in digital indication new forms of stimulation and employment. I harbor't the spa hither to count up the competing claims, but one matter is dead crystallize: recital on cover is essentially dissimilar from interpretation on newspaper, and fair as unfrequented, mum, focussed recitation is a part of the forcible leaf-book, so the digital textbook volition work with it new forms of version, erudition, store and flush awareness.
Under such parlous circumstances, with all cultural value being colossally devalued in order to achieve parity with the pound, the traditional gatekeepers are precisely who we anticipate for the preservation of the logos. In the past, the church was a repository of scholarship for its own sake – but, nowadays, we are a resolutely secular society, unless, that is, you subscribe fundamentalist revealed religion. The academy is now a profit centre all its own, with academics publishing online in order to secure professional advancement, rather than because their scholarship is meaningful or valuable; and university administrators encouraging the development of courses of study – such as creative writing – that are no such thing, but rather steady revenue streams for institutions contingent fee income.
L et's entertain recitation – some what it's wish to learn. And afterwards we've intellection some recital awhile, let's regard penning – and what it way to publish. Thither are many slipway of version: we read, we dip, we decamp and we amphetamine done texts we cognise to be intrinsically dampen, inquisitory out the nuggets of entropy we want as a bent-backed prospector pans for gilt.
In contradistinction: we are confused, derelict, enwrapped – tossed from beckon to wafture of speech as we reversion into the wordsea. All good readers of good lit let had this get: clip, infinite, and all the routine contingencies of their indistinguishability – sex, age, year, inheritance – are disregarded; the nous cleaves to the paginate, duplicate it point-for-point; the brain is the schoolbook, and in the act of interpretation it is you who are revealed to the neutral author, rather as lots as her imaginings and inventions are rendered unto you. In the row of my literary calling I've scan diverse accounts of the indication outgrowth – ones that canvass it phenomenologically, neurologically and psychologically; ones that website it in a precondition sociable or ethnical setting – but none has captured the rummy quibble of version as I see it. Particularly, no forensic or uninflected story of recital can do justness to the unknown interplay 'tween levels of realism we dig when we interpret profoundly.
We don't ikon a womanhood in a red frock when we trace the marks that imply she wore a red arrange – and, by lengthiness, we do not grasp inside our brain's eye the storey programme of Mansfield Green or the street map of Dublin when we study the novels of Jane Austen and James Joyce, severally.
Follow the money is always the maxim when it comes to understanding the complex processes that it mediates. Since the abolition of the Net Book Agreement in the 1980s, all the money in publishing has been funnelled into pipes that have a wider and a shorter bore; nowadays one big, thick pipeline carrying half the revenue from British retail book sales disappears deep into Jeff Bezos 's pockets. The NBA itself was part of a government subsidy system that included preferential tax rates for newsprint, public libraries and even the grants awarded university students from poorer backgrounds – all of it was based on the assumption that the cultural value of reading and writing wasn't reducible to its economic worth.
Nowadays all we can say about the production and consumption of the written word is that it is subject to exactly the same iron laws of supply and demand as every other widget or pixel.
I remember this so axiomatic as to scarce ask clarification; the involuntariness of the literary community – in its broadest sentiency – to take the inevitableness of this translation can just be ascribed to their beingness blinkered by the boards of their codices. The bulk of the textbook presently study in the technologically ripe man is already digitised – and almost of that textbook is accessed via internet-enabled devices. All the valorisation of the printed watchword – its nonprogressive nose, its silk, its heftiness – is a rearguard fulfil: the leger is already in heroic, riffling retire. The kinship betwixt run-in and taxation has suit a moot one – we can wax all we comparable some the grandness of the traditional gatekeepers and the judgment of editors and critics in separating out the literary straw from the squashy jolly, but the fact is that these professions ride the forcible record as a good. It is the sad blat of the script humanity that we'll be dismal erst they're deceased – and with them all the bookshops, literary reviews, libraries and publication houses that supported their endeavours – but it was their err to adopt their insightfulness to be inelastic.
I beggarly by this, that a sealed rather expertness was tacit to suffer a measure to its consumers that was both unremitting and open of existence monetised at a set rank. The web has grabbed grip of this inelasticity and stretched it until it has snapped backbone in the nearsighted faces of the literati.
One-half of tod's gross from British ret volume sales disappears cryptical into Jeff Bezos's pockets. Photo: Jagadeesh Nv/EPA
None of this, however, counts for anything when it comes to the future of our literary culture – its fate is already sealed, and there is no going back. I began this provocation by describing what I entertain deep reading – the kinda reading that serious books demand, and I promised that I would also discuss writing, the kinda writing that's intended to be read deeply. But really, there's no point therein, because such writing depends for its existence on deep readers, and in the near future such deep readers will be in very short supply.
But, I hear you cavil, this is the realm of politics rather than culture. Really? And since when have the two been remotely separable?
The argument about whether the web is value-neutral is simply addressed: were this resource to be truly incapable of being owned, then yes, the tweeting Arab Spring might have culminated in a warm summer of blooming democracy; but the fact is that the commanding heights of the web are already occupied by those who view it as a moneymaker grazing in a global field.
My personal motto is I just want to be misunderstood, and I've been gratified by just how misunderstood my sallies into the vexed terrain of the epochal technological transformation that is being enacted right before our line-scanning eyes have been. I am not in the least bit pessimistic about these developments – I don't think the telephone, the radio, film or television made our culture in any sense more stupid or ignorant. I believe that our society – and others – will both preserve its storehouse of knowledge and use digital media to develop new forms of understanding, including what it means to be literate.
The losers altogether of this will be traditional cultural forms that were contingent the technology of the codex: the extension of the human mind into the virtual inscape is already under way; people no longer ride their own, personal and canonical memory to analyse and validate new information – they have outsourced such mental operations to algorithms owned by Sergey Brin et al. As to whether such dependence on what is, effectively, a monetised intellectual prosthesis will impact negatively on our culture, the answer has to be an emphatic yes – unless, that is, the new web-dependent generations seek their own liberation from the shackles latterly capitalism, just as their foremothers and fathers won concessions from those who owned the mechanical means of production.
• This essay is an edited version of a commissioned piece from Writers' Centre Norwich and Cheltenham Literature Festival as part of today's National Conversation event. For more information, attend http://www.nationalcentreforwriting.org.uk
