Last of three articles
SQUIRRELED AWAY IN a homely house office in Watertown, Mass., MarkBernstein and Diane Greco--and their company Eastgate Systems--champion the avant-garde cause of experimental storytelling thatsneers at beginning-middle-end narrative.
They incite folks to follow wispy electronic links hither, thitherand yon. Readers ricochet from thread to thread, shuttle back andforth from linear tale to deep background to irrelevant digression.
In fact, as technologies--such as on-demand printing andelectronic reading devices--hustle more and more information intodigital, rather than printed, form, the very notion of reading,writing and the book is mutating.
The question is not when, or if. The question is: What willstorytelling look like in the future?
"This is either the dawn of a new age of writing," says Bernstein,"or the end of Western civilization."
Whatever.
"The future of literature," Bernstein says, "lies on the screen."
"Books," says the soft-spoken Greco, "will become objects ofnostalgia."
Storytelling will never be the same.
As more and more authors stop writing for the physical book--paper leaves bound with cardboard covers--and begin writing forelectronic reading screens, the kinds of histories and biographiesand novels and poems and scripts and plays they produce are changingforever.
And as more and more readers stop reading books that are presentedin static, from-on-high, "Moby-Dick" fashion, more and more storiesare becoming collective enterprises. Collaborations among writers andphotographers and designers and code writers flourish, much likeHollywood. With an added, heretofore impossible element: you.
Your life will be the "book." Your poem will be the poem. Yourrecipes will be the cookbook. Your tips will be the travel guide.Your story will be the story. The readers will become the writers, incollaboration with the author (or authors).
But first, we've got a few more stages that we are going through.
Age of Spiritual Machines
Click on the name of Robert Coover, English professor at BrownUniversity, and you'll discover that he's 68, he's been teaching onand off for more than 35 years and he is the godfather of hypertextfiction.
The best example of contemporary, word-intoxicated hypertext,Coover says modestly, is "Patchwork Girl" by Shelley Jackson, whichwas published in 1995 by Eastgate on a floppy disk. It twists thestory of the Frankenstein monster--Mary Shelley creates it, it fallsin love with her and follows her to America.
Or you can click on other stellar samples of hypertext on theInternet.
You'll find a reading room on the home page of Eastgate Systems(www.eastgate.com) with several examples of "straightforward"hypertext. And these:
* Sunshine '69 (www.sunshine69.com), written by Bobby Rabyd in1996, is billed as the "first interactive novel." You can follow thekooky, convoluted adventures of Sunshine, checking out what's on hermind, in her pockets and other points of interest.
* Cartoonist Scott McCloud uses animation and cartoon images,with minimal words, to tell experimental stories on his site(www.scottmccloud.com).
* Ray Kurzweil, author of "The Age of Spiritual Machines: WhenComputers Exceed Human Intelligence" and Internet entrepreneur, hasconstructed an online poetry assistant (www.kurzweilcyberart.com)that uses the computer's interactive capabilities to help you writeverse. You work in one box and the e-assistant works in another onthe same page. The program suggests alliteration, rhymes and theoccasional mot juste.
Even before the great computer deluge, before the Internet, Cooverwas tinkering with nonlinear storytelling, in the tradition ofLaurence Sterne, James Joyce and Salman Rushdie. Coover's storieschallenge the age-old axiom that a good tale moves from Point A toPoint B to Point C. He plays with time and point of view and thestructure of sentences and paragraphs.
The notion of nonlinear storytelling dates all the way back tomedieval manuscripts with marginalia, Coover explains. "They werelike hypertextual documents."
The Bible, he says, is the perfect example of a "not-very-adhered-to story line, in a hypertextual way, one thing linking to another."There are many forward-looking references and echoes of the past inthe Bible.
If you think about it, footnotes, bibliographies and indexes areall forms of hyperlinked materials, which is why people begin readingsome books from the back.
Modern examples of pre-computer hypertext fiction include"Hopscotch" by Julio Cortazar and Milorad Pavic's "Dictionary of theKhazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words," which was published inmale and female editions.
In 1963, Marc Saporta published "Composition No. 1" as a set ofloose pages in a box. Readers were encouraged to shuffle the leaveslike a deck of cards and read them in the order they assumed. InEngland, B.S. Johnson published "The Unfortunates" in 1969, anunbound novel of 27 sections, with only the first and last marked.The middle 25 were to be read in random fashion.
For centuries, Coover says, "people have struggled against theimposition of the line." They have fiddled with backtracking andinterrupting. "Cervantes breaks off the story of 'Don Quixote' andtakes you in different ways."
There is, Coover admits, a certain A-to-B-to-C structure"suggested by the page-turning mechanism" of the book. But beforebooks, oral storytellers wandered here and there, told sub-stories,took the tale in unexpected directions.
"A good joke-teller digresses," Coover says.
"In fact, think of your own life," he adds. "You are living in aparticular instant. Whenever you reflect ahead or behind, this is ahypertextual experience."
Using dandy new electronic devices and the speedy delivery ofwords, images and sounds, storytellers are able to mimic real-as-life mayhem in ways that have never been available. With thecomputer, "we are presented with a multidimensional potential that issomething kind of new," Coover says. "What we are doing is new."
To Coover, parts of the new are unsettling.
Click again and you'll be transported to the December 1999 issueof Yahoo! Internet Life magazine. You'll read Coover pining andopining that there is a new generation of readers being suckled onthe Internet, "trained from primary school on to read and write--andabove all to think--in this new way, and they will be the audiencethat literary artists will seek to reach."
He writes, "New forms will be created, are being created as Iwrite. Hypertextuality, multimedia, text animation, computer games,virtual reality, streaming sound and video, etc. have already had amassive impact on electronic literature, and this will continue at anundoubtedly accelerated pace.
"There is a voracious appetite among the present generation ofreaders for lots of bells and whistles, and the numbing variety ofnew tools required to produce these hypermedia artifacts encouragesmore collaboration, as writers join together to create works withdesigners, composers, graphic artists, filmmakers and other writers."
Of course it's changing the nature of writing. But as the dayarrives when the ideas in a book are no longer inextricablyintertwined with the experience of turning pages, what is this doingto the experience of reading? Is it saving us time or slaying ourattention span? Is it turning Gutenberg's revolution into a quaintblip on the time line? Is it leading us down the primrose.com path?Is it enriching our lives immeasurably? Or is it making us impatientwith the deep, quiet, resonating buzz-on we get from immersing ourimaginations in an author's carefully laid-out tale?
Is it changing the way we reason and, indeed, the very way inwhich our brains and the brains of our children's children are beingwired? What is happening to us as a literate species?
Actively multi-absorbing this very article on the Web--withaccompanying images and sounds and theoretically endless hyperlinks--is a profoundly different experience from reading it meditatively inink on dead trees.
The result is a brave new world that even Aldous Huxley couldn'tenvision in his paper product of the same name.
In the out-front genre of hypertext creation, Coover says, twoschools have emerged--those whose writers quaintly continue to tellstories with words and those that are turning away from them in favorof images, sounds and sensory surprises.
There is, among young writers, "a great fascination with all thenew hypermedia possibilities," Coover says. "Stories are image-driven, less traditional--if you can call something 10 years old atradition--than the kind of stories I write."
It's entirely possible that images could replace words altogetherin the electronic world. "There is a risk of that," Coover says. Buthe doesn't like to entertain the notion. "Language is more precisethan image, easier to reflect upon itself. I wouldn't like to losethat self-critical mode. Nevertheless, writing itself was atechnology, invented by Sumerians for a purpose."
Coover believes that something is lost when words take a back seatto images. He appreciates the way that one reads a word, thinks aboutit, applies his own life experience to it, then reacts to it in thecontext of the storyteller's tale. "For me, there are more checksagainst mere seduction when words are used, and an opportunity toengage my imagination."
Computer-Told Tales
Tapping machines to enhance storytelling fascinates JustineCassell.
"Interactive narrative was discovered around the campfire" eonsago, says Cassell. With long frizzy brown hair, turquoise jewelry,librarian's glasses, Cassell looks for all the world like a graduatestudent in psychology and linguistics, which she once was. Now she'sthe head honcho of the Narrative and Gesture Language division of themuch-ballyhooed Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology.
Her office is a hodgepodge of Barbie dolls and other toys. Zoobtubes hide computer cables. On the door and the wall are photos ofpeople gesturing--Al Gore, William Weld, John Kerry--and a newspaperarticle saying that Southern accents are the sexiest. Cassell iscaught up in human communication and what makes us tick and whatticks us off.
"The death of storytelling is not a necessary outcome ofcomputers," she says. In fact, Cassell says that people have beenbemoaning the effect of any new technology on communication from dayone.
A deconstructionist at heart, Cassell--with help from her students--has broken down the narrative form "frame by frame."
Sitting in her office, she squeezes a purple Koosh ball. Nearbyher dog, Esme, sleeps regally on a sofa. She says she doesn't believein "good narrative or bad narrative" when it comes to storytelling.Nor does she believe in so-called "interactive fiction" that pretendsto allow everyday people to engage in the storytelling process, whenin fact, all it allows is the choice between Path A and Path B in apre-written story.
Cassell believes in the use of narrative as self-expression.
Everybody has a story to tell.
And with the Internet, everybody will be able to tell that story.Readers can add to it and subtract from it. And make the story theirown. And pass it on and so on and so on.
The book--not by committee, but by community. By a group of like-minded people. Beehive storytelling.
Through our own storytelling, Cassell insists, we learn more aboutwho we are. "Telling tales has always been the primary way we tellabout and discover who we are."
Children especially should be encouraged to spin yarns, playimaginative roles, indulge in fantasy, she believes. "Do we want togive all that over to Disney?" she asks.
Rather than be simple output pads, Cassell says, the true books ofthe future will also allow input. The book of the future will not be"the received book."
She contends that we're at a crossroads. There's the good path andthe bad path. "The good path exploits the promise of digitaltechnology as a truly bidirectional medium," she says. "The bad pathviews the Internet as a vast encyclopedia."
Or a highfalutin home shopping network. You can imagine themoneymaking opportunities of linking stores to stories. While readingabout Tom Sawyer's friends whitewashing a fence, you could click onthe word "paint" and be whisked to the Sherwin-Williams home page. Orwhile following the commercially sponsored adventures of Jim Hawkinsin "Treasure Island," you could undertake a hyperlink treasure huntof your own and maybe win $1 million.
Throughout the Media Lab, scientists are pushing thepossibilities. In one wing, researchers study the end of lineartechniques in movies. Holding up Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" as anearly version of multi-threaded cinema, students study ways formoviegoers to use computers to create many variations of the samefilm.
In the lab near Cassell's office, research assistants and PhDcandidates toil away on tools that will allow people to tell theirown stories. The Reflectory, for instance, is an art-book-sizeinteractive--and linked--diary. It works like this: A kid inWashington keeps a diary of current events. Keywords automaticallytrigger pop-up info pages. If the kid is writing about "rising gasprices," for instance, a box about the OPEC cartel might appear.Simultaneously, the Washington diarist can connect with journalkeepers from other cities or countries. The result is multimediagrouplit.
Cassell says she is exploring "shared reality," not "virtualreality."
So she introduces me to Sam.
To Cassell, Sam is a "multi-modal communicative agent"--a life-size, big-screen playmate to share reality with a real live child. Toothers, Sam is perhaps the world's most obnoxious virtual kid.
Sam is in the expanding tradition of online avatars, such asshopping robots, and more familiar toys like Chatty Cathy dolls,which begat Teddy Ruxpin creatures, which begat Furbys--you dosomething to them, they do something back.
With the help of first-year PhD candidate Kimiko Ryokai, I beginmy interactive storytelling. This is my book, right?
In a blue T-shirt and overalls, Sam is a bug-eyed, brown-pigtailed animated character projected on a huge multi-panel screenbehind a regular old three-dimensional table. On the table is a three-story plastic castle with balconies and staircases and a glisteninglittle chandelier. Sam "stands" behind the open-air castle; I standin front, on two sensor pads that send signals to the computer thatis Sam. She is also supposed to respond to my voice.
"Put the toy in the Magic Tower," Sam says, "so I can tell you astory."
But wait a sec, Sam. I want to tell my story.
Oh, well, I stick the little toy king into a compartment at thetop of the pink and purple castle. Sam begins to tell her story in awhiny, grating voice. I reach in and grab the king. "Hey, it was myturn!" she cries.
Ryokai, who is eminently polite, apologizes for Sam's rudimentarynature (accent on the rude). The computerized figure is in earlydevelopment. But the purpose is to encourage kids to tell stories andSam is just trying to be helpful.
Strange, really, that Sam responds to my words and has stories ofher own to tell.
But even stranger: She responds to the movement of my feet and, inthe near future, she will react to my hand gestures.
The Dying Paragraph
You don't need words, says Keith Devlin, a dapperly dressed Britwho pronounces the word "words" as "weirds." Devlin is the dean ofscience at St. Mary's College of California and a senior researcherat Stanford. He has written a passel of books on numbers andlanguage. "You can tell a good story with images and music."
And gestures. "The face conveys everything."
Devlin, 53, is in Washington for a scientific convention. I'minterested in talking to him because he believes that the human brainis changing and that words may be becoming less important to us.
He thinks the paragraph.
Is dying.
He posted this observation on a Web site: "We may be moving towarda generation that is cognitively unable to acquire informationefficiently by reading a paragraph. They can read words and sentences--such as bits of text you find on a graphical display on a Web page--but they are not equipped to assimilate structured information thatrequires a paragraph to get across. . . .
"Half a century after the dawn of the television age, and a decadeinto the Internet, it's perhaps not surprising that the medium foracquiring information that [a large number of 10,000 college studentssurveyed] find most natural is visual nonverbal: pictures, video,illustrations and diagrams."
We could be entering an era, Devlin says, when words are used lessand less to tell stories. Logos and graphs and glyphs and images andsounds are used more and more.
In the August 1999 issue of Conservation Biology, David W. Orr, aprofessor at Oberlin College, wrote that the human vocabulary isshrinking. By one reckoning, he observed, the working vocabulary of14-year-olds in America has plummeted from 25,000 words in 1950 to10,000 words today.
"There has been a precipitous decline in language facility," saysOrr. "This is nothing less than a cultural disaster. Language is whatmakes us human."
He added in his article that in the second half of the 20thcentury "the average person has come to recognize over 1,000corporate logos but can now recognize fewer than 10 plants andanimals native to his or her locality. That fact says a great dealabout why the decline in working vocabulary has gone unnoticed: Feware paying attention."
"Man was around for 3 million years before developing language,"says Keith Devlin. "We've had language for only the past 100,000years. And writing for about 6,000 years. Language may be anaberration" in the human time line.
Convinced of the power of interactive storytelling, Devlin helpeddevelop an electronic companion to calculus. He used interactivity asa teaching tool to pull the student along. "We were really designinginteractive theater."
The classic textbook probably will die, Devlin says. "There willbe a suite of materials available to the student." Students willchoose, and interact with, course material.
"I was used to teaching math serially," Devlin says. But theelectronic companion was designed to teach students who grew up on[Game Boy].
"We engaged them in interactivity. It's very powerful. The user isin the driver's seat. It's the opposite of the normal way ofteaching."
Devlin, like Coover, is troubled by the trends. He has a sensethat the old "text world" is disappearing.
As we talk and I tell him of my research, we envision a less wordyworld. Perhaps harking back to ancient times where images, symbolsand gestures ruled, and where words were few and far between, aknowledge-filled illiterate age. The [Nike swoosh] speaks volumes.
"I don't think we can assume there will be a diminution oflearning and communication" if physical books die, Devlin says."Voice-over, sound-over, interaction, you could talk to the text, thetext could respond. I can well imagine doing such a course, withgraphics and text.
"What we're getting is not a dumbing down of the way communicationis taking place," he says, but a metamorphosis.
Maybe there's a Post-Book Literacy in which reading plays asmaller part. The new multimedia literacy will require the quick andsure assimilation of--and response to--fast-flowing images and soundsand sensory assaults. People will be valued for multiprocessing, notfocusing on one page of text after another after another.
"Some really good novels could come out of this," says Devlin."The capability to convey enormous ideas through images is powerful.This is Gutenberg all over again. It's going to happen."
Images and Music
The one and only predictable feature about the future is itsunpredictability.
There will probably always be books as we know them. Few new mediahave ever completely replaced the old. But the new often sucks awaythe power of the old.
Radio coexists with TV. But we do not crowd around the Philco, aswe once did, to hear the president of the United States declare war.
We don't write on clay tablets anymore. We write on keyboards thatcreate twinkling dots. A Declaration of Independence drafted byThomas Jefferson on a word processor would be fundamentally differentfrom the one meticulously crafted--first in his head, then with quillpen on what was then very expensive paper--more than 200 years ago.
It's a new world, all right. We'll see how brave it is. Orcowardly.
I strolled into this story believing that traditional storytelling--beginning, middle, end--would endure and that the word issacrosanct.
Now, months and thousands of words later, I'm not so sure.
Some of the most intriguing post-book storytelling being committedon the Web is crafted with moving images and music and an occasionalsentence or two here or there.
Much of it, such as the work of Alan Dorow, co-publisher ofJournal E in Vienna, is unwitting.
Dorow has posted an online rendition of "Without Sanctuary," apetrifying new collection of photographs and postcards aboutlynching. The physical book is published by Twin Palms. Oddly enough,Dorow's Web production, using the author's voice and slides from thepaper product, is more captivating and the effect more everlastingthan the hardback. (www.journale.com/withoutsanctuary/main.html)
Other multimedia experiments abound on the Internet. You can findthose at the E Compass logo on the home page of Journal E.
On the Journal E Web site, Dorow offers visitors the chance topost their own stories or family photos.
And while experiencing the "Without Sanctuary" story, readers areable to react to the horrific images.
"The presentation has left me without words that can adequatelyexpress my deep innermost feelings," writes one reader/viewer.
Dorow hopes to expand the Forum aspect of other stories on the Website. He is redesigning pages to integrate the intimate and intenseresponses to the presentation right into the screen so that viewersall over the world will be able to respond to the text and the imagesand to the responses of other viewers, thereby becoming part of thestory--changing and shaping and expanding and making more rich thestory.
The reader becomes the storyteller. And vice versa.
It's a book, I say to Dorow.
"I hadn't thought about it," he admits.
But he doesn't have to think long. He gets excited at theprospects. At the peculiar and precarious spot where we are.
The history of storytelling.
Could be its future.
www.washingtonpost.com
Since you are part of this story, you are invited to participatein The Last Book. Log on to Washingtonpost.com. Search for The LastBook icon. There you can join in the telling. What books mean to you.Why you think books will last. Why you think they won't. Isstorytelling dead? Will the image conquer all? Please advise.
ABOUT THE SERIES
Monday
The good news is that we will soon be able to get any book of anyera in any language pumped out to us in minutes. The bad news is thatthis technology may bury books as we know them.
Yesterday
If it has no pages, just a magic tablet that emits sounds, sights,smells and tastes, is a book still a book?
Today
Why do stories have to have words? Why do they have to haveauthors? Who needs beginnings, middles and endings? The future ofstorytelling will be: you.
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