Book and Power Book: Writing and Technology
Contribution to the panel discussion
International Writing Program, University of Iowa, 9.9.98
Thirty years ago I began using computers for writing. I was a
Electronics and Computer Engineer and I used an editor program
to write and edit program text. I could have used it also for
writing my first short stories but in those days nobody considered
the computer an appropriate tool for working on texts or for communication.
Computers were looked on as complex calculating machines. Even
science fiction writers couldn’t imagine in which direction technology
would progress. With the exception of George Orwell who describes
in his famous novel 1984 an electronic system used to survey the privacy of people. He
predicted also a machine to write and print out novels automatically.
Thirty years ago I used a pencil and my father’s old typewriter
to write my first texts. My writing tools were cheap and simple.
Today I need an expensive and powerful data processing system
to write, edit and correct my texts. On the same system I make
the layout for books and magazines and send the documents over
the network to printers and publishers. I also publish on line
on the Internet (www.zopfi.ch). As a journalist I use the net
for research and for everyday’s communication.
On one hand I’m more independent than thirty years ago because
the computer has greatly increased the power and the versatility
of my working tools. I live in a mountain village but I can do
my job as if the library, the post office and my editor were next
door. On the other hand I depend totally on a complex and expensive
technical system. Sometimes I feel more like a computer technician
than a writer, I waste my time installing new software, repairing
cables and testing modems. And I spend a lot of money for technology
which is today’s top and tomorrow’s scrap.
Fifteen years ago I bought my first Personal Computer with a text
processor. Some years later I tried to sum up how writing on the
computer has influenced my style: «The tool alters the product,
a banal observation in connection with hammers and files but comparatively
unusual when applied to writing. Do texts tend to improve or suffer
as a result of computers? That is the question.»
«When John Steinbeck wrote East of Eden, he kept a log of the writing process. In The Journal of a Novel he describes the way he cultivated the work with pencils, checking
the hardness of the leads, sharpening them until the writing tool
felt right in his hand. Depending on his mood he changed pencils,
occasionally using extra-soft ones because of the particular sensitivity
they require.»
«Whether the keyboard allows particular sensitivity is doubtful,
that it affects one’s mood is indisputable. Clearly a keyboard
can never afford the same flow as the free and easy movement of
a pen or pencil. Hitting the keys uses different muscles, the
brain and thought processes are stimulated differently. The function
of motor activity is one of the great unknowns of the creative
process. What is certain is that movement, thinking and feeling
are closely linked. As closely as tool and product.»
«The computer is undoubtedly a perfect tool for word-processing
and text layout. But all advantages are thrown away if a first
draft is careless. Too much editing smoothes down the rough edges
of any text, making it bare and boring.»
«Copying is the greatest danger. Instead of writing a passage
anew, which also means re-experiencing it, reliving it, the author
simply retrieves it from somewhere, copies it in and polishes
it up. Emphasis is shifting from creation to production. Works
are constructed, built, patched, instead of dreamt, heard, seen.»
(From The Tool is the Style in The Colour of the Black Mountains, Moonstone Press, London ON, Canada).
When I wrote this text ten years ago I hadn’t had yet the experience
of Internet. Nobody imagined that we would soon have such a powerful,
easy-to-use and worldwide accessible computer network. But Internet
is more, World Wide Web is the implementation of Hypertext. It
is a new philosophy of text, a new way of reading and writing.
It’s the end of linear text structures.
In fact, no text was ever linear. When we read we follow with
our eyes a linear stream of words but with the eye of our mind
we see moving pictures and our brain spontaneously produces links.
Reading the words «East of Eden» we link the word «Eden» to the
Bible and we associate our picture of the paradise. Hypertext
makes this process («intertextual linking») visible and machine
controlled. The writer sets the links and offers new dimensions
of reading. It may help the reader find an individual way trough
a text or a complex information structure. It may also confuse
him or deprive him from his own associations. Setting links means
also limiting the freedom of associations. The danger is that
reading deteriorates to surfing on the surface of the net.
Hypertext is a challenge for writers like every new media in history
as radio, film and television. Each new media has created new
forms of story-telling. In 1996 I participated in the first Internet
Literary Competition set up in Germany by the magazine Zeit and
IBM. I was one of 170 competitors and it was a hard experience.
Although being once a computer engineer, producing hypertext in
a multimedia environment seemed to me too technical, to close
to the profession I left behind. Today the Internet is a realm
of Hypertext literature, Hypertext magazines, Hypertext novels.
The authors are mostly newcomers often with technical background.
A new generation of writers and a new way of writing are coming
out.
Internet technology is a further step from creating texts in a
flow to constructing texts like software, breaking up linearity,
fragmenting stories, linking pieces together to a network or a
cluster. Literature has always been a mirror of the society and
Internet literature is no exception. It’s the expression of a
fragmented world.
In ten years from now not only our tools and techniques of writing
will have changed dramatically but also the channels of distributing
literature. On-line book shopping is already everday’s business.
The technology labs are working on a new type of book. It will
be the real «PowerBook». It looks like a conventional book, you
can carry it in your pocket, you can open it and you can read
whatever you want. The Bible or The Coran, East of Eden or the Oxford dictionary or the phone book. The pages are made from so called «electronic
paper», endlessly erasable and rewritable. The book is linked
by satellite channels to the Internet. And wherever you are you
can read whatever you like and in whichever language you prefer.
This sort of «PowerBook» could be a powerful tool to distribute
news and knowledge, art and literature all over the world. But
there are questions.
Who controls Internet? Nobody knows it exactly. Is it perhaps
an anonymous Big Brother like in Orwell’s novel?
Who has access? Fifty percent of the world’s population haven’t
yet a telephone and great parts are illiterate.
Who produces the contents? Writers and journalists who are free
to express their opinion, to tell their stories? Or dependents
of governments or the big media companies?
Modern technology means power. The first computers were built
during World War II and used to calculate the atomic bomb. Also
Internet was initially a military project. The danger of modern
technology is, that it broadens the gap between haves and not-haves,
between rich and poor, that it gives power to the powerful.