Electronic Publishing and the Communal Experience

With the technological advances society has seen in recent decades as well as the rise of personal electronic devices, the debate about the reader experience between print publishing and electronic publishing is everywhere. Fundamentally, books (and more specifically novels) are connected to the ancient cultural practice of storytelling. Philosopher Walter Benjamin comments on the breakdown of oral storytelling with the rise of the novel, which was built on the intense experience of the individual versus the previous explicitly group activity. However, the novel allowed for a greater group experience through the mass production of a physical book that united the solitary readers; thus, leading to the observation that just because a story is said aloud doesn’t make it communal and just because it’s written down doesn’t remove it from this tradition.

So, I started thinking about the rise of electronic publishing and the formatting of eBooks, etc. On first thought following the logic of novels being farther reaching than storytelling, material on the internet is even farther reaching to the majority of demographic groups and has easier accessibility than the printed book. Now there’s instant (and often free) access to a vast library of materials from the comfort of your home or office. But it seems that another issue arises in the way in which we can annotate and follow along with others with these texts. A group of people can have the same version of the same text on different devices, such as a laptop, an older kindle, a newer kindle, and a tablet, and the way the sections of text appear can be vastly different. This isn’t too far from everyone having a different publication of a physical book, but it seems easier to find a passage as you’re flipping through a book than endlessly scrolling on your device. Which leads me to another claim that a professor of mine stated (I’m just going to hope for the sake of my argument he’s correct on this): when we have a physical copy of a book our brains remember where certain passages or actions take place based on being the left or right side of the book as well as the positioning on the page. Personally, I do this a lot when trying to find something I read, knowing that it appeared on this side or that. However, when you’re reading on an electronic device it typically is produced as one page at a time, making this memory connection impossible.

Essentially, everyone is still receiving the same information, but the format becomes less communal than printed work. I find it harder to follow along with electronic copies of material, but some people seem to prefer this method. Perhaps this is my bias for the good old fashioned pages in my hand, but I think this spacial information gathering has interesting implications for publication.

Why do we read novels?

“What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with the death he reads about.” Walter Benjamin (Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach 88)

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While taking a “Novel Theory and History” course at the University of Georgia, this particular quote really stuck out to me. At first I thought it was rather grim but quickly realized that in a way that was exactly what personally draws me to novels. Likewise, I think this is what draws people to movies and tv shows, which can almost be seen as an even more modern extension of the novel (of course we all know the book is better). So, this leads me to question that if the novel is a “genre of modernity” as viewed by some critics then what does this aspect say about modern society? If anything, as story telling progressed to novel writing which has progressed further to film making, this idea Benjamin suggests has become even more prominent.

When compared to more ancient societies, life appears to be much easier for the general populace in recent history as far as maintaining one’s needs and the overall quality of life. However, as technology and thought progresses so does a growing need for fulfillment and understanding in life, similar to the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Nowadays, our news (aha another form tied to the birth of the novel) is filled with the latest shenanigans in celebrities’ lives and other such nonsense, proving that we really do have a preoccupation with the lives of others in order perhaps to uplift our own. This has given rise to popular news agencies like TMZ that many admit to be guilty pleasures. Taking this idea back to the earliest novels and one of the coined fathers of the novel,  Daniel Defoe’s Roxana at times reads like a tabloid. Roxana is composed of the life adventures of a woman who fluctuates from rags to riches, complete with scandalous affairs with men. Yet, we draw some sort of meaning from this beyond her up-front “don’t be like me” –esque moral. These tales of personal scandal and scaling the social ladder (as well falling down it at times) permeate the stories that we find entertaining across all mediums from the beginning of our cultural ties to story telling.

All of this relates back to quote I initially started with from Benjamin: the novel draws readers by giving them tales about people and places they’ll never meet or see as a way of imparting life experiences through an entertaining medium. Our society has somewhat cynically developed this into an interest in tales that are so taboo or so horrible that they make us feel better about our own lives (cue the Jerry Springer Show). However, to give society a little benefit of the doubt, tracing all the way back to Roxana there is also something that draws us to characters who are drug through the dirt just to come out on top because in turn it gives us hope for our own lives. After all, hope keeps us coming back.