Part 7: Only Connect
"Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted"
E. M. Forster
Howards End
But enough of interactions with computers. What of interactions with real people, and with the real physical world?
E. M. Forster's famous imperative was born of a deep belief in the centrality of human relations in spite of the artificial barriers often put in their way. His fiction reflected this philosophy, so it is intriguing to wonder what he might have made of the reading device you are now holding – one whose main and original purpose was person-to-person communication. (And no longer just by voice, but also SMS, email, Bluetooth, and the whole plethora of communicative options provided by the web, from TwitterΦ to Google WaveΦ.)
Considering that reading is usually a solitary activity, books are strangely social objects. The cover advertises to fellow passengers what you are reading; the spines on your bookshelf partially expose the contents of your mind to perusing visitors. For readers, book covers and spines can therefore become fashion statements (and for publishers they become adverts). Does phiction lack this dimension?
Not necessarily – the communication just happens in different ways. On a networked device, what you are reading can in principle be communicated very easily to other people (including those sitting half a world away) via websites like All ConsumingΦ, Library ThingΦ GoodreadsΦ, ShelfariΦ, Red RoomΦ, weReadΦ and BookGluttonΦ.
And for readers who prefer the old-fashioned, face-to-face type of engagement (What book would Anne in Accounts enjoy? Who in my class can tell me whether to try Philip Pullman?) there are helpful technologies like BonjourΦ, a local device-to-device discovery and communication protocol. Thus, with apologies to Umberto Eco, we might truly be moving towards a world in which the books that we hold in our hards are speaking among themselves.
Of course, these social links are important not only for obtaining recommendations and reviews, useful though those things are, but also because for many of us books are a social lubricant – catalysts of conversation and stimulants for the sharing of ideas. (As Pierre Bayard reminds us in his deliciously subversive work, How to Talk About Books You Haven't ReadΦ, this can also include books that we haven't even opened.)
This is another area in which books can learn from games. From XBox Live to World of Warcraft, contemporary online games, unlike their adventure-game ancestors, are intensely social. Just as the worlds of literature, radio, music, films and games are coming together to create the new form I'm calling phiction, so the world's previously isolated readers, listeners, viewers and players are becoming connected like never before. In another famous phrase of Forster's, "Live in fragments no longer."
Yet an even more interesting possibility is the use of real-world interaction not merely to talk with other people about a story but to join them in telling it. Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of alternate-reality gamesΦ.