Part 3: Think Different
"Consumer print publishers, in their flirtations and their aversions to online, have never really understood the medium, and never will as long as they regard it as a replay of print, not a creative publishing medium in its own right."
David Worlock
publishing-industry consultant
Many people doubt that a shiny, sterile device that fits into the palm of one hand could ever offer the all-consuming, emotional experience of a good print book. They are wrong.
Photo: Joi Ito
For a start, the printed page is far from the ultimate in immersiveness. True, a well-written story can be absorbing, but that is in spite of the medium, not because of it. The spell is readily broken, partly because only one of the reader's senses is engaged. (It is usually much easier to distract someone who is reading a book than someone who is watching a film or playing a computer game.)
What's more, the rise of portable multimedia devices means that we no longer have to restrict ourselves to written words alone. We can elaborate and illuminate, stimulate and engage, using sound, video, interactivity, and even interaction with the real world. To plain text we can now add informational and sensory context.
Of course, this is not a new concept. Here is the writer Jed Perl describing a medieval illuminated manuscript on display in a New York museumΦ:
Image: The New Republic
"Just look at the tremendous page illustrating the Ascension, from the Bury Saint Edmunds Psalter... Who can doubt that the eleventh-century English artist responsible for this work understood the emotional possibilities that could be unleashed with a draftsman's tools? He has created a casually commanding narrative with nothing more than some marginal decorations on a page of text. Crowding the left and right margins are dazzling studies of the mortals who watch, wild-eyed with astonishment, as Christ ascends. Each tiny figure, rendered with quick, exact, expressionist strokes of the pen, is a study in human wonderment."
Now jump forward eight centuries to the composer, Richard Wagner, who saw opera as a GesamtkunstwerkΦ (or "total artform"). By this, he meant that it could achieve a kind of apotheosis through a union of words, sounds and visuals that overwhelms the senses.
The main purpose of this essay is to argue that, similarly, a work of fiction created specifically for phones and other multimedia devices – let's call it "phiction" for short – will often be better able to engage its readers by using a mix of modalities.
This is not to say that we should add sound and colour in an indiscriminate or self-indulgent way, dressing up the text like some garish funfair ride. The primary aim must always be constructive engagement with the reader's mind – and anything that doesn't assist with this must be omitted. To my mind the reason that most experiments in multimedia fiction have so far succeeded only modestly (or not at all) is that they have been too self-conscious, putting hey-wow experimentation with the medium ahead of an uncompromising devotion to their audience.
We only mature in our use of a creative medium when we learn to recognise situations in which subtlty can be more potent than ostentation, and it will inevitably take time – along with much trial and error – for us to grow out of our naivety with this new medium. Moviemakers took years to finesse their use of sound, then colour and now 3D, all of which continue to evolve even today. (Henry Selick, director of the 2009 film, CoralineΦ, said recently that his intention for the 3D effects was not to make objects jump out of the screen, but rather to draw the audience inside. That's a nice way of putting it – and by taking this approach he has succeeded in creating one of the least self-conscious and most effective 3D films to date.)
This essay seeks to explore what might (and might not) work, and to present some simple examples. It will already be apparent that I have been inspired in part by Douglas Adams' work, The Hitchhker's Guide to the Galaxy. This is for several reasons. First, it introduced into the mainstream the concept of an electronic multimedia book. Second, Hitchhiker's itself straddlled different media, going on to take the form of print books, TV programmes, computer games, and eventually a feature film. But mostly it is because Adams' work itself helped to reinvent existing media. In particular, it used a combination of wit, artistry and technology (the latter courtesy of the BBC's Radiophonic WorkshopΦ) to breathe new life into the tired and increasingly marginalised form of the radio play.
One day the Douglas Adams of phiction will come along and show us how to write the real book of the future. And the result won't look like this:
Image: BBC.co.uk
It will look much more like the thing you are reading right now.