Leena Krohn

Writing, not talking

What you don’t want to talk about, you have to write about – and blogs are here to stay

In the 1990s progressive circles believed that the internet would revolutionise the institution that is literature. Certain things have been revolutionised, but not in quite the way many people expected.

In 1997 the German newspaper Die Zeit and IBM Deutschland jointly organised an internet writing competition, and the following spring the 9th International Hypertext Conference was held in Pittsburgh. The jury in the Die Zeit / IBM competition decided not to award the first prize at all, as the quality of the texts submitted was not deemed satisfactory.

An interactive hypertext novel has yet to achieve worldwide acclaim, and I’m beginning to wonder whether one ever will. Hypertext — adaptable text created by the internet — or so-called ‘ergodic prose’ (which requires active input from the reader) have altered our reading habits very little, and for this we cannot blame the reading public, also occasionally referred to as ‘passive readers’, of mental decline or lack of education.

Subatomic and particle poetry, text generated by algorithms, juxtaposition poetry: for the life of me I couldn’t tell you what they are. These and unique, interactive fiction targeted at a special audience like them have left readers cold. Today we buy more printed literature than in the 1990s, and hypertext has not ‘liberated’ the reader from the shackles of linearity, as was widely speculated.

Linearity, after all, is not merely the invention of ‘passive writers’. As always in our universe, cause comes before effect. Time is somewhat stuck in its ways: it only goes one way. A story with a plot is still the most fundamental way for us to interpret reality.

Books, such as those available from Gutenberg, are here to stay, despite what I myself predicted ten years ago: ‘We will soon bid farewell to the printed book as a object, and this will be a bittersweet farewell.’

In my circle of friends I am perhaps the only person who reads novels on the screen of my Treo mobile phone at night. (This is a lot lighter than a book and the light doesn’t disturb anyone else.)

Who would waste their valuable time varying the plot of a novel someone else had already written or developing new characters, when they could just as well write their own blog?

Readers have become creators. The text messages of the 1990s and the blogs of the 21st century have flourished as the new fruits of the digital revolution, as mutant life-forms that nobody could have predicted.

Blogs encompass numerous different genres. Blogs may consist of anything that can be digitally created. Blogs are, without a shadow of a doubt, a more permanent and important phenomenon than many other artistic and quasi-artistic attempts at creating internet literature. What is most astonishing is their mass influence: in 1999 there were around a million blogs, now there are 100 million!

Educators, agitators, politicians, journalists and celebrities, priests, clerks and pipers, rich and poor – everyone is blogging, which in simple terms means: they are writing. What an unprecedented expansion of writing culture!

As the blogger called Tommipommi has put it: ‘It makes things easier, because you don’t have to discuss your thoughts when you meet people. They are better expressed in writing. Talking is stupid and ugly.’

Quite. What you don’t want to talk about, you have to write about. ‘Art […] makes life, makes interest, makes importance,’ wrote Henry James.

Bloggers don’t only write, they publish. Who in their right mind would write just to store it away at the bottom of a drawer? The drawers of every desk have been ripped open and their hidden treasures scanned on to the internet. Those who only write for their drawers are a dying breed, extinct already. Everything that can be written must also be published.

Who can still say with any certainty where the mass media lies? This is the kind of structural change to the public sphere which the sociologist Jürgen Habermas, with his theories of ‘communicative rationality’, could not have foreseen in his wildest dreams.

Blogs are like smartdust chips communicating with one another. Whether they create collective intelligence or collective ignorance ultimately remains to be seen.

Translated by David Hackston

www.kaapeli.fi/krohn/