Use of multimedia is beginning to take storytelling in radical new direction
Robert McCrum
The Observer,
The ubiquity of festivals such as Hay testifies to literature’s rude health. Photograph: Felix Clay
The simple truth about the book in the 21st century is that this is a golden age of reading and writing. As Umberto Eco puts it in his latest publication, This is Not the End of the Book (Secker Harvill), "the computer returns us to Gutenberg's galaxy; from now on, everyone has to read".
The figures support this. Despite a dire economy, there's a boom in progress. In 2009, in the US, during the worst recession for 100 years, American readers bought more than 800m new books. Here in the UK, the number of published new titles per annum has risen from 65,000 in 1990 to a staggering 177,000 in 2010, far greater – pro rata – than France, or Germany.
Our literary microclimate is flourishing, too. Book festivals up and down the country are heaving with record attendances. Book clubs and reading groups have become middle England's bingo. Every publisher has a reader's group website to promote new books. Then there are the prizes: Smarties, Orange, Whitbread, Aventis, Booker, Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and this week, the Encore prize. The buzz of books and reading is so familiar that it's easy to overlook, but it reflects an astonishing surge in global literacy.
When Dante published The Divine Comedy in 1321, barely 10% of the Italian population could read, and not even Shakespeare's contemporaries could spell his name (or their own) consistently. In 2008, by contrast, 98% of American adults and 83% of adults worldwide were described as literate by Unesco, which reported that between 1995 and 2008 there had been "an overall global increase of about 6% in rates of adult literacy". In a world of 7 billion, of whom about one-third use "some kind of English", that's a huge potential audience for books.
Some examples of increased literacy are more influential than others. In India, for instance, literacy has increased at a rate of 90% per annum since independence in 1947. Part of this is the inheritance of the Raj, but the bald truth is that in 60 years the subcontinent has done with literacy what it took the US more than 200 years to achieve.
Readers worldwide are driving technological innovation, which in turn is slowly changing the book and its stories, manga novels from Japan or Bollywood fantasies from Mumbai. This is not new. In 15th-century England, Caxton and the development of movable type inspired the vernacular Bible, the rise of periodical journalism and, finally, the novel. Dickens and the Victorians were shaped by magazines such as Household Words.
The worldwide web has already begun to have an influence on imaginative expression. The internet, as Frank Rose writes in The Art of Immersion, "is the first medium that can act like all media. It can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above. It is nonlinear, thanks to its adoption of the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking." According to Rose, "a new type of narrative is emerging – one that's told through many media at once in a way that's nonlinear, that's participatory and often game-like, and that's designed above all to be immersive. This is 'deep media'."
Read McCrum's full piece here.
The figures support this. Despite a dire economy, there's a boom in progress. In 2009, in the US, during the worst recession for 100 years, American readers bought more than 800m new books. Here in the UK, the number of published new titles per annum has risen from 65,000 in 1990 to a staggering 177,000 in 2010, far greater – pro rata – than France, or Germany.
Our literary microclimate is flourishing, too. Book festivals up and down the country are heaving with record attendances. Book clubs and reading groups have become middle England's bingo. Every publisher has a reader's group website to promote new books. Then there are the prizes: Smarties, Orange, Whitbread, Aventis, Booker, Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper, and this week, the Encore prize. The buzz of books and reading is so familiar that it's easy to overlook, but it reflects an astonishing surge in global literacy.
When Dante published The Divine Comedy in 1321, barely 10% of the Italian population could read, and not even Shakespeare's contemporaries could spell his name (or their own) consistently. In 2008, by contrast, 98% of American adults and 83% of adults worldwide were described as literate by Unesco, which reported that between 1995 and 2008 there had been "an overall global increase of about 6% in rates of adult literacy". In a world of 7 billion, of whom about one-third use "some kind of English", that's a huge potential audience for books.
Some examples of increased literacy are more influential than others. In India, for instance, literacy has increased at a rate of 90% per annum since independence in 1947. Part of this is the inheritance of the Raj, but the bald truth is that in 60 years the subcontinent has done with literacy what it took the US more than 200 years to achieve.
Readers worldwide are driving technological innovation, which in turn is slowly changing the book and its stories, manga novels from Japan or Bollywood fantasies from Mumbai. This is not new. In 15th-century England, Caxton and the development of movable type inspired the vernacular Bible, the rise of periodical journalism and, finally, the novel. Dickens and the Victorians were shaped by magazines such as Household Words.
The worldwide web has already begun to have an influence on imaginative expression. The internet, as Frank Rose writes in The Art of Immersion, "is the first medium that can act like all media. It can be text, or audio, or video, or all of the above. It is nonlinear, thanks to its adoption of the revolutionary convention of hyperlinking." According to Rose, "a new type of narrative is emerging – one that's told through many media at once in a way that's nonlinear, that's participatory and often game-like, and that's designed above all to be immersive. This is 'deep media'."
Read McCrum's full piece here.
No comments:
Post a Comment