Motoko Rich, writing in today's New York Times, sees literary blogs as the evolutionary successors of newspaper book reviews. "For those who are used to the old way, it’s a tough evolution."
Tough indeed. At risk of seeming fratricidal, I have to point out that, compared with a well-crafted book review, the average blog post — on just about any blog — is unreadable. This isn't to say that there aren't great writers out there keeping blogs; rather, that newspapers have the benefit of editors — and good editors are not merely guardians of good grammar, but guardians of entertaining and readable prose. And as soon as blogs have the financial wherewithal to hire good editors, they cease to be different in any meaningful sense from newspapers.
The perennial question resurfaces, then. What is a blog good for? I mean a blog with no editors, a blog that is just barely readable.
A while back I happened across As We May Think, an essay by Vannevar Bush published by The Atlantic in 1945. In this essay he complains of the increasing need of a way of sorting the massive amounts of information washing over us. "There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene."
So many articles published, so many books. How to organize things so that you can know what you should read and, having read it, remember why you read it, and what you thought about it? Part of the answer, according to Bush, is to extend the associative process of our thoughts artificially just as we've extended our knowledge. We naturally connect things by "some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain," but these "trails" are prone to fade.
He envisions a device called a memex, something quite like a PC — equipped with some of the associative functions of Amazon's A9 or del.icio.us. The user of the memex enters data and connects them by a trail. "Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book."
He then illustrates its use in daily life, saying that you might look something up in the memex during a conversation with a friend, and you could even transfer data and trails from his memex into yours.
"Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified."
Well, of course we've got Wikipedia, and it's doing just fine without blogs, thank you very much. However, it is only in blogs that you can have truly creative and free association, complete with wild speculation and opinion. Further, blogs provide small enclaves where idiosyncratic ideas can take full shape without the tyranny of Wikipedia's masses reining them in.
I say that literary blogs are only worthwhile to the extent that they are entirely different from book reviews, and completely incapable of supplanting them. Instead, one would hope that they would be public memex's — or, to put a more attractive face on them — something like contemporary literary salons.
By the by, Bush mentions a contraption called a "Voder" in the essay. You can see the Voder being played in "Gizmo," a funny movie I found via Boing Boing.
No comments:
Post a Comment