MARTINA%SASK.BITNET@CORNELLC.CCS.CORNELL.EDU (04/10/88)
Computers and their Effects on Books Steven Bernhardson In the recent discussion on the aesthetics of computing, it has been mentioned that reading on a CRT gives you (potentially) no idea where you are in the text--i.e, how soon till I'm done! This can be exploited by those interested in CRT writing as an art form. (I think this word is too pretensious, but _craft_ makes me think of twig baskets and the like.) For instance, the final twist in a mystry story or the last chase in an adventure book would not be read with the anticipation that the action MUST be almost over since there are only ten pages to go. Also, the "choose your own adventure" type books would be so trivial to implement on a computer, and indeed lend themselves much more to computers than to a printed form. (Hypertext is a whole other issue, much more "fancy" technology than what I am talking about here, namely 80 columns by 24 lines of ASCII text.) I see lots of possibilities with on-line books. For instance, an author could write dynamic books. A book novel presented as a series of memories and recollections could change its passages subtly each time they are reread, illustrating the point and forcing the reader to examine his or her own memory. Or to be perverse, a book could rename its characters each time a new reader "picked" it up. However, we don't have to go that far to see the effects of computers on books. I know nothing about the writing of _The_Tommorow_Makers_, but that book just HAS to have been created on a word processor. Identical sentences reoccur throughout the work, and whole paragraphs have been "cut and pasted" into several chapters, sometimes as is, sometimes with small changes. The books recounts the author's travels to three or four computer sites. going on there. In the section on Caragie-Mellon, you would read something like, "The happy clutter of take-out Chinese food cartons, papers and notes was nothing like the clean, almost barren rooms that I would later see in Japan." Then the Japanese section would say something like, "The halls were clean, almost barren and I couldn't help thinking back to the happy clutter of take-out Chinese food cartons, papers and note I saw at Carnegie-Mellon." Sometimes the sentences make no sense. Yet they are mistakes that no one would ever make writing by hand. They are mistakes that come about by writing a perfectly good sentence on a word processor and then fixing it, changing one element but not the elements need to agree. If a word processor doesn't make everyone authors, it makes everyone think they are authors: a hack becomes a Hemmmingway and a potboiler becomes all to standard.