UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES

The invention of movable type, a technological advance over monk-operated quill pens dipped in ink, made books so much less precious that Bibles were no longer chained to the pulpit for the exclusive use of the priests. Ordinary people read the Bible and inevitably said, “Wait a minute! It says here... but the priest never told us that!” The new knowledge led to the Protestant Reformation (and that prompted a Catholic Reformation) and the Euro world tilted on its axis. A monopoly and a corruption had been broken by movable type.

So now comes our new technology, digital internet supported by satellite. It changes the book, the radio, the television, the movies. It changes the bookstore, the record store, the local movies. It changes the writers, the financiers, the delivery systems. (My movies didn’t come today and I’m peeved!) The computer itself changes, so it’s no bigger than “a paperback book.”

In fact, paperback books were a technological innovation that changed readers, making books even cheaper than before, sold in grocery stores and gas stations, so that the stories interested a different level of people. They coincided with WWII and Korea, with the military “hurry-up-and-wait” habit that gave the ordinary guy a lot of time to read.

At my local library, there is a stack of paperback Westerns and mysteries, all well-worn, that come and go all the time without the librarian even bothering to check them in and out. They sell on the Internet for pennies, and stacks of them are in the back of used bookstores. A friend of mine here in East Glacier acquired a “short stack” of them and in the midst was one with my father’s name written into it, originally bought in the Fifties in Portland, Oregon, not sold until his death at the end of the Sixties. But today you can hardly give away a Western manuscript to a publisher. (Anyway, PETA will soon ask us to stop riding on horses as something that imposes on their dignity and anyway the writers seem hardly able figure out which end a bridle goes on.)

So now we come to the Internet, where the print flies all over the place. Arguably, blogs deposed a president and the Republican power-grab -- or you could say it did if those jokers hadn’t provided so much of the content themselves with mere email.

I blog a thousand words a day, which I’ve done for years, but no one read it because there was no Internet. In the Sixties I used to hear people say, “Mary Clearman Blew is the only female writer in Montana,” and I gnashed my teeth because I wrote all the time -- I just couldn’t get published. (Yesterday I bought an anthology of female writers in Montana. It’s a fat book.) Now I PUBLISH daily plus creating Print On Demand books. People worry about the world drowning in self-produced books and blogs, but I think the danger is not great. It’s a lot of work and takes a lot of time and you have to have something to say. (I heard a woman say, “I’d love to have a blog, but I just can’t think of anything to blog about.”) Now the bloggers are all making videos. (Some day they may say, "Prairie Mary is the only female still blogging in Montana.")

The technology alone is not enough to make change. It’s when there’s a suppressed need or purpose that the techie stuff grabs the imagination and the opportunity. And those needs and purposes are not always available to the predictors. Would they have predicted GNXP.com? Tech-sophisticated guys from India talking genome issues? Or who knew EMT’s can write the belt buckles off most of today’s mystery writers?

The effect on publishers and bookstores has been devastating. Rooms of authors have been thrown on their economic keisters. Foreign investors have been disgusted by the small return on their investment. Book advertising has shrunk to the point that major newspapers are closing down their book review sections. But libraries, at least those with tech-literate librarians, have been a little quicker on their feet. Strangely, it’s coffee roasters who have seen possibilities.

As I type, I’m streaming my public radio station, which is in Billings, a good long day’s drive away. The airwave transmitter has broken -- blown down again, probably, though it always seems to happen when they try to raise money so I sometimes think George Bush is jamming. Streaming works, though it requires an expensive machine, but if I’m streaming why not go to an all classical station to escape all this chatter? Say, a nice government-supported Brit radio station?

Consider US "public" radio, mostly supported by the educated and high income people (and I begin to see that the relationship between the two categories is reciprocal: that is, one must be high income to get educated which will earn you a high income) with their voluntary donations. Most of the rednecks and squareheads around here (snob alert!) are happy with their wailing country, Golden Fifties, and obscene hip hop, so long as the ag market and the weather are included. (Missing from NPR. I don’t care if it’s snowing in Billings anyway.) But the machinery of relaying the signal breaks down (high winds will do that, since the transmitters are up on ridges), so maybe all the highbrows should just go to streaming. Many of the listeners are cheapskates (like me) who never feed the kitty anyway. And public radio has been going more and more to chatter, less and less to solid music. YPRadio even took opera off of Saturdays. Since the Fifties I’ve listened to opera on Saturday afternoon. Every time I moved to a new place, I’d find the local public radio station so I could listen to Saturday opera while I pushed furniture around.

Public access airwaves television (which is not the same thing as highbrow public television) has been more of a local community (the paradigm from churches is “parish” -- everyone within certain boundaries -- rather than “gathered” like NPR) with taxes going to pay for the transmitter up on the hill. But the change from analogue to digital transmission and the availability of “pizza pan” satellite television or movies and TV series on DVD’s, has meant that the high-ridge transmitters around here have aged into uselessness. There isn’t really enough public pressure to get a new digital installation up there. Many people are still using their old analogue TV’s anyway. We’ll have to wait for the government-mandated switchover to see what really happens.

This is of great benefit to the economy of China, since we all have to keep retooling and buying new equipment. Good for Walmart.

But it changes the way we read and write. And some of the population has switched over to an aural culture: talk and music. Some of the best writers have gone to satellite TV. (Interesting article in the last Vanity Fair about the guy who wrote “The Sopranos.”) IPods accompany people to work -- you can listen as you drive but must take mass transit to read. For the REALLY techie among us, one can fold videos into written blogs. Even I can slip in a photo now and then. I’m told the Great Falls Tribune is anxious to become an eNewspaper-only so as to get out from under the burden of printing and distributed a daily paper. But there are people here making their living from that “burden.”

Consider this, both content and format:
The Chronicle of Higher Education
From the issue dated March 30, 2007
Helping Small Publishers Distribute Their Works Quickly, Cheaply, and in Multiple Formats
By DAVID GLENN
HAVE IT YOUR WAY: During the next few weeks, someone might wander into the Tattered Cover, the large independent bookstore in Denver, and ask for the latest book by Fatemeh Keshavarz, a professor of Persian and comparative literature at Washington University in St. Louis. The new book, Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than "Lolita" in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press), explores several aspects of contemporary Iranian culture and was designed in part as a corrective to Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading "Lolita" in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (Random House), which Ms. Keshavarz views as simplistic.

If things go according to script, the clerk at the Tattered Cover will suavely tell our hypothetical customer, "Yes, we have Jasmine and Stars. Would you like that in hardcover, audio, e-book, or large print?"

Interesting to contemplate, but I have no conclusion yet. Yet it struck me that at least one of the NPR fund-raisers seemed to have NO consciousness of this kind of thing, still laboring along under assumptions that relate back to the Fifties when the term “high brow” was invented. Maybe “low brow” techies are the new “high brow.” They probably won’t be shocked by Lolita and they probably have a brother fighting in Iraq.

But if I wanted to peeve a nation, I'd simply blast their satellite feed. There goes TV, banking, ATM's, family communications, travel arrangements, etc. That's why I print out all my blogs and fill them.