Monthly Archive for April, 2010

I don’t really know much about the history of the novel. I know that the genre matured out of earlier, epistolary forms, that it required the rise of literacy, possibly some rise in the ability to read and write in vernacular (national) languages and not just Latin, and it is intimately related to the concurrent development of notions of personal interiority, a psychologised self, and so on. The eventual modern form of the novel, a serial, reasonably long story, that is generally read silently, not all at once, in a device (or form factor) that supports this – the book, are all deeply interrelated. A convergence, some from technologies, some from education, some print, some from industrialisation. Indeed, the famous example of Penguin Books springs to mind. Their creator waiting on a train platform (so industrial travel, the leisured moment that the train journey to work makes available) and wondering why you couldn’t buy cheap novels for the trip. Small, lightweight, cheap. And the affordable paperback was born. What I take from this is the personal nature of the novel. The affinity that develops between something you hold near to hand to read, that others can’t read – unless they’re being deliberately inquisitive, or nosey – and stories that are personal, intimate, complex. There seems something symbiotic about the form factor and affordances of what became the modern novel (and paperback) and the sorts of stories we use it for.

Which begs the (hopefully now elegant) question of the iPad and video. People have been describing how, well, compelling the experience of using the iPad is. Its size, the quality of the screen, the fact that you touch (I think when people bemoaned that you couldn’t take your computer to bed as a criticism of why books would remain, what they were actually saying is you can’t touch your computer in the way you touch your book, you don’t hold it (nor it you) in the same way) it, and that its scale is now personal. The iPhone, iPod and so on are too small to provide a rich experience. They are useful, but not engaging. The computer is too big. It is generally personal viewing (like the novel) but accidentally so. The monitor is up for the world to see if the world happens to be passing by. But the iPad brings us to the phenomenal experience of something novel like. If we want it to be personal we turn it towards our faces, and away from the world. It can play hi quality video that looks glorious. We can have a mix of media. So what sorts of audio visual stories will begin to appear? What is the novelesque post cinematic form for something like the iPad? Personal, private, intimate. Not social like the television or the cinema. Not cluttered and lost amongst my task bar, applications, jobs, windows, mouse, file menus and whatever else on my monitor. Yeah, I could watch films here, and probably would, but as an ersatz sort of viewing (like reading a novel on an ebook reader), but I want the audiovisual forms that leaves the sociality of television and cinema (apart from, of course, for cinephiles who happily watch in solitude) and finds the intimacy of silent reading. What do I need to make for this? What would I watch, for this?