What's the message now, Marshall?

Cory Doctorow has a wonderful article in Locus magazine online, "You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen" . In it, he discusses the technological differences between print media (specifically, the novel) and digital, online media. He weaves snippets of his own thoughts and actions into the article in a great stream-of consciousness manner, demonstrating the cognitive changes digital media have promoted. ( "This is not an ideal environment in which to concentrate on long-form narrative (sorry, one sec, gotta blog this guy who's made cardboard furniture) (wait, the Colbert clip's done, gotta start the music up) (19 more RSS items") We can bemoan the decline of book reading (or, conversely, the rise of multitasking and fragmented communication) but the technology is here, and with each new medium comes new ways of thinking, a new cultural message to be processed -- concurrently, a transformation of old media.

I no longer "read" novels; I listen to them on my iPod. People used to listen to stories, not read them, before the printing press made 400-page books possible and reading necessary. But today's reader has a choice, and many like myself perceive a novel as a long work of fiction, which might be read silently in book form, read aloud from a book to a listener or listeners, or read to me by one or more performers. Such a performance, in fact, could be a solitary experience (the listener on a bus hearing Meryl Streep reading the Velveteen Rabbit) or a shared one (thousands of James Joyce fans participating in Bloomsday, the annual holiday featuring public readings of Ulysses). Include in this vision the possibility of someone interpreting Ulysses in American Sign Language on Bloomsday, and you see that changing the medium of the novel really does alter the experienced "message" of Joyce's words. Of course, setting his manuscript (written on 27 huge sheets of graph paper) in type and producing a small paperback book also alters his words as he experienced them. I wonder what a "novel" will be one hundred years from now, once it has been completely freed from its paper prison?