The Medium is the Message | Assignment 1:3
PROMPT:
At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons. I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?
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As Marshall McLuhan famously once said, “the medium is the message.” This is true when we look at the way that storytelling has been transformed with the influx of convenience provided by social media and hypertext. For example, if we look at Twitter, the platform has become a place where the content itself isn’t very important; realistically, it can be difficult to express an entire story through 280 characters. Instead, tweets become viral often because of the character behind them – in other words, the original publisher/poster and their values. For example, we can look at Donald Trump’s Twitter frenzy as an example of someone with a weak character and large Twitter following. Regardless of content, people are readily on hand to clown his social media efforts. However, Twitter has had great success in viralizing short but effective storytelling techniques. What comes to mind is the “ten word story” – a writing phenomenon created by the website dimeshowreview.com. Within it, writers are challenged with creating stories with a suffocatingly small maximum word limit of ten words. However, professional and amateur authors alike have taken to this challenge, with it also sparking several accounts on Twitter that have been collecting and curating submissions. Going back to tweet limits and the basis of character, I believe the success of the ten word challenge to be separate from the person posting, but it instead still relies on factors other than content. When reading powerful ten word stories, it is on the reader to infer and take apart the content, as ten words alone do not suffice to tell the whole story. Instead, writers rely on the employment of nuances to help their readers. Although inference has always been an essential part of any story, the platform in which stories are told is an important element to enjoying a story as a whole. Twitter, or any social media for that matter, provides an excellent platform in the sense that it imbues an easily accessible global cyber community, making it easier for like minded storytellers and consumers alike to bond together. Chamberlain highlights that “words make us feel closer to the world we live in,” (1) and social media as a storytelling platform goes beyond words themselves, and instead acts as a bonding agent. We can look at oral tradition as another way of understanding the popularity of social media; orature from pre-modern literature was spread by mouth, and often in social settings. Carrying onto the 18th and 19th centuries, storytelling was a popular pasttime that would entertain many people (picture a large group gathered around a hearth). Stories have been bringing people together for eons, and although their structures have changed, the reasons as to why stories are told and enjoyed as a part of humankind remain the same.
Likewise, hyperlinks are similar in the sense that they do not reveal the full story upon glance; one must click the link in order to access the full material. This puts the power in the reader’s hands. Much as how we are left to piece together short, nuanced stories on the internet, we are also left to decide whether we wish to click into a hyperlink. Ultimately, although the storyteller is the one doling out the material, we as consumers can choose as to how and why we want to perceive such content.
Works Cited:
Chamberlin, J. Edward. “A New History of Reading: Hunting, Tracking, and Reading.” For the Geography of a Soul: Emerging Perspectives on Kamau Braithwaite. Ed. Timothy J. Reiss., 145-164. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2001. 145-164.
Federman, Mark. “What Is the Meaning of The Medium Is the Message?” What Is the Meaning of The Medium Is the Message?, 23 July 2004, individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm.
“Ten Word Stories.” DIME SHOW REVIEW, www.dimeshowreview.com/category/fiction/ten-word-stories/.
Oxley, Simon. Twitter Logo. N.d. N.p.
I definitely agree with your point about the role of inference in a medium such as Twitter. Unlike oral story-telling with its tone, rhythm, and inflections, or traditional longer writing, social media does not always give us much to go on, thus leaving far more room for interpretation. This opens up more doors and spawns greater speculation, conversation, and debate, which- I think- is what allows certain tweets to go viral. (In addition to the fact that they are a very accessible medium).
The idea of hyperlinks putting “the power in the reader’s hands” makes me think of the children’s book series “Choose your own Adventure”. At the end of each chapter, readers were given the option to go through different paths in the books, creating different stories and endings- a primitive hyperlink!
Another fascinating example of how hyperlinks have changed storytelling is the book 253 by Geoffrey Ryman. This is a web based book with a non linear narrative, and uses hyperlinks to introduce us to the history of 253 passengers on a London train.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/87748.253
Hi Marianne,
Content published on social media certainly does carry the potential to spark controversy, as it is easier to spread such material. It reminds me of back in the day, when certain pieces of literature would come under controversy after being mass printed. In order for controversy to be large-scale enough, it would need a large set of critics.
Your point about the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books is so great! I used to love reading such books as a kid, and I hadn’t thought to equate hyperlinks with a non-electronic source.
I’ll also be sure to check out 253 – it sounds absolutely riveting.
Hi Katrina,
Thank you for your blog post. I thoroughly enjoyed it. Like mentioned, it really is interesting how Twitter has the capability of catching our attention within seconds in a post without a lot of meaning. Nowadays, you always see memes, Youtube links or other 280-character short stories going viral all over the world. I guess it is because social media is occasionally used as a platform to boast about your cyber popularity amongst your friends. To achieve this, some tend to follow the trends of humor, trying to be as agreeable as possible.
Same with hyperlinks. They are only clicked if they catch our attention. While these technological advances do simplify a lot of things, perhaps it does shrink our scope of perspective, only because we now get the choice to listen to and read what we are interested in. With just a click, we can get rid of the information in front of our faces.
Just like your last sentence, I agree 100% that we are the ones ultimately getting to choose the content, not only on social media but also with hyperlinks. Through these technological advancements, we will definitely narrow our minds and eventually become very biased people.
Anyways thanks again Katrina for your post. I found it really eye-opening as I had decided to answer another question. I will be looking forward to your next entry!
Hi Minhye,
Memes are definitely a good place to start puzzling over the social media phenomenon. Subconsciously, we find certain memes funny but almost impossible to explain, due to embedded nuances that are left up for interpretation. With your point on hyperlinks, I agree. Technology has made it easy to screen content and make it far too simple to stay in one mindset. However, it can also lead to broadening intellectual horizons – it depends on the willingness of the reader to take it upon them to learn.
Thanks for your comment!
Hi Katrina,
I thought the 10 word story was a perfect example of how our literature has adapted and conformed to our worlds changing expectations. With the overwhelming amount of content found on the internet, a 10 word story is an easy and accessible way to get across a message, without requiring the reader to divert their attention for too long (which they often will not do).
As well, I really appreciated what you said about literature being a social activity. I think there have been periods in time where literature has become more high brow and academic, making it inaccessible for the larger, illiterate population. Therefore, like you said, oral storytelling was often the way that stories and ideas were shared. In our present day, I think a similar distinction can be made between the more scholarly, academic writing which is inaccessible to the general public, and the writing found on social media. Often, when I think of literature, I only consider the more scholarly side, particularly when I think of our past and “classic literature” – your blog totally reminded me that there was a way for stories to be shared, even in the past. Presently, in a time were isolation is incredibly common, with people no longer gathering around hearths or living in larger communities, social media has really become the public sphere in which the general population can share.
I think you gave some great ideas in this blog,
Thanks for sharing,
Rachel
Hi Rachel,
Thank you! I’ve always liked reading the 10 word stories, and they came to mind right away when I was doing the readings for this unit. However, I, too, am guilty of confining the notion of literature as being solely in the academic sphere. As we learned, there is orality and written culture; two spheres that join together and are closely interlinked. One dictionary definition of “literature” defines it as being “written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.” However, the word “literature” itself is up to subjective interpretation. Stories embedded in oral tradition can very well be considered literature, as they also hold “superior or lasting artistic merit,” but are carried out using a different medium.
Hey Katrina,
The thought that kept popping up in my head while reading your post is about the short attention span possessed by people today, and it seems that others have touched on it as well. This short attention span is something that is not only taking over our social media but bleeding into traditional publishing as well. People’s time is more valuable than ever, mostly due to the fact that there is so much begging for their attention – it has never been so easy to be entertained. That means, if your story is boring, or is just taking too long, people are not likely to read through the whole thing. That is why I think challenges like the ten-word stories, or any types of short stories, are an amazing exercise for writers, to figure out how to tell a story in an effective, yet entertaining way. The extreme nature of things like ten-word stories makes us realize the value of each word to the point where even using words like “the” or “a” seems wasteful when you can fill the sentence with much stronger, meaningful words.
I think hyperlinks, to an extent, is also another force diverting our short attention span on the internet. It provides us with something interesting to jump to if the current thing you are reading is getting boring. Jumping from one link to another is, in my opinion, the essence of exploring the internet.
Thanks for the insightful post!
Hi Tony,
I agree, we’ve become a society that has a strikingly short attention span, but at the same, being in the academic sphere makes us use a lot of flowery language, sometimes without realizing. In high school, I had a teacher who limited our essay word count to 150 words – and yet, we were still required to keep the conventional 5 paragraph structure. This put a lot of things into perspective for me, as I was forced to cut out anything that wasn’t essential to my main point. This is why I love the 10 word stories so much; they’re so much fun and also wonderfully efficient.