Not sure how I feel about this.
Apparently there is a huge (and growing) market in Japan for novels written on mobile/cell phones. Five — five — of last year's 10 bestsellers are cell-phone novels.
On the one hand, it's always cool to see technology used in interesting ways to produce writing. And it's always way cool when people who never wrote before start writing. I've been saying for years to anyone who'll listen, the rise of emails and chat and SMS and whatever else we type words into to communicate can only improve the overall benchmark of literacy in the world.
“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”
Indeed, many cellphone novelists had never written fiction before, and many of their readers had never read novels before, according to publishers.
But...apparently the novels are actually written in SMS-speak, and the stories are simplistic (it's not just that they're really novella-length, but actually kind of superficial stories). Is this an exciting example of a new creative mode that is inspiring people to risk being imaginative and artistically bold, or is it just self-absorbed teenage dilettantes pretending they're doing something cool and artistic? And, more fundamentally still, is it any of my business?
posted by Laura E. Goodin @ 10:44 AM (permalink)
2 comment(s)
2 Comments:
Yes. I think it is your (and by extension, my and eveybody else who care about the written word) business. The "textspeak" novel with simplistic stories. Ugh.
I'm waiting for the first essay submitted to me in textspeak. I already get emails like that.
However, I think that textspeak will eventually get replaced by something else. I guess it came about through lack of width in the band, so abbreviations were necessary. Right now, it really isn't all that essential, and as the band width increases and more can be sent down the pipe, it'll become even more anachronistic.
So it's a transitional method of communication, but it's so closely related to "glyph" forms writing, that it'll stick around in some form. It doesn't surprise me that such a novel form has arisen in a graphical language and culture like Japan.
I wonder where the Ancient Egyptians of the Mayans would ahve thought of it?
omgosh ma! plz can u get wit da pic? ppl use sms/msn speak al the tme now. its, like wat pple say.
M
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