A rose by any other name... isn't a rose.

• Lee Gomes discourses on the future of web-based media at The Wall Street Journal.

You can always count on someone proclaiming that such-and-such art form is dead and this-and-that art form is the way of the future, which is why the brouhaha of late over Kevin Kelly's New York Times Magazine piece "Scan This Book!" didn't seem to faze anyone much. Gomes' article concerns an online movie-editing company that allows the user to create his/her own edit from preselected scenes:

The short cinematic pastiche we saw is an example of what has come to be called a "mash-up," and for a big part of the tech world, these sorts of mash-ups are becoming the highest form of cultural production. This is most clearly occurring in books. Most of us were taught that reading books is synonymous with being civilized. But in certain tech circles, books have come to be regarded as akin to radios with vacuum tubes, a technology soon to make an unlamented journey into history's dustbin. ...Imagine a long email message with responses and earlier messages included. We'll have those in lieu of "Middlemarch" or "The Corrections." Picking up on the theme, another writer suggested that traditional books "are where words go to die."

So far, so good, except the mash-up method is hardly new; William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin were experimenting with cut-up techniques as far back as the 1950s, by slicing up preexisting manuscripts and splicing them back together in an attempt to create a different associative web, an approach that eventually gave birth to beat hallmarks like Naked Lunch.

This is another "old wine, new bottle" situation, but then again, you could make the argument that mash-up/cut-up techniques don't really fall under the same umbrella as writing or filmmaking; you're dealing with preestablished works, not creating them from scratch, which resets the playing field. There's little, if any, difference between cut-ups, mash-ups, and the mix tapes your friendly basement DJ slaps together. Conversely, you could argue that writing is just an assembly of preexisting stories, structures and even words (which calls the mind the ancient maxim, "Originality is determined by the obscurity of your sources"), which is a semantic argument someone else is welcome to engage themselves in until the end of time as we know it.

I don't think that web-based media is going to be the death of storytelling, which is where Gomes seems to think it's headed; it's just that the vessel for it will change. Literary storytelling has survived a lot of different permutations in technology over the course of human history, and I doubt the Internet will bring about its demise. More often than not I attribute the attitude that new technology will mean the end of one form to the arrogance of those who are at its forefront; the myopic conviction of the true believer.

Elsewhere in the piece, Gomes also says this:

Watching a good movie is "passive" in the same way that looking at a great painting is "passive" -- which is, not very; you're quite actively lost in thought. For my friend, though, the only activity that seemed "active," and thus worthwhile, was when a person sitting at a PC engaged in digital busy work of some kind.

True, but only in the sense that there's no motor function involved, only thought. Think about all the forms of art that are out there; of all of them, literature is the only one that requires your active participation. Pages don't turn by themselves. (Not yet, anyway.) Film, dance, art, music; to experience them you don't need to do anything. You just sit there and let it wash over you. Hopefully, your mind is engaged with what you're seeing/hearing, but this of course is not always the case. This is not to say that passivity on the part of the moviewatcher or concertgoer or museum-walker in any way places them below those that read. But tech geeks around the globe would benefit from the realization that they have more in common with the average reader than they might think; reading is, at its core, an interactive experience. Which is probably why people are always sounding its death knell; it takes actual effort.

Ah, well. I swear, in the future, to get their entertainment people will just sit and stare at a strobe light and complain that the pace is too slow.

Indie booksellers, rest in peace

• Tyler Cowen thinks the loss of the independent bookstore is no big deal at Slate.

Alas, much of this piece is spot-on, even though it stings to admit it:

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it's the reader's greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy's War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the "Alchian and Allen theorem." Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts.

This and other corresponding stories were brought on by the news of the closing of Cody's, a venerable independent bookstore located in San Francisco. The nice thing about independently-owned and operated stores is, yes, having a personal contact at a brick-and-mortar establishment who knows a thing or two about what the store sells and can point inquisitive customers in the right direction, or, alternatively, turn them on to something they might not have thought about or heard of before.

Given the advent of the Internet, however, specialized knowledge of literature -- and books, in general -- has become almost a moot point. Word-of-mouth is one of the strongest selling points of any book, simply because it depends largely upon an interpersonal recommendation: when someone whose tastes you respect mentions a book in a positive context, you're more likely to seek it out. Cowen is smart to point out that forums on the Net -- reader reviews at Amazon, for example, as well as litblogs -- have taken this idea into a new medium. If someone over at Bookslut or Conversational Reading can make a good case for reading XY's new book, then, well, why not check it out?

Yes, e-commerce will probably be the death of the traditional independent bookstore. I'm probably like most people who like to read: my budget is limited, so I'm more likely to buy used books, or shop online for the discounts. It's extremely rare for me to pay full cover price for a book I'm looking for, be it at an independent OR chain bookstore, simply because it doesn't make a whole lot of fiscal sense to do so. It would seem, then, that the alternative to putting more money in the pockets of the behemoths is to apply the same philosophy that spurs you to shop outside the mainstream to e-commerce, as well: buying books from individuals on Amazon Marketplace or eBay, or shopping at independent online booksellers like Powells or discount retailers like BookCloseouts.com.

Cowen is right: there's more out there now, meaning more avenues to explore and about a fraction of the time to explore them. Specialized knowledge of books and literature could either become a blessing or a liability; there was a widely-circulated piece in the May 14 New York Times Magazine called "Scan This Book!", by Kevin Kelly, a writer for Wired, that suggested the future of books would be not unlike that of an MP3 playlist. Knowledge of books, Kelly suggested, would become highly compartmentalized; subject matter could be cross-indexed to death, which is fine if you're looking for scads of information on one particular topic but, as Scott Esposito pointed out, could have the backlash effect of reducing the scope and vision of a particular book to a mere collection of loosely-associated parts. Probably the most appealing thing about a well-written book of any type is its potential to compress the world in all its contradictory glory between two cardboard covers; to contain multitudes. In a world driven and governed by soundbites, that's harder and harder to accomplish.