My previous post was titled The Story of Stories: The
Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art is a compelling new book by Kevin
Ashton. There are eight chapters in that book, titled as follows:
Chapter 1 A Million
Years of Stories 1
Chapter 2 The Eye of
Your Mind 34
Chapter 3 Pictures of
Sounds 59
Chapter 4 The War of
Stories 92
Chapter 5 The
All-Seeing Eye of Providence 136
Chapter 6 One One
Zero 169
Chapter 7 Death by a
Thousand Stories 210
Chapter 8 The
Hyperreal Thing 250
Here are another three quotations out of this book. The
tenth section in the fourth chapter, The War of Stories, is titled Story
Factories. It begins on the bottom of page 130:
“Wood based paper first appeared in Germany in the 1840s,
and by the end of the 1870s most printers in North America and Western Europe
were using it. Not long after that, all paper was made from wood and none was
made from rags. In less than thirty years, the price of paper fell by over 90
percent. In 1860 a pound of rags cost 44 US cents before pulping. In 1889, a
pound of wood cost 4 cents after pulping. The invention of the mass
production of mass communication, started by Gutenberg 450 years earlier was
complete. An industrial revolution had transformed storytelling, and now there
were story factories all over the world.
Those factories produced ever more stories, told by ever
more storytellers, reproduced ever more times. In 1449, the year before
Gutenberg’s printing press became operational, Europeans published two thousand
new books and made an average of twenty-five copies of each one. In 1900, after
paper made from wood replaced paper made from rags, Europeans published twenty
thousand new books and, on average, there were twenty-five hundred copies
of each one: ten times more stories a year, told by ten times more storytellers,
to a hundred times more people.”
The second section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye
of Providence, is titled Experience. It begins on page 139:
“We are now halfway through The Story of Stories. The
first half covered a million years of storytelling, from the first nightfires
to the first telecommunications; the second half covers only two hundred years.
This imbalance – four chapters for one million years, four
chapters for 200 years – arises because the book’s structure is not time but
change, and change is not linear: Its rate increases so much that the next two
hundred years of the story of stories contains as much change as the first
million years.
When we look at almost any example of long-term human
progress, we see change speeding up around the fifteenth century. This
acceleration was once mistaken for a sudden springlike return to creation after
a centuries-long winterlike freeze: a ‘renaissance’ preceded by ‘dark ages.’
The various versions of this mistake are all story-shaped: They center heroic
protagonists and, by implication, individual human agency, hidden behind
hand-wavy vaguenesses like culture or faith.
This ever-increasing, ever-continuing rate of change is not
caused by individual human agency. The change causes itself, especially the
change in storytelling. Our increasing acceleration of innovation arises from
our accumulation of equality, liberty, and freedom of thought; of health, life
expectancy, and population; and of time for nonsubsistence activities, all of
which exist because we have ever more ways to share experience using stories.
Experience is knowledge that we have stored and recorded.
Before we could recall and retell stories, we stored our experiences in the
error-prone, personal, private, and, above all, mortal medium of memory.
The rise of storytelling, through speaking, singing, painting, writing, and
printing, enshrined ever more experience in ways ever more immortal. Printing
is especially good at transforming one person’s experience into everyone’s
experience: Frederick Douglass died in 1895, for example, but we can forever
share some of his lived experience as a slave by reading his books.
The invention of the printing press enabled and inspired
ever more inventions for storing and sharing experiences, among them the first
atlas in 1482, the first postal service in 1516, the first book of mathematical
references and tables in 1533, the first peer-reviewed scientific journal in
1655, the first school textbook in 1690, and the first bookstore in 1732.
These inventions laid the foundation for an explosion of new
storytelling technologies, many of them powered by electricity, in the
nineteenth century, including the first electric telegraph in 1816, the first
free, taxpayer-funded public library in 1833, the first photograph in 1838, the
first paperback in 1841, the first practical typewriter in 1867, the first
carbon copy in 1870 (now the vestigial ‘cc’ – carbon copy – and ‘bcc’ -blind
carbon copy – options in the ‘send’ field of every email), the first telephone
in 1876, the first duplicating machine for low-volume home, school, and office
use in 1886, the first record player in 1887, and the first movie screening and
the first radio transmission in 1895.
The speed with which we invented, improved, and
industrialized these electricity-powered storytelling tools was a consequence
of the accelerative, self-reinforcing effect of shared experience. New
story-telling technologies create new storytelling technologies. Where writing
took five thousand years to mature and spread around the world, and printing
took two thousand years, the electrified storytelling tools of the 1800s
developed and dispersed in little more than a century.
These inventions turned the nineteenth century into what we
would now call an age of big data, where someone sitting at their kitchen table
could benefit from the thoughts and experiences of others, of almost any kind,
from almost any place and time, and preserve their own thoughts and experiences
in handwriting, or as a printing-like typewritten manuscript that could be
duplicated cheaply and in any quantity, from one to millions.
The inventions of the nineteenth century also laid the
foundation for a twentieth-century storytelling technology: the television,
invented by Philo Farnsworth in 1927, 111 years after the invention of the
electric telegraph.”
The eighth section in the fifth chapter, The All-Seeing Eye
of Providence, is titled A New Literacy. On page 160:
“Reading only writing may have been sufficient when writing
was the only technology of story, but it is not enough today. Everyone must be
able to ‘read’ stories no matter what technology is being used to tell them.
This technology-independent literacy is sometimes called
transliteracy, a term that originated in 2005 with Alan Liu, a professor at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and means ‘the ability to read, write
and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and
orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social
networks,’
Transliteracy is especially well understood by librarians,
the underground freedom fighters in the war of stories, whose sworn duty is to
connect people in the universe of the mass of humanity to knowledge. For
example, here is Tom Ipri, a senior librarian at Temple University in
Philadelphia, describing transliteracy’s importance:
Not only does transliteracy question previous assumptions
of authority, it also calls into question the often assumed privilege of
printed text. Transliteracy is not unique in questioning this bias – media
literacy efforts have certainly tried to raise the profile of nonprint
materials. But transliteracy is unique in combining democratizing communication
formats, expressing no preference of one over the other, with emphasizing the
social construction of meaning via diverse media. Because of the ways in which
transliteracy questions authority and devalues hierarchical structures for
disseminating information, transliteracy overlaps concerns much at the heart of
librarianship.”
Very detailed notes at the back of Kevin’s book point out
that the above statement by Tom Ipri was edited for length from one in 2010 –
it is a paraphrase rather than an exact quotation. You can find the original article by Tom Ipri at College and Research Library News (2010, Volume 71,
Number 10) titled Introducing transliteracy: What does it mean to academic
libraries? Also see the Wikipedia page for Transliteracy.
The 1904 drawing of a mysterious stranger (at the top left)
telling a story came from the Library of Congress.
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