Imagine the Thumb Pain…
Last Sunday, I read an article download Wolfen movie in the NYT about the rise of “cell phone novels” in Japan. You read that right: entire novels pecked out on cell phone keypads, written in the abbreviated language of text messaging, with little plot or character development, uploaded to web communities.
The big news is not that these cell phone novels have gained popularity among young people; it’s that they’re beginning to be republished in book form and making money. In fact, of 2007’s top 10 best-selling Japanese books, five are republished cell phone novels. It’s officially a cultural movement.
Predictably, the value of this new genre of writing is hotly debated, with opposing viewpoints falling squarely along generational lines. The younger generation would like the novels to be recognized as a genre, and older folks dismiss the works as “comic books.” It’s understandable how the novels’ language, replete with emoticons and Leet
, might befuddle anybody over 25 who isn’t Merlin Mann
.
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What’s interesting to me is that these young, mostly female novelists aren’t experienced writers. Most of them have never written fiction at all. Was it the cell phone that stirred a desire to write? As a society, we tend to be wary of personal technology, branding it “isolationist” or worrying about its effect on our imaginations. We talk about TV turning our brains to mush, wasting time on the internet, and worry about texting replacing “real communication.”
download Black Rain movie But at least in this case, it looks to me like the technology made an easy avenue for creative expression, instead of hindering it. And it’s not the first time, either: all we need to do is look at Technorati’s growing blog registry to see that folks are expressing themselves left and right on the Internet.
Could it be that as humans, we all have an innate need to communicate and express ourselves, and the technology matters less than we think?