My final project, Mapping Mihály, adapts the novel, Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb to the Miro digital platform. Using internal hyperlinks, interactive tools, and collagesque supporting AI images and gifs, the story of Mihály traveling through Italy comes to life.
Given the traditional use of Miro as a collaborative work platform—not a narrative based interactive story platform—there were interesting challenges to resolve and work around. However, specifically because of the collaborative intention behind the software, opportunities to pull the user in were easily accommodated. There is a lot of potential for building different types of interactive narrative experiences within Miro.
Intended for avid fiction readers and undergrad students looking for a new way to explore this classic of Hungarian fiction, the project does not seek to completely retell every aspect of the novel. It does not, for instance, shift to the perspective of Mihály’s wife, as the original work does, but focuses, instead on the events, locations and people directly impacting Mihály’s journey. Throughout the experience, users are asked to offer their own take on what is happening and are prompted to decide the next best course of action. Prompts throughout the experience to “get lost in thought” help recreate the inner world of the highly impressionable main character as he wrestles with his past and tries to figure out how to create a future.
After yesterday’s gaming discussion I came across this article in PC Gamer and thought I’d share. In it, former Greek Finance Minister, Yanis Varoufakis, who worked for Valve as a consultant on their in-game economy discusses the process of developing a functioning and sustainable financial system within the company’s games back in the 2010s.
I found it interesting how nested games can work (how far can you drill down and spin off?), how much of the “real” world can be injected into the virtual (as Murray asked: when do you start to feel the outside creeping in and lose immersion?), and how simulations can jump outside of their boundaries to other platforms (the “real” world). Wonder if the “real enough to use” (Murray) quality of the Valve economy made it more susceptible to platform jumping—people recognized it as something beyond the virtual space.
Mapping Mihály
Capturing the mental state of a traveller on a Journey by Moonlight
Antal Szerb’s novel, Journey by Moonlight, features the erratic, exciting, and somewhat tortured adventures of Mihály, a young Hungarian newlywed on his honeymoon in Italy. After abandoning his new wife for a hysteria-fueled adventure through the country that stirs up old memories of his youth. As he travels around the country meeting new characters and running into old friends (and frenemies) he grapples with that age-old conundrum: pursue the wild abandon of unknown possibilities and freedom or follow the carved out “respectable” path laid forth by custom. Through memories we are shown the events of his youth that inspired his curiosity for complete freedom, and through each person he comes in contact with we see him offered a new potential path forward. In the end, he is confronted with the exact figure of his youth who most dramatically inspired in him a susceptibility to questioning tradition and chasing reinvention and the unknown.
For my final project I would like to create a visual schematic of Mihály’s memories, his journey through Italy, and the characters he interacts with—branching out and connecting the influences that weigh on his mind at all times as he grapples with this major life decision. In this way, I can present as evidence the various elements that contribute to his behavior and the decision he makes at the close of the novel. Building on insights garnered through work in Miro for the second group project, I would like to bring Mihály’s mental pathways to life using the same platform. Using the project board, I would like to create a framework that indicates the interconnectivity of the past and the present, and the physical locations and individuals who impact Mihály. I do not intend to account for the entire novel—there, for example, a portion is devoted to the misadventures Erzsi, Mihály’s wife —but I will account for every character whose existence presses on Mihály’s mental state—creating the push and pull he struggles with throughout the novel. The final piece will resemble a narrative only up to a certain point—using hyperlinks within the text, a user will be able to jump between areas of Mihály’s world and potentially travel through Italy, but ultimately the goal is to account for Mihály’s experience. I think it’s important to be able to see the schematic fully—or at least portions of it at a time—as a way of representing the constant retreading down neural pathways and constant hum and glow of all of the emotional, intellectual, physical, and social data we process as we maneuver the world. Using a digital storytelling platform like Twine would help the user slowly build up some idea of Mihály’s situation and mental state, but by using Miro I can immediately present the pressure he feels and holds within him and start to mimic the sensation of navigating his anguish and indecision.
After users have explored Mihály’s world, I will invite them to select the path that is most attractive to them, before revealing Mihály’s own decision that closes out the novel.
Barthes tells us that, “confronting the work–a traditional notion, long since, and still today, conceived in what we might call a Newtonian fashion–there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories.” His description of the text starts to resemble that of Dark Matter—not able to be directly or immediately perceived, but is rather, evidenced by its impact. I took this to mean there are certain persuasive and influential realities that govern our human perception, experience and behavior—though we are not always aware of their impact. In art, we attempt to give shape to some these forces acting on us—charting or claiming understanding of what we feel but don’t necessarily clearly see.
In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf drills down into very specific examples of these forces—spotlighting the causes and reactions tied to universally human themes of aging, spontaneity (freedom) versus security, conformity versus individualism—and sets them, seemingly, adrift in the minds of her characters. For all the precious behaviors of 1920s London she describes, Woolf makes her text felt through the undulating undercurrent of her key themes. Despite Woolf’s claim that there was no grand scheme in the writing of the book, an armature of precise timing, balance of character focus, and prism-like refractions of her key themes emerges. In the end, the novel itself feels quite tidy, even if her characters’ internal dialogues reveal them to be anything but.
In working on this annotation project, I thought it important to capture some aspect of both the tidiness and the mess of Woolf’s stream of conscious-driven meditation on social British social obligation and human mortality. I feared that using a tool like Manifold, despite its many merits, would give far too much ground to an academic tidiness. I felt Miro offered a few beneficial tools that would help bring out what I felt was embedded in the text. First, it allows the text to be viewed all at once—one could theoretically zoom out and sense the body of work and the overlapping occurrence of many of the books events, and have an immediate impression of character interactions with each other and external events. Second, I felt that externalizing the annotations—making them viewable at all times (there are ways to hide them, with a slightly different set up) helped reinforce the concept of stream of consciousness—immediately sussing out Woolf’s intricately woven references to history, society, psychology, and geography. Third, Miro allows for linking between text and objects on the board, with the screen traveling across the terrain of the text to land on the final destination. This physical experience, to me, suggests the various migrations of Woolf’s characters around London, and even hints at the passage of time, a key component of the novel, as you shift to a new space on the board. And Finally, placing external links directly on the board generates a preview of the link—imagery that potentially answers the immediate needs of the viewer, keeping them engaged and focused on the text at hand. Of course, readers can jump into the rabbit hole if the wish. In addition, using the search function,certain patterns within the work emerge. Quick context and word frequencies can be found—speaking to the rhythms Woolf baked into the narrative.
Overall, I feel that the resulting object functions on many levels. It starts to trace some of the “Dark Matter” of the text—revealing it to the naked eye, while also answering the immediate need of sharing relevant factual information related to references contained within the “work.” Although it is perhaps not considered best practice, as a deeper expression of the multilayered of Woolf’s novel, I could imagine a thicket of stickies, links, images, and videos crowding the margins of chapters, giving an immediate impression of the depth, interconnectivity, and overarching structure of the text to shake off purely practical annotation ini favor of becoming, in its new form, a new “work” in and of itself.
Our readings this week focus a lot on methods intention behind knowledge gathering, sorting, retrieval, and output. Experts and “creative thinkers” are presented, seemingly ashuman interface to the networked nodes of their learnings, and the articles give us insight into how they might best develop or lean into this capacity. At the same time, Ann Blair’s Note Taking as an Art of Transmission and Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think both have, between their lines, an invitation to question which works are worthy of reference and who exactly is doing the referencing?
Both readings draw heaving from specifically European approaches to gathering information and knowledge.Blair does make mention in passing of Chinese and Arabic traditions, but spends the bulk of her writing in exploring Jeremiah Drexel’s delineation of note capturing motivations and techniques. In Drexel’s time a good memory is “a sign of moral worth and virtuous hard work.” Developing the memory, and the actively engaging in note taking, also seems to denote a pronounced effort to develop the self, elevating status as one is able to seamlessly and “silently” incorporate learning into intellectual expressions. Lemmata, adversaria, and historica, Drexel’s three types of notation, each serve a different purpose and speak to various relationships with a text and its author—yet each is heavily shaped by the ability and intention of the reader. Readers must be discerning, and therefore already well-versed to be able to determine the most original and striking passages and thoughts. Interestingly, Blair mentions that historica, notes related to “anecdotes of human behavior” meant to be incorporated into ones own work, and adversaria, excerpts copied directly from a text, can be incorporated into ones own work (intellectual and personal) without citation. Readers can ingest, reconfigure, and expel a new text that an unversed reader could mistake as original or potentially miss obscure references directed at experts and scholars. This technique recalls the hypertextuality of Joyce’s Ulysses as discussed in Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires. This multi-layering and weaving of references generates jewel-like texts created in rarified conditions inaccessible to most. The items chosen for reference are each signals of what is of value—signs of the author’s (and knowledgeable reader’s) discerning and knowledgable mind, cementing status within specific circles of cultural expression. At the same time, these works act as a kind of mapping of dominance, each vertex a node of cultural reference to worthy values and interests of a time, place, and people. The nodes may stretch into historical spaces but not into others, telling us which moments are worth our notice and deeper exploration. They may also aggregate esteemed philosophical thought of dominant cultural thinkers, sidelining thought that doesn’t align with specific values and world views, suggesting ways of processing the past, present and imagine the future.
Bush’s piece also makes reference to the important work of knitting shared knowledge together. Having access to information in a way that mimics our associative brains is central to his discussion of the necessities of future technological advancements. What Bush does that Blair’s discussion of Drexel only hints at, is speak directly of the expert as the central and singular figure for which knowledge acquisition and processing is intended. It isn’t in the service of ensuring that knowledge is shared with a greater number of people that Bush stresses the need for technological advancements—he means specifically to empower the true creative thinkers.
“For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.”
With that, Bush creates a hierarchy between types of thought— suggesting creators are mature while repetitive thinkers, working within closed systems, are not. This worship of newness, of the erudite and innovative thinker as a pioneer who should not be bogged down with the drudgery (on which his work rests) sits in conflict with the great possibilities presented by the digital world he envisions. Bush’s vision, like Drexel’s, imagines the access and indexing of knowledge will inform the output of the learned scholar or expert. It’s important to call out the outright (and often sexist) relegation of the unseen contributors to the output to obscurity and a lesser-than status. In the sciences, the human computers of NASA of the 40s and 50s come to mind. Female engineers, mathematicians and scientists relegated to the background all the while providing critical input to major developments in space travel. Bush’s insistence on designating their thought as less mature and, therefore, of lower status, ignores the necessary expertise, insight, and creativity needed to complete their work. He betrays his own lack of expertise by imagining that this work doesn’t require extensive familiarity, curiosity, and dexterity as well was a special mental capacity and tendency for problem solving.
But beyond this shortcoming, there is still the fact that the digitization Bush proposes has, in practice, broken down the crisp edges and hierarchy of the siloed “mature” and immature thinkers. The potential for a richly woven piece of work doesn’t sit squarely on the shoulders of the author or expert, it is now possible, and often beneficial, to share its development with a wider community. It may have been too difficult to imagine social computing and its impact on the scholarly process he subscribed to. It had stood unchallenged for generations, and its shake up came in waves when it did come. It wasn’t until Web 2.0 that we really saw a reconfiguration of digital information architecture that dramatically widened the potential for reader activities and collaboration (From Reading to Social Computing, Alan Liu ). Inviting in a wider number of perspectives has helped shine a light on who we have elevated as experts and luminaries—and who has wrongly been excluded. We now routinely question and try to evolve the traditions from which experts emerge, allowing for a more varied understanding of knowledge acquisition, processing, and importance. The web of references in Ulysses would look very different were it written today—pulling in nodes previously overlooked, misunderstood, or demeaned—shifting across traditional western points of value and importance to cast an even wider net.
One of the great dangers of unchecked celebration of innovation, and Experts is the passing on of faulty, biased, or uninformed interpretations positioned as groundbreaking or visionary. Historians, for example, have evolved their interpretations of the past based on previous writings but also the political and cultural moment from which they write. Looking at the telling of antebellum United States, for example, presents a distinct evolution of perspectives, contemporary tellings to present day, influenced by racial bias, periods of social upheaval, cultural awareness, and the arrival of the digital world. Historians play an important role in our understanding of our institutions and conventions, and their work can have a huge impact on policy and social norms. With the ability to access more information quicker it’s easier for archives to be mined for new insights, but, more importantly, connectivity has provided the ability to pull in a great number of perspectives from various scholars in the same field and beyond to better triangulate an interpretation of the past that gets us closer (never perfectly) to understanding what transpired before from a multifaceted perspective.
Certainly Drexler and Bush would be blown away by the tools so readily available to scholars, professional and amateur. I would, however, love to know what they thought of an audience who also has greater access to information and talks back, insists on collaborating, and questions authority.
Our group, assigned to create an audio book, chose to weave three related stories into one. We used The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892) as the master recording, into which we spliced recordings of The Box Social(James Reaney, 1996) and The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin; 1894). The heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper is a writer who, we imagined, could be the author of the other to stories. Her experiences and observations wove easily into the other two stories which deal with a similar theme: women whose lives are stifled and negatively impacted by men in their lives. Taken together, the three stories give a rich impression of how this oppression takes shape, and the different ways its impact is processed by and emerges through the women it affects. To emphasize this variation and layer we chose to have three different readers, one for each story.
I was assigned the reading of The Yellow Wallpaper. I knew, from my previous experience listening to Publivox works, that creating an audio recording of a text would bring about unexpected sensations and realizations. I had experienced in my comparative listening of the Sherlock Holmes tale A Scandal in Bohemia the impact a reader has on the interpretation, enjoyment, and understanding of the listener. If unmoored in the story—presenting it simply as words translated from written to aural, the story could feel stilted with the emotional stripped away. Too professional and polished and it could dehumanize the characters and center the reader. Read with empathy, enhanced by macro and micro understanding of the tale paired with an ability to read between the lines, and the story can really spark to life.
I got set up and ready to go, with a goal in mind—bring the story to life! Feel our characters experience and immerse yourself! All of this creative direction buzzing in my head left me unprepared for the physical challenge of performing the text! The constant need to clear the throat, swallow, or quench a sudden urgent need for water. The mind jumping and distracted by anachronistic and unrelated sounds—sirens, honking, dogs barking and neighbors stomping. More than once I found my mouth simply would not form the words distinctly—bumbling together and rounding out the sharp edges of that needed precise articulation. A woman of some standing in 1892 slurring her words? It can’t be. Despite reading ahead to anticipate the flow of a passage, I’d still find myself in funny little corners where the tone of a previous sentence simply did not neatly connect to the next. I became a bit obsessed with pausing and rerecording — my liberal use of “pause” leaving little blips all through the recording.
Even more surprising than the physical realties of audio book narration, however, was hearing what I had actually captured. When I recorded, I did what I could to immerse myself in the characters voice. She was writing in her diary, a setting where she would presumably be most expressive and safely house her true emotions. As I spoke into the microphone, I would lean into certain words with an image of our heroine writing and reliving what she described. Given that the story portrays her being isolated, with activities limited and monitored, she would need to have a bit of desperation. In the opening, that might take shape as her trying to make peace with the situation up, looking at it through the lens of her oppressor husband/doctor, until that façade begins to crack revealing an frantic delusion centered on restoring her own freedom and sense of agency. My idea was that I would set out almost too chipper and light at the beginning, as she tries to convince herself that all is fine—maybe with a few cracks of awareness that she chases away. As the story progressed I would become more frantic—speaking faster and louder with more emphasis on certain words. Our heroine ironically becomes more hysterical as she, in her own mind, becomes more in control. The issue is when I listened back is that what I had thought were emotional readings were actually mild mannered and distant. The distance between the voice in my head and the one in the recording was immense and surprising. Either my natural or conditioned tendency to softening my expressions interfered with what I had been trying to do artistically. But I’m not an actress—so how to render her story in “full color” without going off the rails into campy emoting? I muddled through—admitted to myself that some of it would likely be absurd, but noted this new realization of myself. Thanks to this experience I now wonder what people are hearing whenever I speak, because it clearly is not what I hear in my mind.
That distance between my internal and external expression of the story puts in relief the conscious structuring and perimeter of a story. Any hesitation or discrepancy in flow and emotion, and immersion is lost for the reader and the listener. I believe that there’s an authenticity that naturally occurs when we hear any story in our minds—as we absorb and activate it, weaving in our own voice and experiences. That is ours alone. Once we turn to share it out it necessarily cannot be the same, unless you are specifically skilled at the translation of the internal to the external. Overall, this experience has given me a greater appreciation for the artistic process behind acting. The ability to take someone else’s story, enhance it with your own internal understanding and reflect that back into the world is extraordinary. For me it is much more difficult than storytelling alone—which necessarily includes personal tailoring and adjustments for mood and audience—leeway in its telling. But to take the boundaries of a written piece and still pump it full of life and meaning, never changing a word, is a different talent all together.
Sharing a couple of articles I thought were interesting in relation to what we’ve been discussing in class for anyone with extra time on their hands. They are fun fairly quick reads, I promise! The first, is a response to a letter written into the Wired magazine advice column, Cloud Support, looking for reassurance that disdain for emoji and gif usage is valid. The second is an Ezra Klein piece (NYT) that contains interesting thoughts around content and platform pairing. The article, with quite a bit drawn from McLuhan (surprise!!), spends a lot of time discussing television’s tendency to create the expectation of being entertained in the viewer. The implication being—what does that do to news, education or other types of information that may not appropriately pair with that expectation? What does that mean for audio books? How has television influenced our expectation beyond that platform to be entertained? If you record a book without embellishments do you actually mimic the “blank slate” presentation of print that allows the reader to actively engage in world creation? If you apply sound effects, spirited embodiment of characters and music how are you changing the reception of the information (spoken and unspoken) contained in the text?
Before this assignment I had never listened to an audio recording of a work that originated in print. On the rare occasion, I’ve been engrossed in audio-native storytelling. It was easy enough to get swept up in Serial, a suspenseful telling of a twisty-turny real life mystery sitting on the border between journalism and entertainment. So this was new territory—and initially quite overwhelming. What would be the best way to become acquainted with the sensations, possibilities, and distinctions of this particular form of storytelling? Ultimately, I chose to visit characters who I am fully familiar with—partly to whittle down the seemingly endless list of possibilities, but also to provide a grounding and basis for comparison with my personal experience with the story confined to the page. I say confined, but in reality a fictional story is only confined to the page if it is left unread. As soon as we engage with the string words threaded together to incite emotion give shape to settings and voice to characters—the stories spring to life in our minds and intermingle with our own experiences and impressions. In fact, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, perhaps overly familiar to many, have long inspired interpretations in film, television, and, I’ve now discovered, audio recordings. The lengthy list of productions related to their stories could almost make you forget that they had been born in printed short stories to begin with.
For this assignment I chose to listen to three presumably amateur recordings of A Scandal in Bohemia by Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle. I chose all of my recordings from PubliVox, the non-profit open source website that allows anyone from the public to upload recordings of texts in the public domain. Each of my three readers brought the story of a Bohemian king’s panicked attempt to contain his scandalous association with a wily and charming female performer to life in a completely different manner. Each one approached the representation of Holmes and Watson as well as their relationship to each other with such wide variation that it was almost surprising to imagine that, after so many existing expressions of these characters more subtle shifts were left to be made.
Recording 1:
TBOL3
My first recording was created by the user TBOL3. No real information is provided about them personally, but if I were to guess this reader is an American male, 14-17 years old, who may wear braces. His reading style is halting at times, his pronunciation of both English and German vocabulary is spotty, and his recording instruments and techniquescreate a tinny distance in the sound quality. At times a shift is felt in the pace of his reading, as he presumably nears the end of a page and prepares to turn it…which you also hear. Paired with the gentle initial lisp dotted the recording—this created an almost endearing quality akin to peeking in on an older brother reading to their sleepy little sibling.
Although TBOL3 did attempt to render a British accent for our hero and sidekick, it was simply too difficult to maintain throughout the text or render the characters fully distinct. The accents come in and out of focus, never quite feeling authentic. Interestingly, as the text shifts from a solitary Watson to a visit with Sherlock, the attempt at an English accept ramps up—almost as though their proximity unconsciously prompted the reader to emphasize it. Upon the arrival of our Bohemian Prince, we find that the idea of a second foreign accent is simply too much or, maybe the impact of German on the English language is just unknown by our reader—our King speaks in an American rendering of a British accent, but emphatically—as if a more pronounce accent of any sort will help distinguish his higher social standing.
Overall, I was left wondering if perhaps this young reader was using the PubliVox platform to improve their reading skills,if this semi-casual hobby, or, finally, if this recordings stemmed from a class assignment as well (the recording of the full anthology was done collaboratively). The characters never quite stepped away from the basic assumptions that have been made about them—Watson the unassuming and even a bit childlike wingman to Sherlock’s commanding intellect. Beyond English, it is hard to interpret any personal details from the way the characters are rendered—our reader simply needed to get through the text. Mispronunciations, ( Prague as “pragooo” and carte blanche as “carty blanchy”), wavering accents, and the overall speedy cadence of someone unable to fully render the fullness of his characters made it impossible to become immersed in the story.
My second reader clearly has a bit more experience under his belt. A trained voice and professional equipment elevated the experience starting with the title page. An American male ~40-55 years old, he created an almost cozy rich “silence” to house his low velvety delivery of the material. Interestingly, his training may have hindered him at times. Despite excellent enunciation and a smooth flow, he fell into an almost robotic delivery and cadence that can best be compared with the swiftly spoken “small print” of a radio ad. Despite there being no PubliVox limits on his recording time, the steady clip suggested the awareness of someone used to squeezing into scheduled time slots and attempting to limit post production cuts.
The text starts off with Watson’s inner dialogue read in the readers American accent. Not until Watson shares space with Sherlock does the English accent appear—applied to both characters unevenly, and more pronounced when specifically British phrasing appears. (Example: usage of words like “Indeed” or “quite ”—“It’s quite too funny.”). Mr. Smith’s Sherlock feelsflippant and almost whimsical, a stark contrast from some of the more sober Sherlock’s we’ve seen in the past (Jeremy Brett!). It’s almost as if this Sherlock is deriving a bright joy from toying with his interlocutors and digging into a little challenge, instead of the almost dry misanthropic exasperation that commonly seeps out of the pores of some earlier Sherlocks.
Mr. Smiths attempt at a German accent in English is a loose approximation, possibly inspired my American tv or film, but not drawn from any first hand knowledge of the German language. Knowing how much Sherlock Holmes prides himself in his complete a thorough knowledge of any subject at hand, it didn’t ring true when he mispronounced the King’s title— and it became even harder to give into the story when the German speaker himself mispronounced German words and inconsistently applied German phonetic treatments to English words (ex. “Gesellschaft”’ss not pronounced like a “z”, “Ormstein”’s “st” not pronouncedas “sht”.)
Overall, this reading was just fine. It faithfully retold the story as it appears on the page, and there was a professional flow that kept the energy lively and engaging enough, but when compared with my personal experience with the characters or even existing renderings in television and film (and the final recording review in this blog), it felt like a missed opportunity to create a more engaging and rich experience. I would be concerned if this were someone’s first or only experience with these beloved classic characters.
My third and final recording featured a British woman, ~50-60 years old who is clearly a very talented professional audio book reader. Her PubliVox profile did, in fact, feature a link to her webpage which alludes to her professional recordings and experience. The production quality of the recording is professional and intimate, but without the almost overly smooth or cozy effect of Mark Smith. Ms. Golding’s voice is confident and smooth without needing to be buttery. This actually gives her more range, as she is not always trying to overlay a velveting quality on characterizations that do not merit it.
Her command of the material would almost lead you to believe she wasn’t reading at all, but speaking directly from the mind of the characters. Of course she has an advantage, naturally having a British accent and a better command on a range of possible expressions of it, but how she employs this in service of the story is what really struck me. At the opening of the story, Watson’s inner dialogue feels so natural as to draw you in—it pours out, as if following a spontaneous train of thought and exhibits emphasis on certain words and phrases as though the feeling had naturally come to light in the mind of our doctor. Watson is rendered as a man Infused with emotion and quickly clear, through Ms. Golding’s delivery, that he holds deep empathy for and attachment to Holmes. All this while Ms. Golding simultaneouslymaintains the balanced and sober delivery becoming a respected doctor of his time.
Where it gets particularly interesting is when Watson is in the company of Sherlock. Ms. Golding’s Sherlock has a drawn out speaking cadence, as though he is at all times coping with a tendency to languish. There’s a wistfulness, maybe stemming from his regular escape into deep thought and substance abuse. Overall he feels self-content, somewhat distracted, and unbothered. Watson’s tone however, now expressing himself vocally to Sherlock, shifts away from the sober flowing cadence of his inner thoughts. His voice becomes a bit high pitched and his speech is clipped and precise. This helps create a deeper contrast between the two main main characters, but it also creates a distinction between Watson’s inner and outer voices. This provides a depth and richness to the character and the story itself, that inspired an entirely new personal experience of the story. Watson is often depicted as “straight man” to Holmes’s moody brilliance. Holmes’s quirks and genius are set in relief by Watson’s more pedestrian presentation. Ms. Golding, in making such a stark distinction between Watson’s inner and spoke voice, asks us to consider the the characters inner depth and his role and expression in society.I, personally, had always looked at Watson as a kind of second fiddle, but Ms. Golding’s rendering of him made me question if I had not missed the point of the stories entirely. Was the anomaly of Holmes’s genius really just a catalyst to better understand the impact of being confronted with the deep awareness of human behavior and suffering that Holmes’ represents? Essentially, are the clever intricacies of the mysteries the window dressing, but Watson’s inner musings and reactions the real substance of the stories?
Ms. Golding continued to impress with her range of character voices—shifting her voice deeper to bring weight to our Bohemian king, and giving him the German accent he deserves (and Holmes the appropriate command of the German language). The dainty and high pitched renderings of the female characters might feel unexpected, but perhaps feeling the need to make a dramatic shift from her own female voice, she opted to render them unquestionably distinct. Like the other readers, she avoided sound effects, although she did give depth to a shouting crowd by overlaying several recordings of her own voice in different characters.
Ms. Golding’s recording really inspired me to reconsider my understanding characters that considered utterly familiar—known quanitites. Her telling fully immersed me in a world that was both familiar and surprisingly new all at once, rekindling the enjoyment I felt as a young reader of the same tales. Her talent showcases the distinct qualities and power of an audio rendition of an originally printed text, and the critical attention to casting an artist who can make all the different between a recording falling flat or truly singing.
“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (Nicolas Carr) Is the novel dead? like Will Self proclaims, struck down by modern communication technology? Each of these questions, honestly, seems a little beside the point, when looking at the development of communication technology over the ages. Generational trends, which loom large when viewed up close (i.e. are familiar and ubiquitous to you in your time (hello, wired phone!)), can blot out other possibilities, making the arrival of the new technology can feel shocking and instantly threatening. But technology is simply the tools overlaid on the resource of our collective knowledge to extract its truths—much like a web browser visualizes written code. We should trust that on a whole, when it comes to communication technology, we humans tend to craft tools that help us understand more of the universe than we did before, and each tool has brought us closer to connecting and engaging our collective understanding and experience of the world to help us navigate the “why” of our existence on both a personal and social level.
Think of it! The written word itself, the codex, wood pulp paper (Price, pg. 7), the printing press, the newspaper, the novel, television, and the internet. Each a wonder—providing more effected tools to share, learn, and discuss — and each creating a broader reach, creating access to and for more hearts and minds. They are different modes— each conveying information differently, varying in speed, scarcity, and complexity, but each tapping into the resource of collective human knowledge and powered by our human need to engage.As Alan Liu puts it in relation to recent technologies and online behaviors—“… social computing and literary activity are both aspects of a single communicational phenomenon: the contemporary form of the human need to say something well (memorably, persuasively, movingly, beautifully, wittily, and so on) to someone else.” (Alan Liu)
Communication technology is often a target for disparagement. It is, after all, one of the quickest evolving and most often used. In fact, the criticisms lobbed at modern digital communication technology are not even unique to this era. Reading habits predating our digital world exhibit similarities to today’s, and the ills prescribed to digital tools were once prescribed to everything from the written word itself to newspapers and novels. For example, people never really universally devoted full attention to their books, because we’ve always multitasked, and we’ve always recombined and skipped around in our reading and inquiry. (Price, pgs. 9-10). Even pegging the internet as the death of the bookstore is shortsighted—conveniently forgetting the impact of the Barnes & Nobles’ of the world on independent book stores which paved the way for Amazon’s gobbling up of the bookselling market. (Coady and Kennedy pg. 36). The impact of digital technology on our ability to remain present has been document with older forms of communication technology, as illustrated in Stanley Kubrick’s mid-forties photograph featuring a subway car filled exclusively with passengers with their noses buried in newspapers. (Lynn Coady and Kennedy pg. 42). All of this suggests that these behaviors are tied to underlying human tendencies that digital tools simply brought to the forefront in a more visible way. (Price, pgs. 9-10)
Why all of this animosity towards new technology time and time again? Pushing us to reconsider how we do things and step into a new framework can feel like a threat to the methods we’ve used to build meaning and security in a world that is so often nonsensical. In a reactionary state, we might assume the arrival of a new technology instantly implies its predecessor is of little or no worth (it doesn’t). Whether it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald disparaging film and his perceived limitations of it to capture the full range of the human emotional experience, Joyce Carol Oates accusing television of reducing humans to small and trivial beings (Coady and Kennedy pg. 14-15), or ministers railing against the novel as a great distraction and threat to our eyesight and doctors diagnosing newspaper addiction (Price, pg. 12)— we as humans can’t help but bristle with suspicion at the new. In all fairness, if new technology marks our location on the long human path to greater understanding, it acts, equally, as a marker of our finite place on that path. It can feel like being pulled out of the game by the coach when what you believed to be tried and true (physical books!, scholarly pursuits!, “serious” literature!) is called into question, or worse, set aside. You’ve, after all, pushed the ball forward as much as you could with the tools you had, and played by the rules. And Bam— the game changes, and with it systems of discourse —the “core circuit” as it were, is thrown up in the air. That could even make a person a little bitter (hello, Will Self!) — that loss of status and being able to keep up. The trick is to not look at getting benched as a negation of all you’ve contributed. As the unbothered WNBA superstar, Sue Bird, recently said about losing the last game before her retirement “It’s not the story. It’s not the story of a career.” (The New York Times, Sept. 9, 2022).
We’ve got to keep our eyes on the prize—on the “career”—the long path we as a species are plotting across the ages towards deeper understanding and connection. The word “technology” comes from the Greek roots “teckhne” (art, craft) and “logy” (study of). In this configuration it means art and craft, which both imply humanity and its creations are what is being studied. So in a sense, technology is really all about crafting tools to help us understand what it means to be human. In studying the progression of technology we can map the the many ways we’ve moved closer to tapping into our collective understanding of the human experience. Modern digital communication is just the latest iteration of our human desire to connect, understand, express, and learn. We should maintain a healthy suspicion of what’s new (not all tech serves us well), but we should also ask if, regardless of how it relates to existing practices, it serves our longer goal of gaining better understanding of the world and each other. If a criticism lies only in that a new technology challenges existing norms — what’s “serious” what’s “meaningful” (these terms coming with their own myriad of assumptions, we should take a beat to consider if this isn’t just an emotional reaction to realizing that the human search for understanding and connection will go on without us.
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