This is an edited version of my contribution to a conference and debate about the impact of the Internet on Literature, held in Barcelona in 2006: some of the thoughts have been rendered redundant by history: but not all of them. 

 What a great subject for a cafe@europa. Thanks to the internet, I am replying immediately, with my unmediated thoughts late on a Friday night/Saturday morning. I only do this because the subject is so provocative and stimulating. Otherwise I would be sleeping! I think the internet is part of the ongoing ‘electrification of the word’.

The word, the logos, is such a fixed and profound part of Hellenic thinking. It required education, expensive vellum and the social organisation of the monasteries to develop. In the age of mechanical reproduction, to be ‘published’ to be official, required either the apparatus of state or commercial capital investment.

 But what do you need today? For the means of production, just a printer and a computer. And for the means of distribution and exchange? A blog site.

My personal feeling is that the age of the word – the hieratic, priestly, authored word – is the exception. For most of history, language has been oral – fluid, shared, unrecorded. The paradox of the information age is that the written word, thanks to this computer, and this internet connection, has become as fluid as the spoken word. Literacy has returned to orality. As Mikhail Bakhtin said – it’s all just dialogue.

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So I agree there has been a desacralisation of the word in the information age, but I would also agree that this process began with Gutenberg, with the mechanical reproduction of text.

As Walter Benjamin explained, in mechanical reproduction text loses its direct connection with handwriting, its aura or physical residual contact with its creator.

 I suppose it’s not surprising that our notions of divine creation are shaped by changes in human creativity. With mechanical reproduction, human creators became more distanced from their works, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the rise of information technology was accompanied by the theology of a ‘hidden god’ at work in nature, a deus absconditus, who employed intervening processes of gravity or evolution to express himself.

Flaubert draws on the same analogy when he says that an author should be in his work as god is in the world, invisible but all powerful.

 So to me, this information age begins in the early modern period, sometime around the late 16th early 17th century – appropriately for us, around the time of Cervantes and Shakespeare – when there was a sudden shift in what I’ll call the ‘technology of knowledge’.

The question is whether the last twenty or so years are just a part of the same process of speeding up mechanical reproduction, or if something else more profound has taken place.

I would also add that mechanical reproduction didn’t mean the death of god, or the death of the author, but both creators became more distant from their works and their audiences.

About ten years ago I wrote an essay for the New Statesman, updating Benjamin for the information age. I called the brief piece the work of art in the digital domain. Some of these issues were explored there, but one paradox did strike me.

 Thanks to digital technology, it was clear even then that, working alone on our computers, we could edit video, music and sound, compose and tamper with images. To me, this represented the revenge of the writer. Sound and image had also been turned into code, and could be manipulated like text. In effect, digitization turned everything into literature, ecriture, and more people into authors.

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I think that is the danger in all discussions of technological innovation- the idea that the printing press, or the telegraph, or the internet, came along one day and changed everything for good.

History is not a succession of innovations, it is fragmented, parallel, and discontinuous…Nothing need ‘replace’ anything else. Every new medium has its practical constraints, and ultimately its human limitations

One common complaint i often hear about these new information technologies is that texting, emailing, and blogging are somehow undermining our standards of grammar, spelling and punctuation.

It’s certainly true that my kids ‘txt’ all the time, and message me weird coded messages on chat ‘soz dad l8 – brb’. Sorry dad i’m late for school. Be right back. However, both my msn/txt children are gr8 at school, and just as they shift their accents from the argot of the playground to the politesse of family dinners, they seem very adaptable when it comes to the rigours of exams against the acronyms of text messaging. Two styles can co-exist simultaneously, often with great wit and vigour from the cross fertilisation.

When it comes to rules of grammar, punctuation and spelling, i always remember that Britain’s most creative period of writing, and the birth place of this modern English now spoken and written throughout the world, was during the age of Elizabethan Jacobean theatre and poetry – a time in which ‘Shakspeare’ spelt his name in ten different ways, and the rules of spelling and grammar were in flux.

That’s one way that the new knowledge technologies are affecting the physics of our textuality (and no doubt our sexuality). But when it comes to ‘hypertextuality’, I always feel we are straying into areas of’ metaphysics’, indeed theology, as I pointed out in a previous intervention.

 So perhaps one way of looking at hypertextuality is to go full throttle for this quasi-religious approach, and since literature and the arts have classically offered some kind of substitution for religion, then it may be germane to ask… how does the internet affect our idea of immortality?

Years ago, as a tense teenager, I longed to have a book published. I was reading the canon of famous writers, and then books about these writers – Eliot, Lawrence, eckett – and my idea of salvation was to become famous enough that someone would write a book about me. In the years since then, many things have happened – not least a realisation of the limits of my own literary talent – but I wonder if a broader cultural shift has taken place: i.e. the decline of the book, the printed page, as an emblem of social approval, legitimacy and authority.

In the era of Hola! magazine, the National Enquirer, and in literature of intrusive scandalous biographies, probably the last thing now I’d want is to be ‘immortal’ in this way – like Primo Levi or Elvis Presley. But I wonder how the internet changes our notions of fame, immortality and Parnassus.

About five years ago, I explored with an entrepreneurial friend of the idea of setting up soul.com, in which people could upload their lives to a web space memorial, complete with architecture, music, photos, poems and songs, which would act as a repository of their soul.

We imagined it a bit like the Sims or Sim City, the difference being everyone would build their own mausoleum or utopia. 700 years ago, Dante’s image of paradiso was firmly based in the hypertextuality of books; he saw every redeemed sinner as a page in god’s library. Oddly enough, with more and more people having access to publication, we all have a chance to be at least a ‘web page’ in the library of mankind, and have our fifteen minutes of fame. We have got our place in the library in the absence of god.

This seems to be the crucial problem. In this electronic era of information technology we can all be visible. The biggest anxiety is not expression, but the lurking realisation that nobody may be watching. There is presence, but no judgement. Who is going to ‘editorialise’ this mass of human expression? We don’t have a god anymore. But we do have google. Has google replaced god?

It may mark the end of culture as we know it. The sideshows are raucous and sensational. They revolve around puerile fantasies of sex and aggression, horror and sleaze. They are also highly addictive. Something in their flickering imagery mesmerises the young (in some cases inducing fits) resulting in short attention spans, truancy, and an explosion of juvenile crime.

Initial comparisons are promising. Like early film, interactive games have become an unpredicted commercial success. In a few years, Sega and Nintendo have amassed a four to five billion dollar annual turnover, capturing some two-thirds of the recorded music market, a quarter of the entertainments industry as a whole. Just as cinema emerged from the protozoic soup of 19th century technology: Fantascopes, Zoopraxiscopes, Kinetoscopes, Zoetrope, Vitascopes, today's interactive media betray a similar proliferation of proprietorial formats. In the last year, in the compact disc market alone, Sega has launched the Mega-CD, Amiga the CD-TV, Philips CD-I. In a market teeming with life, natural selection is already in progress. Some of these mutations will be unviable: others might only last of few years. But among them, crawling out of the swamp, might be the prototype of a new medium destined to colonise the earth.

One proof will be the fear and loathing the new arrival attracts. Writing about film in The Work of Art in the Era of Mechanical Reproduction Walter Benjamin noted how new art forms initially appear brash and monstrous. They have, by necessity, to shake traditions, offend older sensibilities. Video games certainly fulfil this brief. Witness the uproar that has attended the proposed release of Night Trap for the Sega Mega-CD. The game is billed as an 'interactive movie' in which - among other things - you have to rescue some semi-naked women from a lurking alien threat. Night Trap was one of the first computer games to be referred to British Board of Film Censors (where it was awarded a 15 certificate). By video standards, the content was mild. But the disproportionate outrage just adds to the medium's credentials. As Malcolm McClaren has pointed out: if you want to rebel against your parents, the last thing you'll play is loud rock and roll. If you really want to get them worried, go and play a computer game.

Something strange has happened to the great microchip revolution. Cheap computer processing was supposed to bring us smart TVs and digital organisers, put the sophistication of a graphics workstation, recording studio and typesetting shop within everyone's reach. Through the home computer we were going to be connected to global networks of data, ushered into the era of information. Instead, rather than information, the bulk of home computer processing is dedicated to the production of disinformation: of simulations and games, Sonic the Hedgehog and Super Mario.

Maybe it's not so strange. Some marketing manager coined 'infotainment' to describe the paradox of information and play and, at heart, cinema also displays the same ambivalence. In the 1870s Étienne Marey and Eadward Muybridge developed the cine camera to help their investigations into animal locomotion. Louis Lumière thought cinema as a tool for scientific research, a way of recording and analysing events, not unlike a computer. It took a showman and conjurer to turn it into a vehicle for mass appeal.

The showman was Georges Méliès (an exhibition of whose career is still running at the Museum of the Moving Image). The Frenchman was the first fully to explore the fantastic possibilities of film: his favourite genres were fairytales, burlesque and science fiction. Méliès mastered endless unique special effects for making women turn into mermaids, heads to fall off or inflate, bodies dismember themselves and individual limbs go dancing about the screen. He loved the irrational side of film, the erotic, the comic, the macabre.

Cinema partly derives from photo realism, from the documentary impulse to describe the world, but Méliès represents the other equally important tradition: stage magic, deception, trick photography. Despite his kitsch and playfulness, Méliès probably advanced the genre further than any other single figure. Indeed, by pursuing the lowest possible audience taste, he was testing the form to the highest technical limits. After all, what better proof of the verisimilitude of the moving image than that it convey a sexual charge? And what more graphic demonstration of its capabilities than showing a man removing his head five times, and placing each singing head on a bar of five telegraph wires like so many musical notes?

In the history of cinema, play has often been the mother of invention. For the new digital media, this has proved equally true. In the 1970s, in the Californian town of Palo Alto (where Muybridge studied animal locomotion a century before) Rank Xerox set up a research centre. Its aim was to develop the next generation of computers and according to Larry Tesler, one of the core engineers, they soon turned to computer games for inspiration. Millions who found information technology complex and intimidating were less circumspect when it came to playing Space Invaders or Missile Command. If it appeared as a pacman or asteroid, most were quite happy manipulating electronic data on a VDU. It was this insight that led the development of the 'Graphical user interface', the use of windows, icons, and desktop metaphors to simplify tasks. This interface, in turn, led directly to the launch of Apple MacIntosh and Microsoft Windows and the beginning of the end of IBM. By imitating games personal computing became, through the 1980s, the fastest growing industry ever.

We are still living through the golden age of computing. Most of the languages, algorithms, and metaphors created today will provide the foundation for the next hundred years. Whether it's a game to save Lemmings from extinction, a beautifully tailored personal organiser, or a screen saver showing flying toasters, current software is a source of much of ingenuity, wit and invention. In a few centuries time the shoot-em-up arcade games that so worry commentators will probably be in display cases at the Design Museum or the V&A. Now that the office market is saturated, corporations are looking to exploit the home market and once again computer games are leading the way.

Yet, as with the early years of film, official culture refuses to recognise it's crass, nerdish newcomer. The higher arts look down on their pixilated relatives with dismay and disdain. Both film and computer software come from the boiler room of culture, designed by pioneers with a technical or manufacturing background rather than a training in the high arts. This means that achievements tend to go unrecognised until too late, just as the critics began to praise the era of silent movies the moment the talkies came in.

All of which makes predictions generically difficult. Indeed, this could be the moment the analogy between cinema and the digital domain ends. Unlike the mimetic traditions of photography and film, a new interactive art form might follow an entirely different logic: the logic of simulation. Current computer games such as A-Trainor Sim City are not really representations of the world but software models, virtual machines sustained by their own mathematical engines. Alternatively, film and computer technology could be converging. Francis Ford Coppola - who used much of the new technology in his underrated Dracula - has predicted that it will open film-making to ordinary people. He expresses the hope that one day soon a film masterpiece may be made at home in her room by 'some fat girl in Wisconsin'. In this light digital media could fulfil the promise of cinema, making the manipulation of images and the creation of a new visual language more accessible and seamless.

According to a Russian maxim, the Fox knows many little things but the Hedgehog knows one big thing. But what is the big thing that Sonic the Hedgehog knows? What else waits to crawl out of the digital swamp?

For the moment he is silent.

Published in New Statesmen July 1993