Technology and literature are changing

SOCIAL STUDIES - Published Monday March 30th, 2009

The other day a friend and I went to see the movie "The Watchmen."

I am a bit of a superhero geek; always have been. I wanted to grow up to be Wolverine for most of my life. Perhaps I still do. It was interesting because we met for a drink before hand and the waiter asked us what we were going to see. When we replied "Watchmen" he gave us this blank stare that seemed to last a couple of minutes until finally something broke the spell and he said "Oh yeah, great movie!"

It was strange; until we saw the movie.

My friend turned to me after and said, "Now I understand the blank stare." After a few moments we came up with the answer for when people asked us how it was: "If you are into the apocalypse, dismemberment, and practically constant full frontal male nudity, it was great!"

In truth, however, it was a fabulous movie. The fact that it was science fiction, as I have argued before, allowed the writers to make a graphic novel about American foreign policy, manifest destiny, aging, love, finding your life purpose, and the depths of society in a way that normally does not register.

Now, I went home from the movie and began to read the graphic novel. I have read comic books all my life, mostly as escapist fun; but have never read a graphic novel. For those who don't know, that means it is an adult oriented, up scaled, comic book.

I was brought up in a bit of an elitist way and I always thought that literature was literature and trash was trash. In fact, I have made some snide comments to Brian Cormier for taking American Idol seriously enough to write about it. It is half in jest, but seriously, I have never allowed myself to watch any reality television for the same reason I have never read a graphic novel; there are correct and meaningful ways to do art, and there are cheap and degrading ways. Or so I have always been led to believe.

I think I owe the world an apology.

Having read the Watchmen, which, in case you have not, has a better ending than the movie although the movie is remarkably faithful to the book; I can honestly say it is one of the best novels I have read; and I have read a lot.

It is sort of like rock music. My father thought Billy Joel was the end all and be all of musical genius. Billy could rock out the sentiments that went on in his baby boomer mind in an emotionally jarring way; sort of the way Third Eye Blind does for me.

My dad would hate Third Eye Blind. His father hated Billy Joel. Music adapts, it grows, it is reinterpreted. As are novels, as are films, as are paintings.

The thing is that if we ignore the new medium and its power over the current generation, we do so at our peril.

Imagine this, for example. Would Vietnam have engendered the protests it did were it not for the television broadcasting the war into the living rooms of the United States?

The way we interact with the world and with each other is constantly changing, it is evolving and at the core of that evolution has always been the way we tell stories.

Ashton Kutcher, of all people, recently wrote this comment on Twitter: "I strongly believe that social media, search, and Web sourcing is a hell of a lot more valuable these days than the Dewey decimal system."

He later replied, "It's not an underestimation of the value of literature it's an adaptation of the way we source it. Educational Darwinism."

Twitter, for those who don't know, is a way to communicate random bits of information. I have a program called tweetdeck on my computer, and I have a list of contacts who I think are "interesting" for one reason or another. Whenever they think to type 140 characters about life, it shows up on my screen; which is how I got the above quote from a famous movie star.

I have a mixed bag of folks -- actors, writers, comic book illustrators for Marvel, philosophers, the CEO of Ecko clothing. By being able to watch their random thought process my mind is enlightened, or amused, or changed.

Then I copy the stuff onto my Facebook page or print it in a newspaper, text it to someone on my phone, or write it on my blog.

Communication is now far more instant, far more personal, and far more universal than it has ever been. And like Mr. Kutcher says, it is changing everything.

Are we going to adapt, or are we going to go the way of the Dodo and Dinosaur before them? That is the real issue.

That, and who watches the watchmen. . .

Just for the sake of saying it out loud, an entire comic book premised on a quote from a Roman poet who wrote at the end of the first century, in his work The Satires, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes".

Who says literature is dead?