The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
b-side
Thursday, March 22, 2018 — 3B

There’s no doubt we are 
living in an age of screens, and 
books have not been spared in 
the relentless transfer of text 
to electronic devices. Is this a 
bad thing? How have writers 
grappled 
with 
the 
impacts 
of 
technology 
on 
human 
connection, 
communication 
and interaction?
Sweetland lecturer Simone 
Sessolo studies how technology 
shapes the way we write and 
think. His take on digital media 
is refreshingly nuanced.
“Let’s not start by being 
evaluative,” 
said 
Sessolo. 
“Let’s start by observing and 
describing.”
The software of e-reading 
is perhaps more important to 
consider than the hardware. 
E-readers have become less 
popular in recent years; apps 
that users can download on 
their phones and computers are 
more convenient and usually 
free, even when the content 
itself is not.
“There’s 
an 
enhanced 
attention 
to 
multimodality,” 
Sessolo explained.
Technology 
means 
there 
is no longer an inexorable 
connection between object and 
content. Sessolo held up a book 
and demonstrated, explaining 
he could read that book on his 
laptop, his phone or an e-reader. 
The physical book, once central 
to obtaining knowledge, is now 
one of many means through 
which readers and writers can 
communicate.
The relocation of print books 
to digital mediums does mean 
something is lost, however. 
The Daily chatted with English 
Professor Joshua Miller, and 
he described an experience 
that, for him, reinforced the 
possibility for connection and 
coincidence that physical books 
allow.
“I had this very strange 
experience 
in 
college 
that 
I 
think 
probably 
can’t 
be 
reproduced anymore,” Miller 
said. “I was in the library, 
browsing through the stacks. 
I just randomly picked up a 
novel, and I decided to take it 
to the checkout desk. I was on 
the way there and the old call 
slip card fell out of the book 
so I reached down to pick it 
up — and there was my father’s 
name, in his handwriting, from 
when he was a graduate student 
20 years earlier. That’s the kind 
of thing that won’t happen once 
we’re fully digital.”
Miller, though enthusiastic 
about 
the 
possibilities 
for 
creativity 
that 
technology 
allows, 
still 
has 
some 
reservations.
“One thing that I think gets 
lost a little bit is the book as a 
curated object,” Miller said. 
“The publisher and the editors 
— and the author, if they’re 
lucky — get to make decisions 
about how the book comes 
together — in terms of a unique 
font, hardcover or softcover, 
creative typography, whether 
or not to include drawings or 
images, the texture of the paper, 
how raised or how smooth and 
matte or glossy. That doesn’t 
always happen with digital 
material.”
Miller is also a margin-note 
enthusiast.
“All of the books I have on 
my bookshelves I keep in part 
because they have my notes in 
them. As a piece of technology, 
the paper book is very good at 
storing 
information,” 
Miller 
said. “That data doesn’t get 
lost unless I lose the book, 
and no digital format has fully 
succeeded in convincing me I 
can reproduce that.”
Miller continued to clarify 
his use of reading technology.
“I think we’re all still figuring 
out what (e-readers) can and 
can’t do,” Miller explained. “I 
do have some concerns about 
the shift from analog to digital 
and what it means. We lose a lot 
when we give up the material 
book.”
Still, Miller isn’t by any 

means 
opposed 
to 
new 
technologies.
“I use screen reading apps, 
and I love them. It allows me to 
buy a book and read it quickly, 
so that’s really helpful … there’s 
a lot of benefits to it,” Miller 
said. “I’m excited about the 
opportunities and possibilities 
of new technologies, and I’m 
trying to distinguish between 
the changes that feel profound 
to me and the changes that feel 
incremental — and determine 
what I think about each of those 
different kinds of changes, 
because both are there.”
Another important aspect of 
reading technology is the issues 
it raises regarding accessibility. 
Sessolo noted in many ways, 
technology has broken down 
barriers between writers and 
readers and thus democratized 
access to books. Those who 
don’t 
live 
near 
bookstores 
or libraries and people with 
various 
disabilities 
clearly 
benefit from the ability to read 
using a screen; however, while 
technology has the potential 
to radically improve access 
to written material, it’s also 
important 
to 
consider 
the 
price 
of 
technology, 
which 
can exclude those who cannot 
afford to buy e-books, e-readers 
or other devices.
“Technology in and of itself 
is not enough,” Sessolo said.
While 
technology 
is 
promising 
in 
many 
ways, 
working toward economic and 
social equality in all aspects 
of life is still necessary in 
order to fulfill the potential of 
alternative reading mediums. 
“The thing I’d like people 
to consider is that democracy 
only exists in action,” Sessolo 
explained. “To democratize the 
experience of new technology, 
get involved with whatever you 
can.”
Miller 
emphasized 
the 
importance 
of 
accessibility 
when considering multimedia 
works.
“Publishers 
are 
understandably 
concerned 
about losing readers who require 
accessibility or are sympathetic 
to the politics of accessibility,” 
Miller 
said. 
“There’s 
class 
issues too — writers are often 
writing about the precarity 
of everyday life and scenes of 
crisis, so they want to reach the 
widest audience possible and 
engage the issues that they’re 
describing. They don’t want 
to write a novel that can’t be 
checked out of the library.”
How have writers addressed 
and used technology in their 
work?
“I think authors are adjusting 
slowly,” Miller said. “There are 
some writers who have found 
digital platforms and e-books 
to be a natural fit or work really 
well with pre-existing forms. 
Now there’s Twitter fiction and 
things like that, but the divide 
in technology between turning 
books into digital forms and 
digitally-born books is still 
pretty firm. My guess is that 
more and more writers will 
figure out how to use these 
technologies digitally.”
Associate English Professor 
Madhumita Lahiri noted in an 
interview with The Daily that 
short-form writing lends itself 
to incorporating slang, emojis 
and abbreviations. The long 
publishing process for novels 
often means quick cultural 
changes 
render 
words 
and 
phrases obsolete, even if the 
author was innovative a few 
years earlier.
“I think it’s easier if you 
know it’s going to be published 
in the next week,” Lahiri said. 
“The thing that’s tricky about 
emojis in particular is that 
their meanings are extremely 
unstable.”
Miller talked about the rise 
of 
short-form 
writing 
and 
reading apps.
“The number four app in 
the book section of the iOS app 
store is Hooked,” Miller said. 
“It’s a storytelling platform 
that allows authors to tell 
captivating stories in a really 
short form as a series of text 
messages.”

Still, 
there’s 
a 
cultural 
pushback against shorter forms 
of narrative.
“The micro of culture has 
been maligned by people who 
have said attention spans have 
gone down, which I think is 
exaggerating a true fact too 
much,” Miller explained. “The 
shift from a book to a machine 
to apps on other devices does 
increase 
the 
likelihood 
of 
distraction and I think makes 
it much harder to stay focused. 
On the other hand, I think 
the emphasis on short-form 
storytelling isn’t necessarily a 
bad thing.”
While there are many long-
form novels that interrogate 
the 
role 
of 
technology 
in 
modern life, there are fewer 
that 
actually 
incorporate 
technology as part of the 
reading experience.
“There are a lot of works 
describing 
technology 
in 
relatively analog formats, so I 
don’t know when the tipping 
point is going to happen and 
people are going to figure 
out how exactly to make that 
work,” Miller said. “There are 
definitely people who are using 
text language or acronyms —
people are thinking and writing 
about speech and language 
issues.”
The 
ways 
technology 
has changed language is a 
source of cultural anxiety. Is 
technology disintegrating the 
very foundations of language? 
Sessolo 
doesn’t 
think 
so, 
particularly because slang isn’t 
a 21st century creation.
“We’re talking about these 
abbreviations with the feeling 
that they’re new,” Sessolo said. 
“But if we look into stenography, 
that’s what stenographers have 
been doing for a long time.”
Combining text with other 
media such as photographs or 
paintings is also not new. In 
fact, the practice goes back 
hundreds of years.
“Some pages (of medieval 
books) look like the homepage 
of a website. People have always 
experimented 
with 
design,” 
Sessolo said.
Similarly, the popularity of 
serialized narratives harkens 
back to earlier trends.
“There’s 
a 
19th 
century 
version of serialized fiction that 
was published in newspapers or 
magazine in chapters and then 
only put together as a book 
later,” Miller said.
Lahiri echoed this sentiment.
“When the Dickens novel 
was a serial, it would come out 
on the weekend. You could send 
in some comments, and then the 
next one came out — whether or 
not it was true, people felt that 
they had some input,” Lahiri 
said. “People have always felt 
a certain interactivity with the 
fastest media of their day.”
Lahiri 
also 
stressed 
writers have been integrating 
technology into literature for a 
long time.
“If you back to 18th and 
19th century novels, there’s 
all this stuff that we don’t 
understand that is often about 
specific technical devices — a 
kind of shoe or a kind of lamp.” 
Lahiri said. “When we look 
at 
technological 
references, 
there’s a lot more novel-length 
fiction about technology than 
there is actually incorporating 
it. I think that the kinds of 
expressions used in texting 
would have to work the way 
dialect and slang work in 
literature in general — it would 
have to show us something 
particular about that moment. 
I wonder if part of it is that 
people don’t know what it is 
that we would gain from seeing 
that on the page.”
Given 
the 
fast 
pace 
of 
technological 
innovation 
in the 21st century, this is 
certainly an exciting time to 
be a reader and a writer. Here 
are a few recommendations 
for 
narratives 
and 
novels 
that incorporate or discuss 
technology in unusual and 
meaningful ways.
Lauren 
Beukes’s 
“Broken 
Monsters” 
(Harper, 
2014) 
is a Detroit-set thriller that 

Technology, ebooks and 
new frontiers of narrative

MIRIAM FRANCISCO
Daily Arts Writer

You may know him as Jay 
Dee, J Dilla or even his given 
name, James Dewitt Yancey, 
but there’s no denying that the 
man with many monikers was 
an undeniable genius. Taking 
part in the mid-’90s hip hop 
and neo-soul boom that crafted 
some of the best music of all 
time, the Detroit producer is 
responsible for bringing funk to 
a new playing field with other 
legends like Q-Tip and Dr. Dre. 
J Dilla revolutionized the genre 
with his incredible take on 
the art of sampling, bringing a 
human touch to the computer-
generated beats of his era.
His hand in the great music 
of the ’90s and early 2000s is 
unmistakable; 
the 
laid-back 
groove of Erykah Badu, De La 
Soul, The Roots, Slum Village, 
A Tribe Called Quest, Common 
and many more owe their unique 
sound to the collaboration of 
Yancey and his singular use of 
sampling and drum machines. 
Dilla’s influence is found in 
almost all of current hip hop, 
living on in the remixes and 
beats of music mainstays from 
Flying Lotus to Kanye West and 
the headphones of millions.
Yancey was born in Detroit 
in 1974, growing up with his 
family’s appreciation for music 
and the deep-rooted traditions 
of his city. According to his 
mother Maureen “Ma Dukes” 
Yancey, her son was musical 
from a young age, playing with 
a Fisher-Price record player for 
hours on end and accumulating 
his first 45s given to him by 
family. This laid the foundation 
for an illustrious career as a 
producer who changed the hip 
hop game, starting with the 
formation of his first group, 
Slum Village, in the final years 
of high school with fellow 
Detroit rappers T3 and Baatin. 
Their first album Fantastic, Vol. 
1 came out in 1996 to critical and 
local acclaim.
This was a stepping stone 
toward 
the 
greater 
Detroit 
hip hop scene, of which he 
became a lasting fixture. His 
friendship 
with 
producer 
Joseph “Amp” Fiddler created 
a 
fruitful 
mentorship 
from 
which Dilla mastered digital 
production and created his 
signature sampling style. From 
there, his talent could be seen 
on albums like The Pharcyde’s 
1995 Labcabincalifornia, which 

are still revered today. That 
style is what sets him apart 
from other producers of his 
era — Dilla threw convention 
to the wind with everything he 
did, learning techniques from 
Amp and building off of them 
towards an incomparable sound 
of his own.
Amp’s influence on a young 
Yancey 
contributed 
to 
his 

affinity and skill for sampling 
and 
drum 
machines 
like 
the MPC (MIDI Production 
Center) in its earliest 60 and 
3000 models, a collaboration 
between Roger Linn and Akai 
which revolutionized digital 
music production by giving 
artists the opportunity to use 
their own samples in lieu of 
preloaded drum sounds like 
those of the Linn Drum. In 
Dilla’s 
last 
interview 
with 
Scratch Magazine before his 
untimely death in 2006, the 
producer claimed that Amp 
encouraged him to learn by use 
and not the manual, saying that 
“(Amp) was like, ‘I’m not going 
to show you to work it. You gotta 
learn on your own.’ He was like, 
‘Don’t use a book.’ Ever since 
this day I never read the books 
to samplers and all of that, I just 
try to learn them.”
This 
on-the-fly 
education 
gave Dilla a creative edge to 
sampling, one of the most 
prominent signatures of his 
work being his disregard for a 
function called quantization, 
which snaps beats to a more 
uniform grid. Instead of using 
quantization 
to 
polish 
his 
production, J Dilla embraced 
the humanity of music-making 
and let the beat take him 
where it wanted to go. Roots 
drummer Ahmir “Questlove” 
Thompson says Dilla’s beat on 
The Pharcyde’s song “Bullshit” 
produced 
the 
most 
“life-
changing moment he’d ever 
had,” which inspired him to 
rethink everything he’d been 

taught as a drummer. In an 
interview with Red Bull Music 
Academy, Questlove said that 
at first listen, Dilla’s beats 
“sounded like the kick drum 
was played by like a drunk 
three-year-old. And I was like, 
‘Are you allowed to do that?’”
This stunned response was 
one of many to Dilla’s unique 
approach to drums and bass, as 
he created a signature low-end 
sound that grooves and flows 
throughout each of his songs. 
His 
work 
with 
production 
groups like The Ummah, in 
which he worked with A Tribe 
Called Quest’s Q-Tip and Ali 
Shaheed Muhammad and hip-
hop supergroup Soulquarians. 
Dilla’s command of sampling did 
not only present in his technical 
skill with machines like the 
MPC, but also an incredible 
knack for sourcing jazz and soul 
records and bringing them to 
new heights.
This 
skill 
for 
creating 
incredibly original music out of 
already existing samples is what 
put Dilla on the map in the first 
place, but also what carries his 
legacy into the present. His last 
album, Donuts, was released 
three days before his death from 
a rare blood disease in 2006, 
and mostly recorded and mixed 
from his hospital room. Despite 
the conditions in which it was 
produced, Donuts is arguably 
J Dilla’s most acclaimed and 
celebrated solo album, a stark 
example of his skill for creating 
instrumental hip hop from 
unique sources and influences.
Some 
have 
argued 
Dilla 
may 
have 
been 
the 
last 
great jazz innovator, as his 
command and creative affinity 
for 
imperfection 
lifted 
his 
music to a level beyond his 
contemporaries. Whatever one 
may think J Dilla stands for 
in the history of hip hop and 
soul, it’s clear that he was a 
revolutionary figure who truly 
shifted how people thought 
about production. Dilla’s use of 
technology to further his art 
is proof of hip hop’s reliance 
on and celebration of digital 
production, but also of what it 
is capable of. Dilla humanized 
the buttons and knobs of his 
machines beyond recognition, 
disregarding norms left and 
right to create a lasting legacy 
which lives on in every track he 
touched. Whatever name you 
know him by, one thing is true 
— that James Dewitt Yancey 
changed the face of hip hop 
forever.

J Dilla & the computer-
generated beat revolution

CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer

WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Dilla humanized 

the buttons and 

knobs of his 

machines beyond 

recognition

MUSIC NOTEBOOK

SECONDARY
skillfully 
incorporates 
text 
messages and texting lingo into 
the narrative structure.
Alena Graedon’s “The Word 
Exchange” (Doubleday, 2014) 
introduces us to a not-so-
distant future when humans 
rely on a device to look up the 
meanings of almost every word.
Xu 
Bing’s 
graphic 
novel 
“Book from the Ground” (MIT 
Press, 2014) is pictographic 
text written entirely in emojis 
and symbols.
Diary of a Zulu Girl is a blog 
by Mike Maphoto composed of 
a fictional young woman’s diary 
entries about her journey from 
a rural area of South Africa to 
Johannesburg. The blog entries 
have been compiled into two 
books and the series is ongoing.

Gary 
Shteyngart’s 
“Super 
Sad True Love Story” (Random 
House, 2010), written in both 
letters and emails, is a new take 
on the epistolary novel genre.
Spent 
is 
a 
game-based 
narrative in which players are 
given a fictional $1000 per 
month and confronted with a 
series of choices on housing, 
health care, employment and 
bills. The game, which was 
created 
by 
the 
advertising 
agency 
McKinney 
for 
the 
Urban Ministries of Durham, 
incorporates 
aspects 
of 
computer games with a strong 
narrative structure. Spent is 
intended to educate players 
about the precarious situation 
of people living below the 
poverty line.

Jennifer 
Egan’s 
“A 
Visit 
from the Goon Squad” (Knopf, 
2010) includes both discussions 
of technology and a chapter 
written entirely in PowerPoint 
slides.
Though 
technology 
is 
shaping both written content 
and the reading experience 
in 
thought-provoking 
ways, 
it’s hard to predict where 
technological innovation will 
take us next —and what that 
will mean for readers and 
writers.
“Technology 
is 
allowing 
storytelling as an art to happen 
in all sorts of places in really 
interesting ways,” Lahiri said. 
“How that relates to print is 
still something we’re figuring 
out.”

