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.”