scarfman | Art in the Communication Age (Reply)

Eric (WEBSNARK) Burns has an essay in his LJ today which put me in mind of things I've written on the same topic, of which the easiest to find was this, from Arthurnet, the mailing list affiliated with Arthuriana, the Journal of Arthurian Studies, the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society, at which website the mailing list messages are archived so consider this a quote citation.

Subject: Re: AN 7/15 Movies and Mouvance

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004, Arthurnet wrote:
> njl2@PSU.EDU
> Obviously, we don't expect or accept _mouvance_ (except perhaps in some
> live theatrical situations) in the same way the medieval audience did.
> But we may get used to it with film, and it will be interesting to see
> if perceptual patterns and practices change as a result. Although we
> can't recover or duplicate medieval reading habits, we just may modify
> our customary assumption that a text, whether visual or written, is or
> should be fixed and immutable.
>
> Norris Lacy

Going off on a tangent here:

That technology should render to us the return of an aspect of 
storytelling once highly valued (in this discussion the _nouvance_ concept 
which I hadn't encountered until Professor Lacy's post) isn't a new idea 
to me.

I draw a daily comic strip which I upload to the web (a King Arthur themed 
comic strip, as I occasionally plug here). One of highest-profile 
webcartoonists (if that isn't an oxymoron) is Fred Gallagher of 
www.megatokyo.com, who finds in his own unexpectedly overwhelming critical 
and business success a lesson for all of us to learn.

It used to be that the height of storytelling, at least as far as the 
common people were concerned, was the evening gathering around the fire. 
Everyone was a storyteller, or had the potential, because while only the 
rich and the royal could afford the professional storytellers everyone 
else had the same hardware as the professionals: mind and voice.

But since the printing press, and in a quantum leap in the last half of 
the twentieth century, storytelling has become a tool of the rich or 
prosperous because the best, newest storytelling technologies - five 
hundred years ago, books; fifty years ago, motion pictures - have required 
funding beyond the capabilities of the people; funding not just for 
creation but (and here's my point) distribution. You could make a movie in 
your garage, but how would you get it to people to see it? Technology had 
handed entertainment over to the big boys, who've now spent fifty years, 
consciously or unconsciously, trying to brainwash us that our 
entertainment must be slick and fast-paced and professional.

But now technology's given us a device for distribution. The internet is 
the evening fire of the global village. Technology has given us back that 
which it had inadvertently stolen from us: the ability to be storytellers, 
every one of us.

Pleas don't allow the big boys to tell you it hasn't.

Paul Gadzikowski, scarfman@iglou.com since 1995
http://www.arthurkingoftimeandspace.com New cartoons daily.

There's talk of delaying the presidential election to keep terrorists from 
disrupting the democratic process. Words fail me.