Tap, Tap, Tap… Who’s there, the Raven or Marshall McLuhan?

An article in Sunday’s NY Times describes a Japanese tech phenomenon called “cellphone novels”: bodice-rippers (obi-rippers?) tapped out on thumb-pads.  These packet-sized “books” have proved to be a huge success in Japan, eventually being reformatted into hardcover best-sellers resold through standard outlets. However, a crisis has arisen among authors, most of whom are young women who go by one name; the example used by the Times was a 21-year-old with the nomme de phone, Rin. What’s wrong with Rin? It seems that cellphone authors are up-in-thumbs about the gestalt of cellphoning. They worry that some typers may be tapping their tales on a computer instead of their iPhones, which not only violates the rules of the game but the essence of the “genre.” In other words, the medium is the text message.  Quoth the Times: “When a work is written on a computer, the nuance of the number of lines is different, and the rhythm is different from writing on a cellphone. Some hard-core fans wouldn’t consider that a cellphone novel.” Oh-hiyo gozi-emashta! Welcome to BentWrite. How does the writing tool affect the act/art of writing? Good question. Can a cellphone be an intellectual prosthetic? Indeed it can. One writes by any means necessary, although there may be a ghost in the machine: the medium certainly involves the message. A young cellphone author who was forced to switch to a computer because of ingrown thumbnails — too much tapping — has evolved beyond the emoticons of cellphone novels composed of pin-prick sentences, and bonsai paragraphs, according to her publisher. Says the New York Times:  “Since she’s switched to a computer her vocabulary’s gotten richer and her sentences have also grown longer.” Surely the end is near.