{"id":282336,"date":"2011-02-17T19:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-02-17T19:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2011\/02\/17\/in-the-age-of-screens-part-iv\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T16:28:16","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T16:28:16","slug":"in-the-age-of-screens-part-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2011\/02\/17\/in-the-age-of-screens-part-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Age of Screens (Part IV)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here<\/a> and download a PDF<\/span> version of the whole thing. Or you can click here<\/a> to see all the posts.<\/em><\/p>\n

What does this all mean? So, we live in an age that values the slick lines of an iPad, that chases sales of books that fit pre-existing patterns, that wants to go all-in on the digital in order to revolt against (with good cause) the hegemony of the Big Six Publishers, and believes that behind the omnipresent screens in our lives is a fledgling democracy where we can get whatever we want and that talent and the ability to connect<\/em> will reign supreme.<\/p>\n

More importantly: where does literature\u2014especially translated literature, whose \u201cvoice\u201d is hindered by non-English speaking authors and the view that translators are second-class\u2014fit into this Age of Screens? <\/p>\n

To rephrase: we\u2019ve stripped away all the institutions that supported the ways in which most outsiders found their literature, leaving texts to float untethered in the ether, there to be found . . . <\/p>\n

There is no serendipity on Amazon.com. As much as I love buying books for cheap\u2014and knowing that they\u2019ll \u201cbe there\u201d\u2014I know that Amazon is nothing more than a kick-ass checkout counter. It\u2019s not a bookstore; it\u2019s not an informed reader telling you things. \u201cThose who bought X also bought Y\u201d? It\u2019s nothing more than an algorithm of sales. If you bought pattern-reinforcing Twilight<\/em> you\u2019ll probably also love The Da Vinci Code<\/em>. It\u2019s nearly impossible to come across something totally out of nowhere on Amazon. And yet, for the long-term benefit of society, we need people to have\u2014and be exposed to\u2014ideas from the out-of-nowhere. <\/p>\n

Online Discovery Moment #4: This semester I\u2019m teaching a class on \u201cTranslator & World Literature.\u201d I have ten students in the class, and we\u2019re reading ten books. The other night I was on Amazon.com looking for info on a book I was reviewing\u2014a title that\u2019s actually included in our class. On that book\u2019s Amazon page, the scroll of \u201cCustomers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed\u201d simply listed all the other books in my class. By putting titles on a syllabus I had subtly altered the experience of every Amazon customer looking for Thomas Pletzinger\u2019s Funeral for a Dog.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some time ago, Random House studied what caused people to actually buy books in bookstores. They observed customers, they had them fill out surveys, they figured out a set of attributes that lead a reader\u2019s \u201cwillingness to pay\u201d to exceed the price of the book, resulting in a purchase. What they found: a book cover is the most important thing, followed by whether a book is displayed or not. (Big piles equal big sales! \u201cWe\u201d trend like sheep!) Reviews? Very near the bottom. (Although anyone who worked in a bookstore will attest to NPR<\/span> being a million times more important that the _New York Times Book Review_\u2014we\u2019ve all dealt with the customer seeking the book that \u201cthey talked about on the NPR<\/span> . . . I think it was blue, with the word \u201cage\u201d in the title?\u201d) Word-of-mouth was higher . . . <\/p>\n

Again with the recap: Everything is available instantly. Or almost. Any obscure French translation can either be downloaded immediately to a Kindle-iPad, or be overnighted from Amazon. But how someone found out about this book is still mysterious . . . <\/p>\n

All the presentations and chatter focus on how the Age of Screens is the most democratic and egalitarian. About how an author can directly reach her\/his audience. And this is true and beautiful in an anti-capitalist way. Traditionally publishers have hated interacting with their readers and done all they could to avoid having to deal with them\u2014something that\u2019s finally changing.<\/p>\n

Online Discovery Moment #5: A couple years back I attended a Salzburg Global Seminar on translation. There were about 80 translation related people there (publishers, translators, reviewers, etc.), including a very high-profile German publisher. During a session on the \u201cInternet and Translation\u201d that I moderated, this German publisher railed against the influence of the \u201cfree Internet\u201d and how online publishing was destroying his newspapers, literary journals, etc. When I pointed out to him that another value of the Internet was the ability to actually interact with fans and readers his reply was simply: \u201cWhy would I ever want to talk with those people?\u201d This distain will not draw the readers seeking the literary fringe to actual literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/a>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over the course of this week, we’ll be serializing an essay I wrote for the recent Non-Fiction Conference that took place in Amsterdam a couple weeks ago. If you’d rather not wait until Friday to read the whole thing, then click here and download a PDF version of the whole thing. Or you can click […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[38276,1646],"class_list":["post-282336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-in-the-age-of-screens","tag-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=282336"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":321226,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/282336\/revisions\/321226"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=282336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=282336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=282336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}