WWWriting

In honor of [The London Review of Books]' 30th anniversary, the paper sponsored a panel discussion last Saturday featuring John Lanchester, Colm Tóibín, Mary-Kay Wilmers and James Wood at the New School's Tishman Auditorium. They discussed the role of the author in the Internet age.

Tóibín linked bloggers to pamphlet writers of old, such as Jonathan Swift, establishing a link between what is considered a modern form of writing to one much older. Wilmers added to this, saying the major difference between the modern blogger and the pamphleteers is that bloggers can reach far more people. She praised blogs as being more relevant than newspapers because of their brevity and the diversity of opinions. This point was undercut by her own admission that the only blog she reads regularly is the one written by The London Review of Books. Both Wilmer and Tóibín believed that the e-book would take over, not because it was better, but because large chain stores in Britain are aggressively pushing e-readers.

The panelists were more wary about speculating on the future of the novel. When Tóibín was asked to explain how the Internet has changed his own writing, he could only say that his new collection of short stories showed its absence. He spent much time discussing his general fascination with the Internet because it facilitated the end of gay loneliness. He said it provides an unparalleled ability for gay men to find each other in even the most unlikely places.

Lanchester referenced an article about a man who used a website to track his wife's location using her cell phone and then preceded to stalk her for a week. He believed that writers could use this as inspiration for a story. Using a news story as the basis for a novel is nothing new. He honestly admitted he could not imagine how the form of the novel would change. He said that there will always be writers, and there will always be readers, however the medium with which they communicate is beginning to break down, and something new would replace it.

When Nicholas Spice, the moderator, asked if the panelists could imagine novels incorporating technology like hypertext or video, James Wood listed Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace as examples of authors he felt exemplified the Internet age, even though he conceded that these writers wrote most of their work pre-Internet. No mention was made of hypertext authors such as Shelley Jackson. The panelists' general ignorance of contemporary novelists who have fully embraced the Internet, both as a new way of writing and as a means of distribution, felt like a huge oversight.