Cell Phone Bestsellers

I am intrigued by the recent article in the NY Times about this year's bestseller list in Japan where a number of novels written on cell phones and read on cell phones were on the list. They are mostly written by young girls, as first-person narratives, memoiristic, associational, everyday life. They are written and read serially and then packaged, eventually, as actual physical books. And then not only are the cell phone versions popular, but so are the books themselves. Here's the url: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=1&oref=slogin. Five of the year's top ten bestsellers were cell phone novels, topped by a novel by Rin, 21, whose novel, repackaged in book form, sold over 400,000 copies. These are mostly love stories, typed out on keypads. Of course moralizers and literary giants and pundits are all appalled . . . just as they were forty or maybe now sixty years ago when manga and other forms of graphic novels began to claim a large share of the book market. Now it is TEXT that is the new evil, or texting-as-narrative. I'm intrigued, not only by the resurgence of print media as a form, but also by how, as with virtually all cultural forms that take advantage of new technologies, this one is not only derided for itself but is seen in some evolutionary biological way as dominating and destroying lesser species, wiping out great and classic novels such as the Tale of Genji. As if, before the keypad novels, everyone in Japan was walking around with Lady Murasaki's 900-page classic tucked beneath the arm; as if anyone who reads Genji is going to be reading a serial keypad novel. As in all the "closing of the American/Japanese/French/YouNameIt mind" kinds of jeremiads, the Keynesian economics doesn't work for culture, at least not in anything like a simple way. A macro cultural fad does not drive out micro aesthetic tastes. But the argument of bad driving out and depleting and diminishing The Good literature goes back to the eighteenth century and the advent of mass printing: cheap books for the masses were going to eliminate the Bible and diminish literacy for all. Mass sellers would dominate and destroy more specialized literature, like errant Alpha baboons getting rid of the lesser baboons whose genes are unfit to carry on the species. Well, I'm not sure it really works that way in baboons (I'm suspicious of such a simplistic and anthropomorphic narratve) and I know it doesn't for literature. Audiences overlap and then are discrete in complex and interesting ways. Forms coexist and mutually transform one another. Some neo-Jane Austen out there will soon write a "serious" novel about a girl who makes her living writing novels on cell phone keypads. Or not. We never know what is next but our narratives of extinction (not Darwin but Herbert Spenser), expulsion (ah, Adam and Eve!), termination (think Arnold Schwarzenegger), or contamination (read Priscilla Wald's new book Contagious to learn more) are applied, over and over again, not just to technology and its ravages but to the cultural products of each new techno-cultural moment. The rhetoric is always hyperbolic and inflammatory. Like Godzilla emerging from the primordial murk, new technolog threatens mass destruction--even when it comes in the form of girls giggling over this week's installment on the cell phone.