The Librarian Kate

(The following was written for my Instructional Technologies class this semester, based on a pre-semester reading of two texts – Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.  The thoughts here seemed applicable to the primary mission and scope of this blog of late – discussion of communication and technology – so I repost here.)

“The medium is the message.” — Marshall McLuhan

“A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it.” — Marshall McLuhan

I found these two conflicting thoughts from McLuhan when writing a paper for another class, and yet find them just as relevant to City of Glass and Understanding Comics as they were for my original assignment. They bring forth questions about our forms of communication in 2010, how relevant these works written over 20 years ago would be today, and how much weight we should give to the medium in our messages.

(Disclaimer: My reflections on City of Glass are limited to the print version as I have not had a chance to obtain the graphic novel adaptation yet.)

Although it was hard to follow, I did enjoy City of Glass. It wasn’t your typical Nancy Drew-Scooby Doo mystery. There was no neat resolution of the mystery, no “pulling the mask off of the bad guy to reveal his true identity,” though we did get some clue as to what happened to Stillman the Elder. Our protagonist is far from a shining hero with the ideal lifestyle; he’s conflicted, lonely and even a touch angry. I enjoyed watching Stillman the Elder and Stillman the Younger manipulate and work with language, each recognizing in their own way that words are just words and meaning is subjective.

One question that I ask myself after reading this novel is: How would the story change, if at all, in 2010? Of course, one wonders if our protagonist would have been able to hide as long as he did without discovery in our post-9/11 world, but I limit this question’s scope to technology. Would Quinn/Auster still record his notes in a little notebook or would he be typing them out in Evernote on his iPhone? And would that record of his work be found next to his nearly dead self and able to be read or preserved – or would the battery have run out, losing his stream of consciousness to the ages? What would have happened in Mrs. Stillman decided to PayPal Quinn/Auster’s payment rather than a check – would there have still been that dramatic denouement resulting from the check bouncing that contributed to Quinn/Auster’s madness? Would Quinn/Auster have been able to discover that Stillman the Elder’s path spelled out the word “Babel” if he had been following him on his iPhone map, rather than sketching it out in that notebook? Herein lies McLuhan’s two conflicting thoughts – does the medium have an effect on the message or is it just a means of transcription?

Understanding Comics was a friendlier read; McCloud got the point across that comics are in fact an art. The mainstream art world agrees; in 2006 the Newark Museum featured Masters of American Comics, an exhibition that illustrated how “use of humor as a strategy for addressing complex social and political issues combined with sophisticated visual compositions propel these works beyond the realm of popular entertainment, placing them on equal footing with the achievements of other fine artists.” (http://www.newarkmuseum.org/museum_pages.aspx?id=5578). After reading this, I realized why I love my two favorite comics, Peanuts and For Better or For Worse. Both find the balance between words and pictures – simple artwork gives way to compelling thought – sometimes in childlike wonder (Peanuts) or growth in real time and relevance to social issues (For Better or For Worse). One medium realizes that in order to be effective, promote resonance, and provide closure, they must give way to the other.

I liked McCloud’s use of comics from all over the world; some art criticisms (John Berger’s Ways of Seeing for example), are quite pro-Western art. Yet at times he went a little overboard with this, more diversity in examples of “good” comics would have been useful, especially for readers like me who are not familiar with Japanse animation, short of what enters mainstream American culture.

I wonder what McCloud would think of webcomics, like xkcd or pictures for sad children. Some traditional comic conventions are there (simple graphics, scene to scene transitions), yet the seemingly limitless medium of a webpage allow experimentation with layout (the pictures for sad children comic, posted today, 1/29/2010, is a great example of this). And the ease of opening up your browser tab to look up unfamiliar references can take away from the beauty of being “maddeningly vague” to open up imagination; there is potential to receive immediate closure but not from your own point of view. Again, is the medium changing the message or just transcribing it?

If McLuhan were alive today, would he be able to justify his two conflicting thoughts, or would he be asking the questions I pose here? I’m not sure there are easy answers, and I think we’ll keep asking over and over as our means of communication change. I do hope that as librarians and bibliographic instructors, we’ll be able to find some answers, some closure, so that we can pass on a morsel of knowledge to a populace hungry for answers.