As we mentioned last week, the hunt for a Meanland blogger resulted in not one, not two, but four Meanland bloggers! Here is the first of the winning Meanland essays, which we’ll be publishing here and on Spike over the next week. Regular Meanland postings will resume at the end of June.

Digital writing, which uses linking, video and commentary, is a return to oral storytelling traditions.

Literacy conjured printing, which invented copyright, which invented the author, who in turn invented the reader and silent contemplation, which killed orality.

That’s the Twitter-sized history of the effect of print on orality (those in need of a deeper analysis might like to check out Walter J Ong’s Orality and Literacy, or for something a little more zingy, Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy).

Print demanded texts that could be reproduced exactly and en masse. This did away with the notion of communal storytelling through interruption, addition, rehashing and conversation, as they were in the oral storytelling tradition. To succeed, print also needed rigid grammar, syntax and spelling, it needed one fixed version of a story told from one perspective; it needed the author, singular.

Before print, the idea of a text even having an author was pretty rare. As it was impossible, pre-print, to mass produce exact copies of one’s work, it was not possible to sell enough of them to make a living. Therefore the idea of owning a particular version of a story was almost unheard of, much as we do not consider that we own copyright in our social media conversations and tweets. It wasn’t until stories became saleable, in printed-book form, that the idea of story ownership became interesting. Printed books became one of the first mass-produced commodities and authors began popping up everywhere.

Prior to this, writing was more an adjunct to speech than a discrete discourse. Books were, in the main, written to be spoken aloud and people read and chanted them aloud together. Scholars kept notes in books to aid with their discussions; these ‘commonplace books’ were filled with quotes and useful information they’d picked up in class or from colleagues. Think of Digg, Diigo and Delicious as online versions of the commonplace book.

What digital writing does, albeit at this stage in a small way, is to remove the air of fixedness that printed text has imposed on writing and storytelling. Digital texts can be altered endlessly and cheaply – altering an existing printed book is a time consuming and expensive exercise. Digital texts are also free to ignore the conventions of grammar, syntax and spelling, invented by print, (d)evolving to more oral-like enigmatic forms. It’s amazing just how quickly, once writing moves off the printed page and becomes once again an adjunct to communal storytelling and conversation rather than an end in itself, that it divests itself of formality. F u dnt blve me snd me a txt

Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies currently prevent us from altering commercially produced digital texts too much, but the time must come (and soon) when this tech is cracked and we are downloading and playing with book torrent files as we do with TV, music, games and film.

What we might see then, when anyone can download and play with almost any text, is a rapid return to shared story telling. Readers might exchange ideas, criticisms and comments with authors in much the same way as they now do in the news media.

Author John Birmingham is already engaging in this process. He spoke in April this year at Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) symposium The Reader saying that he sometimes uses Twitter and his blog to research, asking his followers/readers for help with specialised subject matters outside his ken. Admittedly that’s not quite communal storytelling, but it is still a significant dismantling of the producer/consumer barrier between writer and reader.

EPUB 3.0 (the soon-to-be-released latest version of the industry standard online publishing software) promises to offer the digital author the option of streaming video and audio into their texts. This brings back to storytelling the qualities of gesture, nuance and tone of voice lost when we moved from the spoken to the printed word. If we can crack digital texts one day will readers then be able to stream their own images and sound into them?

Once readers are able to interact with longer form text in the same way they are able to with news text, how long then before the gatekeeper, author becomes a gatewatcher, willingly, or otherwise, offering stories to a virtual community of pseudo co-storytellers in versions that are always evolving and never fixed? How long before we see the produser enter the realm of the novel?

Devices such as the Kindle and iPad already allow us to create our own commonplace books, by providing readers with the ability to clip and bookmark interesting passages and quotes. Could this then lead to produsers sampling the work of other writers, much as musicians have done since the digitisation of music? If Helen Garner expresses a concept, or emotion much better than I do couldn’t I just link to a digital version of her work, rather than writing my own clumsier piece? Could I even include chunks of her work in mine? Yes, I can! In fact it is already being done: see Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and others.

The implications of this new shared storytelling, this pseudo-orality are manifold, especially with regard to copyright. Will my version of Monkey Grip, entitled Monkey Grip with Real Monkeys be an infringement of Garner’s copyright, or a new work? The great challenge to be faced by any return to oral storytelling practices will be: who owns the story.

Through social media we’re already chanting our narratives together, not out loud but virtually so, through our status updates and our tweets. We create communal stories making choices as authors do about which lead to follow, which characters to pursue and how they should interact. Through these media we achieve virtual community and virtual-orality. There’s no value in these exchanges yet, just as there was no value in storytelling until the invention of print, but then we’re in the early stages of digitised writing, so who knows where we might end up?