Story Tellers, Authors, Places

Pardon the rambling. Or better yet, straighten it out and tell me what I’m trying to say…

Before there were books and scribes, there were singers of stories. Every time Homer’s tale was told, it was different depending on the voice of the teller. Intonation, tune, rhythm, even content varied with each telling. What counted was the way the story was told that night.

Writing nailed the words to pages; the words became the Platonic form of the story. The words may be rendered differently by each edition — the new edition of a book may be set in a different typeface than the previous one — but the two editions are editions of the same book only if the words are the same. And with the fixing of words on paper, we also get “authors.” Authors own their words in a way that the previous generations of story tellers could not. Printing leads to “authorized” editions indeed.

On the Web we have authors and story tellers. But we have something else as well: places. For the first time, a place can constitute the “what-ness” of the discourse, not the story, not the author, not the words. The work can be the place where authors, tellers, stories, voices and words meet. It is the place that has permanence, it is the place that makes the discourse into a work. And the place isn’t owned the way authors own words, and it isn’t possessed the way a voice possesses a singer or teller. It is public, it is shared, it is ours.

“Ours” isn’t a possessive here. Books, embodying Platonic works, exist without us. Stories, on the other hand, need us as listeners to exist; a story untold is like a dance undanced. The Web’s new places combine the permanence of books with the needfulness of stories…

[Crap. I hate this type of writing. Nice words instead of real ideas. Shoot me before I write more.]

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