Author: Liu Shiyu
Many people have heard the famous hypothesis: give infinite monkeys unlimited time, and they can always type out a complete collection of Shakespeare on the computer. People are arguing about the probability of monkeys "can or can't", but what really matters is the "computer" in the stem. The infinite trial and error and limited choice brought by the screen and keyboard greatly raise the lower limit of "creation", and in the era of knife and stone, pen and paper, no one will compare monkeys and literary heroes.
Compared with the ancients who cherished words like gold and thought twice, leaving the most memorable things on rock walls, bamboo janes and paper that were not easy to obtain, our writing and dissemination were too convenient. However, compared with the works of the devout ancients and the millennia, we can confidently say - have we written better?
Reading screen: The gaze rolls down the steep hillside
When we say that we are not as good as the ancients, we always like to talk about the inspiration and talent of Li Bai or Cao Xueqin; But those who have been engaged in creation know that this is not only a technical work, but also a hard work, and the level and height of the work are absolutely related to the number of exercises and practices, and the convenience of tools.
Therefore, one of my core views on this topic is that when we compare the many works of today with the few famous works that stand on the peak of history, and come to the conclusion that the present is not as good as in the past, we should realize that we are using the standards of the past to demand the present, and using the standards of history to demand reality - in today's words, "double standards"; The so-called inferiority of today's people is a kind of survivor bias after screening, and it is more due to the fact that modern people choose to use another narrative, language, and thought style to cater to different reading methods, carriers and purposes.
It's a bit abstract to say that, but I'll give you an example of what happened to you. Around 2004, screens replaced paper for the first time and became my main vehicle for reading. It was an MP3 monochrome LCD screen that could only display up to 52 words at the same time, and I used it to read at least millions of words. Yes, this one natural segment has more than 70 words here, and I see less on the small screen than these at a glance. On such a screen, any "look back" means a huge operating cost, and it is completely unavoidable to describe my reading as a ski or roller coaster with no return. In the reading of "one-dimensional degree", I pay more attention to whether the plot of the novel is ups and downs, whether the fate of the characters is tortuous, and what kind of "ideas" and "ideas" are conveyed by the linear narrative that cannot be too complicated, and whether the language and narrative can withstand repeated taste, which is less important.
Later, the technology of electronic devices continued to upgrade, and our screens gradually became larger than books, but the habit of reading was difficult to return to the past. In the Edge browser that comes with windows, there is an intriguing design idea for a function. When there is more text on the web page, the user can enter the "Immersive Reader" and select the "Line Focus" mode, at which point the large screen will be dimmed, and only the middle one or two lines of text will still be lit. The prompt given by the browser is "to help improve concentration when reading", which is actually equivalent to forcing people in front of the big screen to dream back to the era of monochrome LCD small screens, and the price of distraction is the hook between the default contexts, and it is not strong enough to appear at the same time. Imagine the scene of smooth travel in mobile phone information every day, the eyes are focused on the middle point of the screen, the fingers that are constantly sliding, the text that is constantly scrolling is swept through here as if the assembly line - "backtracking" here means not fluent, meaning the possibility of readers "giving up", which is something that most authors today find difficult to accept. As a result, those once timeless styles, poetic words, esoteric ideas, and entangled logics gradually fade with the writer's pandering to the reader.
One advantage of writing on screen is that you can compile and index material with minimal operational cost, or it is easy to modify and adjust the article in large sections without having to re-transcribe. In theory, by giving Cao Xueqin a computer and teaching him to type, "Dream of the Red Chamber" will inevitably come out faster, and those things that are either unfinished or deliberately hidden are likely to really survive in history. But for today's people, the convenience brought by the screen is more reflected in academic research, dissertations, and those who face leaders and customers, with obvious needs and mandatory applied writing. Has literary creation thus become more elaborate or broad? Do writers prefer to review a work for several years, add or delete several times? The answer is unknown, behind the convenience of the tool, is the reader's demand for simplicity and extensiveness, is the market's dependence on speed and rhythm.
Pinyin Input Method: Invisible Manipulator
It is not necessary to say that the writer has fallen and literature has collapsed. I have noticed that in recent years, the WeChat public account opened by writers has entered the public eye, and the works they paste on the mobile phone screen are often the works of the paper media era, as long as they are broken down into a sentence and paragraph that is more suitable for scrolling, coupled with some funny and vivid "memes", they can produce a good response. The changes brought about by screen reading and writing are more reflected in concepts and appeals, rather than necessarily touching the essence of literary creation.
The problem mentioned next, the pinyin input method, has a more intangible and irresistible impact on the creation of an era. For the handwritten writer, every Chinese character is directly connected to the mind, and it is up to the jun to choose; But in the face of the pinyin input method, words and words have a potential "priority", and the pandering to the input method mechanism, together with other ideologies, preemptively constrains creation, affecting which words we choose and avoid.
Let's start with the examples. In the 1990s, when most people first touched the computer, they used an input method called "Smart ABC". This input method does not have such a convenient thesaurus function as it is today, and it is common to turn it over and over again for a long time for a slightly strange word. A very small number of people can memorize the order of each page of candidate words, and more people choose to use "words" to anchor "words", such as to type a "yu" word, directly type "universe" and then delete "Zeus" to avoid the pain of word selection. Don't underestimate the meaning of this "shortcut", in addition to making you forget how to write words, pinyin input method also "forces" you to type words that do not belong to your thinking.
Today's pinyin input methods have made rapid progress in the calculation of candidate words, but the essence of things has not changed. If the language itself has built a solid barrier between people's thinking and the meaning they want to express, then the logic of the pinyin letters on the keyboard and the input method of selecting words has built another solid wall with emotional costs, making it more difficult for creators to express their true selves. Simply put, that is, creators are often "good and bad", they will choose words and sentences that are easier to "type", and the word frequency accumulated by big data is also internalized into the "muscle memory" of the brain and fingers, so that people's synonyms are increasingly repetitive, and the vocabulary is constantly decreasing compared with the compulsory education stage. In front of the keyboard, we may be Shakespeare, or we may be just smarter but only at the mercy of tools of the "monkey".
This is not alarmist, but let's take another example. If you are used to using a computer to take reading notes, you will find that some writers' creations are difficult to excerpt - seemingly normal narratives and dialogues, but they will be wrong when typing, and a large number of words are inconsistent with the options recommended by the input method - I can't say that this is better, but compared to those works that can be smoothly excerpted, in the sense of "standardized" works in the sense of input methods, those works that do not fit into the keyboard may mean diversity, and diversity is always true for literature.
The "keyboard" itself is based on pinyin characters rather than pictographic and ideographic characters. It is entirely reasonable to assume that a native speaker of a Chinese has one more "step" and more "discipline" than the thinking transformation of English native speakers when using the Pinyin input method. On the other hand, Sumerian, ancient Egyptian, ancient Indian and other hieroglyphs have "disappeared" under the expansion of pinyin script, and Chinese characters have gradually evolved from pictographic oracle bones to today's ideographs.
Due to space limitations, this article is unable to discuss more deeply the future of ideographs, the new changes in the relationship between signifiers and signifiers in the "input method era". Or back to the topic of the article, the era of screens and keyboards, have we written better? Realistically speaking, in a classical and serious judgment dimension, the progress of current literary creation is indeed not proportional to the development of "writing instruments"; But the problem we face today is not as simple as Shi Nai'an can type, or Liu Cixin must grind ink and suck the distinction between ancient and modern, but after the media innovation, the new market mechanism, social status, and reader expectations are pushing literary creation into an unknown direction. At this time, the problem consciousness of this discussion is by no means to despise and criticize today's literary creators, but to some extent to view the author as a passive, new "vulnerable group", and then evoke some thinking about the overall mechanism of generating current literature.
Source: China Culture Daily