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3 Media Transformation: The Talked Book When you talk about the media today, one question constantly recurs: Do the new media wipe out the old? Or, more particularly , has television wiped out books? Since no moderately alert person who notices bookstalls or the habits of persons around him could possibly believe that books have disappeared, the asking of the question becomes itself interesting. Something besides the facts is disturbing him. Television and the whole of electronics must be doing something, he feels. What is it that they are doing? Two different and indeed polarized answers are often given to this question. One answer is that electronics is wiping out books and print generally, whether you like it or not. The other is that books are books, and they are here to stay-or, with a slight variation , books are books, and we had better help them to stay, to remain as they are, for we cannot live without them (despite the fact that our ancestors lived for tens of thousands of years without any script whatsoever-all but the last six thousand years of human existence) . Any more considered answer which takes cognizance of the facts of history and of technological activity will have to be more complex than either of these. A survey of what has gone on in the past development of verbal communication and what is going on now suggests the operation of some paradoxical laws. A new medium of verbal communication not only does not wipe out the old, but actually reinforces the older medium or media. However , in doing so it transforms the old) so that the old is no longer Media Transformation 83 what is used to be. Applied to books, this means that in the foreseeable future there will be more books than ever before but that books will no longer be what books used to be. If you think of books even today as working the way books worked for Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas or Chaucer or Milton or Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, you are out of touch with the way things are. We are producing books already which are not written by anybody . They are talked books. Of course, we have had talked books before. Oral epics which in the past somehow got themselves transcribed are books not written by anybody- they are transcriptions of something someone said or sang. But our talked books work differently from these. They are superimpositions of electronic orality, writing, and print on or through one another. The new kind of book, once it is printed, may look like older books, may not have a recording or tape in a cover pocket, but it does not sound or work the same way. I was recently interviewed for such a talked book. The supervisor of the book, as we might style him, or the production manager -he is not the author nor am I; there is no author in any earlier sense of this word-called me first in St. Louis by telephone from New York to arrange an interview with me in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He brought a tape recorder to the interview and taped my answers to questions which he put to me. Then he slept on the tape in a Bethlehem hotel and came back the next morning with supplementary questions for a fill-in interview , which he also taped. He took all the tape back to Brooklyn and had it transcribed. Of course the stenographer edited the tape a bit in transcribing it. The supervisor or production manager edited the transcription some more, after which he sent it to me for further editing. When I had reworked it and sent it back to him, he called me in St. Louis by long distance telephone from New York and once again, this time over the telephone, taped my answers to additional questions which had occurred to him after the two or three revisions. Then he had these additional questions transcribed, edited them, fed them back into the revised manuscript, and sent the whole to me for further revisions. When 84 The Sequestration of Voice the book comes out, what do we have? The "book" is presented as an interview, with his questions and my responses. But in fact the total is something that neither of us said and that neither of us ever wrote. We have no term or readily available concept for this sort of thing. Perhaps we could call the end-result...

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