Elmo the kitten has a tragic and heart warming story. Mother killed by a car, siblings dead from neglect, he is the only survivor of his family. Taken in by a kindly vet who gave him to me and Laura, filling a cat-shaped void in our lives and bringing joy into our house. His story is one of the first things I tell people about Elmo when they meet him. As a story telling animal, it helps me make sense of the world, and make a connection with the person I’m talking to.
Elmo doesn’t care about any of that. He just wants to chew on my computer cable and chase slippers around the room.
The way that stories connect us with the past is complicated. The can help us come to terms with it and understand its significance – just look at this year’s Booker Prize winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel exploring Jamaica’s recent history. (It’s also the first time in ages that I’ve been tempted to read the Booker winner – this looks like one hell of a book.)
But stories can also trap us in the past. Ask a psychiatrist, or anyone who’s spent time in counselling – the stories we tell about ourselves and about why things happened can become a form of conditioning, trapping us in harmful behaviour and painful emotions.
They can also trap us in relating to people in particular ways. It’s tempting for me to view Elmo the kitten as a tragic little figure who desperately needs to be sheltered and protected. But really, he’s a lively, playful ball of fur who needs to be encouraged to explore his world.
Stories are amazing. But like anything, they can do us harm when misused.
If you have any thoughts on how we connect with stories and the past, please share them in the comments. I’d be interested to hear other people’s perspectives.
Our reading habits are hugely influenced by gatekeepers, people and institutions who make broad judgements on what is and isn’t worth reading. It might not feel like it on an individual level, when you’re picking up the book that your friend recommended, but if you look at the big picture you can see these guardians of our reading experience looming over our selections.
They’re the big publishers, deciding what to put into print.
They’re the bookstores big and small, deciding what to order, what to show prominently on the shelves.
They’re the reviewers and editors who decide what gets attention.
They’re the writers of school and college curricula, making decisions on what counts as ‘important’.
Out with the old gatekeepers
Of course the overt power of any given gatekeeper is crumbling. Western culture developed a healthy and outspoken strain of cynicism about authority in the 1960s. The rise of the internet in the 1990s created a space in which we could easily seek out voices like our own, and so live the fractured and pluralistic culture promised by that previous generation. Now the growth of self-publishing is along many more writers to see their words in print.
The power of traditional gatekeepers is in decline. Bookstores are closing down, or at least being transformed. Ministers receive as much ridicule as praise when they try to tell us what’s worth reading.
And yet the wide range of choices causes us problems. We need a way to filter the millions of books, to decide what to read. We cannot make decisions without the help of some kind of gatekeepers. So what will those gatekeepers look like in ten or twenty years’ time? And will they empower us to make the choices that best suit our tastes, as we want them to, or will they try to make us fit their tastes, as is traditional?
Algorithms as gatekeepers
One of the biggest gatekeepers at the moment is Amazon. Its algorithms are designed to help you find books that you will like through its recommendations on what to read next. Amazon foregoes the opportunity to deliberately point you towards books which provide the company with a larger per-sale profit, instead betting on the long game. If they keep recommending the best choices for you then you will keep coming back and buying through them. It’s part of how they so thoroughly dominate the book selling market right now. If you want to know more, go read the informative books and blog posts of David Gaughran.
If the Amazon story has taught us anything it’s that nothing lasts forever. Damien Walter has predicted that, with the rise of more sophisticated software, Google may eventually take over from Amazon as our best source of book recommendations. This would, as Damien points out, liberate writers from being dependent on Amazon. However, Google’s paying customers are advertisers not readers or writers, and that could have a detrimental impact on how it works.
Algorithms have proved the sort of gatekeepers that empower us and help us to find books we want. The owners might change, but those programs aren’t going away. What will be interesting to see will be who provides the programs and who they help.
Awards as gatekeepers
Awards ceremonies provide a very different sort of gatekeeper, essentially creating a recommendation that the judges or collective community believe everyone should read. Whether it’s the impending Booker Prize directing the entire British reading public towards a single piece of literary fiction, or the fandom-voted awards that accompany the summer’s big science fiction and fantasy conventions, these are hegemonic gatekeepers, trying to hold a group together through shared tastes and identity.
The Knighton prize for getting my lazy arse out of bed in the morning
In some ways awards are among the most old-style of gatekeepers. The idea that any single book can be held up as objectively the best in its field feels absurd to me. But these prizes aren’t going anywhere, and they do fill a useful function. They bring us together, scattered as we are by our diverse tastes, help to create bonding conversations before we scatter back to our algorithmically identified reading piles.
What other gatekeepers?
I’m sure there are other gatekeepers still of relevance. Can you think of some I’ve missed? And what difference do these ones make to your reading? Do you find Amazon helpful? Do you single out award-winning books to read?
As always, please share your thoughts in the comments.
The way that stories connect us with the past is complicated. The can help us come to terms with it and understand its significance – just look at this year’s Booker Prize winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, a novel exploring Jamaica’s recent history. (It’s also the first time in ages that I’ve been tempted to read the Booker winner – this looks like one hell of a book.)