Computers have affected human society as few other inventions in the past century have. As literature generally tends to reflect the nature and self-image of the society that produces it, it is but natural that the advent and widespread use of computers have had a large impact on contemporary literature.
One of the most significant effects of computers is the arrival of computers in literature. The genre of science fiction was in some senses started by the British authoress Mary Shelley in the early 19th century with her renowned classic Frankenstein, but it caught on in a big way only in the 1930s and later. The science fiction produced in any generation tends to reflect the beliefs and knowledge, scientific or otherwise, of its time (for instance, science fiction written in the late 1940s and early 1950s sometimes described characters safely living through exposures to nuclear weapon blasts, which we now know is not possible because of very harmful long-term radiation effects). As computers have become widespread in society, so too has mention of them in contemporary science fiction.
Just as fiction takes its lead from life, so too, sometimes, does life from fiction. Early pioneers of manned flights were motivated by childhood readings of fiction where that happened; likewise, many computer scientists, especially artificial intelligence researchers like Marvin Minsky, freely admit that they have been motivated to work on making computers do the things that the science fiction authors of their childhoods imagined them to be able to do. The word 'robot' comes to us from a 1930s science-fiction play (Rossum's Universal Robots) by the Czech author Karel Capek, and the word 'robotics' is due to the late American author Isaac Asimov (although his original use of the word was different in flavor from the sense which is now widespread for it).
However, there are many instances where computer fiction has yet to become computer science--unrestricted machine translation of natural language is one of them. Likewise, there are also instances where reality has surpassed fiction--for instance, no science fiction writer foresaw the World Wide Web until it was reality.
In addition to computers in literature, we also now have literature in computers, which is possibly even more significant. There are a number of efforts to use computers to archive literary material (some of which is still in manuscript form and yet unpublished using conventional means). There are two aspects to the work--one is to make actual copies of texts, and the second to annotate the textual database and make it searchable by scholars. Simply copying printed or manuscript works as images is not sufficient, though it is useful and may stop them from being lost.
The best-known effort to use computers to archive literature is the ongoing Project Gutenberg (<http://www.gutenberg.net>), started by Michael Hart in 1971 and now involving thousands of individuals and institutions. Project Gutenberg began in 1971 when Hart obtained a computer operator's account with $100 million of computer time in it, given to him by the operators of the Xerox Sigma V mainframe at the Materials Research Lab at the University of Illinois. At the time, Hart and his fellow operators had more computer time than they knew what to do with, but they were encouraged to use it in creative ways, in the hope that they would learn something that would be useful for their jobs.
Hart decided that there was nothing he could do by way of usual computing tasks that would make proper use of the huge amount of resources he had been given. He therefore announced his conclusion that the greatest value of computers would not be conventional computation, but would be storage, retrieval, and searching of what was stored in conventional library bookstacks. He then created a "Declaration of Independence," modeled on the lines of the work of the Founding Fathers, and sent it to other people on the network. The discussion on this document gave rise to what became known as the Gutenberg Project, named in honor of Johannes Gutenberg, the first person to produce a printed edition of the Bible around 1454/55.
The Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web, are certainly the most important developments as far as the use of computers in literature go. They allow for texts to be published online rather than by conventional means, which makes for efficient, quick distribution of literary materials. The conventional book-publishing business is profit-driven, and only a small percentage of all the books written actually get published (perhaps 5% or less). Most books that are published have only small print-runs and are unavailable to interested readers because of logistical problems involved in distribution, transport, and selling. The Web addresses all these problems well.
Aided in large part by the Web, a new type of literary work, called an E-Book or E-Text, is now gaining currency; this is just an electronic version of a book, and can be downloaded off the Web by interested readers, to either be read either on the screen or printed out for offline reading. At this time, visual interfaces, particularly computer monitors, are inferior to standard printed text in terms of visual clarity, but technological advances should narrow the gap, allowing E-Books to become more prevalent.
In some people's eyes, the Web has also caused a decline in the quality of published literature, because there is less peer review, and anyone can publish things on his own home page. Although free speech is an important right as everyone accepts, some people feel that the Web allows for many false claims, scams, and poor quality writing to be published easily, with scarcely any review. As some lay people believe anything they see in print (naivete that is exploited by supermarket tabloids), such poor material has the potential for causing confusion and misinformation, and it is upto the reader to learn to distinguish good sources from bad ones.
This is the complete article, containing 974 words
(approx. 3 pages at 300 words per page).
