“If your kid says ‘I’m bored’ that’s good. It means he’s not being assaulted by various media at the moment. Sitting doing nothing is very important for a kid. There’s no time for daydreaming otherwise today. We lived in daydreams and spent much of our time fantasising…these days kids get on to a bus and look at their phones, come home and switch on the TV…” Hong Kong based children’s and adult writer Nury Vittachi hit it spot on at a discussion titled “Ctrl Alt Del: Storytelling in a Time of Technology”.
The panel was part of JumpStart’14 held recently in Bangalore — a platform for writers, illustrators, storytellers, publishers of children’s books — to come together and discuss ideas on developing content for children. It was organised by the German Book Office.
This particular panel featured Ralph Mollers, founder of several multimedia publishing enterprises including book2look and flipintu. And Nury Vittachi, who also works at an entertainment lab, is founder of Scholastic Asia Book Prize among others. The discussion was moderated by Samina Mishra, filmmaker, teacher, writer with a special interest in media for children.
It was a predictably polarised debate for and against e-books, and it was with child-like glee that Nury took an “against technology” stand stating he’s hostile to new technology, while Ralph took the “for” stand. Though at some point they both made peace when Nury admitted that “the world can have both (physical and e-books) — it’s not an either or relationship”. Ralph too agreed at one point saying “I believe the medium is irrelevant. A good story is a good story. The question is whether it’s engaging or not.”
Samina initially steered the discussion towards the relationship between storytelling and technology. Ralph spoke of how technology can transport a story, and how storytelling is deeply rooted in our DNA. Nury established his cynical, sarcastic, and dramatic approach when he started off holding a book in his hand, and raving about how “Look! It’s a solar-powered eye-book, which can operate even by candlelight…it costs 1/100 of your iPhone and the best part is it is not multifunctional. You have a relationship with it!” Nury also pointed out how storytelling, in excess of 5,000 years has been a largely oral tradition, and how we all essentially tell stories everyday even when we pick up the phone and start telling friends what we did last evening.
The debate went the next step to question whether new technology is the big bad wolf and if panic about it was justified. Ralph argued that the “moral panic is totally useless. It’s important to understand how technology woks, how it allows or explorative storytelling as different from that on paper, giving us a new dimension. Storytelling becomes a mode of communication.” Nury was quick to point out studies and statistics which reveal that no publishing firm has made money selling children’s e-books. While moving on to what works or doesn’t for e-books, and coming down to the brass-tacks of language and imagination, Nury again had the participants in agreement when he said “You need wild imaginations, and that’s where books are ahead. Gaming companies are hiring writers and novelists because they’ve realised they need good dialogue writers. In games you hear and see characters.
In books, you make the voices up. It’s different for all of us. Books are internal and so much more powerful.”
Continuing on imagination, Nury pointed out how (again quoting studies) how the level of imagination in children is decreasing with each year because kids are surrounded by poorly-imagined or under-imagined material. Ralph agreed with Nury on this and offered his theory that it was “because a lot of stuff is developed keeping international markets in mind, so it was totally faithless. In children’s publishing, you should focus on the home culture and be more daring and not have one eye on the American public.”
With the Q&A session the discussion opened up into the world of 3D printing and books, young adult fiction, whether content is changing because children are losing innocence faster, alternate measures of success of a book, parents as gatekeepers of what children read v/s shouldn’t children be deciding what they want to read?
