Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

In the new media it’s easy for our pet hatreds to be introduced to anyone who is interested. And of course everyone is interested, how else could it be? Jyrki Lehtola investigates

Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, how can we get the revenue model to work by using our old media, Twitter, Facebook, Twitter, Twitter, hey, what about that revenue model of ours, Twitter.

The preceding is a poignant summary of what the Finnish media was like in 2011 when the rules of the game changed like they have changed every year. And we still don’t even fully understand what the game is supposed to be.

As late as 2010 you could still discuss the existence, significance and utility of Facebook as if there could be many different opinions on the subject; the defenders’ argument centred on social interaction and community, while the detractors was more ‘why would I join Facebook, I have a life.’

But in 2010 there was no longer any call for such wrangling, because Facebook was life. People didn’t join it anymore, because they already had. On Facebook we looked for cleaning help, shared our Spotify lists, shared links, endlessly, and told all of our friends how depressing Mondays are, or, as you would express it on Facebook: ‘Isn’t it great that it’s Monday again?’

We also hated there – oh, how we hated. Facebook tried to make us positive by offering us a ‘Like’ button, not a ‘Hate’ or ‘Despise’ button. But we were people who hated and despised – how to fulfil that important side of our nature on Facebook?

Easily, and, what’s more, in a pleasantly communal spirit; Facebook was a social medium, after all, not a medium that just tells us what to think, and what about. In the name of communality we created groups where we hated things and told others what to think.

We hated people who thought differently than we did, people whose values didn’t match our own, people who said ‘no’ when they were supposed to say ‘yes’ and people who worked in parts of the media that didn’t live up to our conception as social media actors about what people in the media should think.

Social media brought us a new communal gift: lurking. We created groups that hated and boycotted media, viewpoints and people, and then we sat and followed those same things, even though the purpose was to boycott them. Whenever the object of our hatred made a mistake, we linked to that error on Facebook, and then we laughed with our friends about how impossibly stupid people are.

Facebook was supposed to bring us a new, joyful sense of community, but even Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t do anything about our nature; we adopted Facebook in order to lure our friends into hating the things that we hated.

In 2011 Twitter also became an important part of our lives, because it understood our limitations and offered us the opportunity to condense our feelings and knowledge down to 140 characters. Twitter was the text messaging service for those who really wanted to subscribe to our social messages and hear that today we were ‘drunk in Porvoo’, that tomorrow ‘I’ll find out about a secret project I can’t talk about’ and that ‘here’s a link for all my Twitter followers to a page I found interesting’ because there can never be enough links in the world.

Twitter also gave us the opportunity to speak out in a way that didn’t require anything of ourselves. When you’re expressing your displeasure with a politician, the media or an international corporation in 140 characters, reasons don’t matter much, what you think does.

At the same time, Twitter gave the old media something to think about. What do we have to offer anyone anymore, and how can we squeeze money out of it? Because of Twitter, those of us in the old media were always late. Tweets were the first announcements of the revolutions in North Africa, the London riots and the death of Amy Winehouse.

We came limping along so late it was embarrassing. The subheading for every newspaper and TV news website could have been ‘News for the slow’.

The world became a place where you never had to wait for any information; everything was always available.

Whether we need all that information as quickly as we receive it is another matter. The new media was supposed to be social, but nothing had changed. There we sat, still alone in front of the television, just with the addition of our iPads, where we constantly received new information about what was happening in the world outside of the television; and, instead of digesting that information, we did what we always do nowadays: we forwarded it on.

It isn’t very long since we descended from the trees, and our gait is still a little unsteady. Our brains have been forced to adapt little by little to an accelerating world. Now that world has become so fast and so manic that our brains can’t necessarily keep up anymore. You can read about the effects of that imbalance in the old media, where the number of news blurbs about disorderly conduct has been rising sharply.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Because I am not a historian and Googling this topic would take more than two clicks, I do not know whether Gutenberg was accused of ruining the future of young people and making adults even stupider.

There would have been reason to. The invention of the printing press took us away from what is truly important. The world was better before Gutenberg.

People knew themselves and each other; they were connected to nature and what really matters. After Gutenberg invented the printing press, those poor people were forced to read books, creating an ever-worsening state of helplessness.

New inventions are always bad for everything we could be.

Television made us stupid. It brought us TV dinners and put the family on the couch watching advertisements, even though everyone could have been in their own rooms reading Hegel.

Magazines made us stupid. They had short stories, gossip, and pictures about people other than Hegel.

Now we have this Internet thing. It made us incredibly, unbelievably stupid, although, on the other hand, not so much.

The power of the Internet to make people stupid has been discussed as long as we have had the Internet to talk about the power of it making people stupid.

Because the Internet is something new, the potential and effects of which we are just becoming acquainted with, it follows that it makes us stupider. Google’s automatic answer service prevents us from using our memories. Wikipedia removes from the pool of answers the one that the world is a complex place in which there can be many contradictory answers to the same question. The endless news stream takes away our ability to concentrate. Each of these and many more considerations have had articles and books published about them.

Then there is the other, somewhat amusing perspective that has clung to the Zeitgeist, according to which the Internet is the salvation that will teach our youth and children how to get along in the modern world. This view emphasises willingness to change, coping with speed, multitasking, and that reading books is just a hindrance in a world of flashing stimuli.

We have spent the whole beginning of the millennium discussing this. People who write books have argued for the dumbing-down affect of the Internet; people who make their living from the Internet argue about what a good place the Internet is for our coping skills.

One of the most recent additions to the conversation is Nick Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. According to Carr, the Internet is changing how our brains work. On the Internet you don’t concentrate deeply on one thing, instead jumping from link to link in such a way that our brains don’t stop long enough on one thing.

Carr’s book has naturally aroused a discussion in which the opposition has argued that, well, here we go again with another elitist author tut-tutting current developments without offering any other solutions that tut-tutting current developments.

Now that this discussion has been going on for so long, would it be possible reshape it, if only for a moment?

Are we making the Internet stupid?

The Internet is a global place that crosses all boundaries, where we can get the latest information, which we can delve into ourselves or read about how other people have delved into, and in which we can be connected with people and perspectives we may never have been able to encounter otherwise.

That doesn’t sound all that terrible: a place where we can become acquainted with ten different opinions on the financial crisis, connect with our friends, check tomorrow’s weather, and purchase Terrence Malick’s latest film.

It would be nice in a place like that, but then we show up, we humans. Or at least the confusion of the Internet’s commercial actors related to us humans – related to what we are like and what to offer us so we’ll stay on the Internet in a way that can be made commercially viable.

And so they tried to invent different ways we could be present on the Internet: open discussion boards, a continuous demand to take a stand and let our voices be heard, and the recognition of how confused we are in the face of life.

And that is why I find instructions, queries, and polls on the Internet that apply to me so well. How can I keep my erotic life interesting? (I either have to remember that a) the other party is also a person, not simply the object of my erotic desires and b) it’s always fun to try new things) When is the right time to buy a child a mobile phone? (Depends on the child and your situation in life.) What to do when a child masturbates? (Talk with the child without embarrassing him.) Why am I not losing weight? (I eat unhealthy foods and don’t exercise enough.)

We have the Internet, a source of limitless potential, and how do we use it?

We turn it into a book – a book for rather simple children that tells us things we already know. We turn the Internet into a place whose default assumption is that we’re stupid, into a place that always has the same old questions and answers.

The Internet didn’t make us stupid. It didn’t have time, because we had already made it stupid first.

Translated by Owen Witesman

High in the sky: cumulus clouds. Photo: Michael Jastremski, Wikimedia

I’m sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of a cottage by a lake. My fingers tap and slide on the surface of a black glass panel, a kind of instrument used in the composing of literature. Each tap equals a letter, a series of taps equals a word, a symphony of taps becomes a paragraph, a paragraph an essay.

The glass panel remembers these letters and words and the writings they become, and knows them by their names, but it could also record anything I see or hear. I could even talk to it and it would understand my commands, as if some nether spirit were captured inside, a magic genie slaved to do my bidding.

If I command the spirit, it can send all that I have written into the sky, into the clouds where it lives; the heavens where the gods used to live. Now the cloud is occupied by another space altogether, a kind of information-aether existing everywhere around us. In this information-space my words will organise themselves into a file in a kind of imaginary drawer, or a lockbox that I have rented from these benevolent spiritual forces in order to store these other-dimensional ditherings for later perusal.

At some point in the future I will use a larger glass window into which I will stare like an enchanter into a scrying glass, and the window will open a portal into that other world, and I will there open the same lockbox and take out the file I have written in a cottage by a lake. This time I will be at home, writing this sentence in order to convey to you the sense of wonder I sometimes feel when tapping on my black glass panel like some techno-witch in a sci-fi tale.

What I have been describing is of course what is called, in a fitting poetic gesture, cloud computing. Cloud computing simply means that all the things we do, all the things we create on our computers, the files and documents and images and whatnot do not have to exist physically ‘in’ your computer. They will exist somewhere else, and you will access them through the internet. All that word processing, all those spread sheets and email and calendars, manuscripts and drafts, none of them will exist anywhere near where you are working on them, but in another computer perhaps thousands of miles away. To me this signals a profound change in the material nature of writing and reading that no one seems to be talking about.

The unaddressed nature of cloud computing and its impact on the future of the book might be due to the fact that most discussion has been centred around the way new technology will change the economy and the institutions of publishing. We don’t really hear actual readers and writers talk about the impact these new technologies have had on their life. So, I’m now asking: is this gift the cloud-gods have given us a blessing or a curse?

First, from the point of view of my reading habits, the change from a physical library to a cloud library has been mostly wonderful, yet somewhat frustrating, because the change has not proceeded fast enough. Last year I’ve read more books on my ‘smartphone’ than on paper. It’s almost too easy to buy books online, as it may take less than a minute for them to arrive. I would read even more, but what I tend to read is often unavailable in ebook form (for example, niche authors of obscure fantasy – Michael Cisco, Abram Tertz, David Ohle and Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky). This has made me impatient in a rather comically paradoxical way: ‘I can’t wait for them to mail me the book’, I think to myself, ‘and it’s more expensive anyway’ – so I end up not getting the book at all, because I would much rather wait wait for the digital version. Sadly, sometimes this wait might take forever, if copyright law stays the way it is.

My impatience also has other adverse effects. Because the books I want are not available, it’s too easy to read bad books that are. You can get mediocre space adventures or romance novels for five euros: the literary equivalent of fast food. Bingeing on such cheap fare, I haven’t even thought of the most worrying aspects of cloud libraries: the possibility of losing all my ebooks. My phone might break down, or the files might become corrupted, or the network might be hacked, and I couldn’t peruse any of the 25 books I’m currently reading. But still, I can take my books everywhere and read them any time I want –  with paper books you have to choose what, where and when to read.

If my reading has been enhanced, the best thing about this new paradigm has been the new writing tools it has given me. For me, one of the main concerns has always been the management of my incredibly bad memory and the inappropriate times when inspiration occurs. I need to write a good idea down right away, or I’ll forget it. Since new ideas tend to strike when nowhere near my office or my home, like on a train, in a hotel room, in a cafe or shopping, I’ve always hated laptops because they are just so unwieldy. Mine is small but still too large, the battery doesn’t last, and it’s impossible to take it out of your pocket just to write down one sentence. And while it’s possible to go to a cafe or a library to work and wait for those good ideas to come to me, I’m not able to decide when this serendipity happens.

Shouldn’t I be using good old paper notebooks, then? Sure, but my best ideas never come to me when I put my pen on paper. Somehow they just dissipate in ink. There’s something in the physicality of the act that chafes me, restricts the free flow of fast association, the connections between ideas that I need to see happening on the page quickly in order to fully understand. It’s also impossible to ‘edit’ notebooks efficiently. I see the forms of ideas and the connections between them as kinetic movements, and editing text on the computer lets me juxtapose things very fast. My notebooks look awful, are sometimes totally incomprehensible, and therefore defeat their purpose.

A smartphone, on the other hand, is a marvellous notebook. Some programmes have enormous potential: some of them are able to organise notes, chapter outlines, character backstories and so on by colour coding or a system resembling index cards. For me the most useful feature has been the ability to seamlessly edit and write new material anywhere and on any computer through a browser or a programme on my phone. I usually work in stages of drafts from notes and ideas, which are stored in various documents, proceed to more complete drafts on a word processor, then towards edited and revised drafts. If I am working on a literary book, prose or poetry, I have to see the final drafts in pdf format – like the final pages of a book. Being able to reach all these stages from anywhere and edit them anywhere has been a real blessing.

Most of my reading and all of my work now resides in the digital cloud. I won’t really miss the paper book, and I definitely won’t miss writing by longhand. It feels so wonderful that I don’t actually understand why people aren’t going around public places exclaiming in hyperboles about it like demented evangelists. It’s as if my ideas were existing in the air around me, not locked away in some notebook or a weathered old dustjacket, somewhere I can’t reach when I need to.

Like some constellation in the sky, my thoughts now move across the firmament, from where the influence and the inspiration of the gods descends upon us.

Stumbled upon: readers find Tommi Musturi's comic strip (June 10–June 18)

When Books from Finland was a printed journal, it was relatively easy to define its readership – now it is different: we are a part of the internet’s ecosystem, its surging and multifarious mass of knowledge.

Those who visit our pages may have the most diverse motives for wanting to read our articles – and they may travel surprising itineraries before arriving on Books from Finland’s pages, as we found out recently: StumbleUpon is still a fairly little-known service in Finland. Thus it took a while before we realised why so many of the comments about our piece on Tommi Musturi’s wordless comic strip, on colour and friendship, began with the words ‘I stumbled upon’…

The idea of StumbleUpon is simple: it filters and evaluates websites on the basis of the opinions of its members. It is, in other words, a social media application which is not used for traditional information-seeking, but instead answers the question, ‘What would I like to find today?’ On the basis of the user’s interests, the service suggests pages which the user, in turn, judges with an upturned thumb. A website may attract a significant number of visitors if it rises high on StumbleUpon’s list of recommendations.

This was the case with the piece on Tommi Musturi: during the course of a single day, it was read by thousands of people – and completely entangled our graph of visitor numbers!

Inspired by this, I signed up for StumbleUpon. The very first suggestion the site offered me was impressive: the real-time simulation page links the globes carbon dioxide emissions with birth- and death-rates. Did you know that Wikipedia has a list of the unsolved problems of philosophy?

Thumbs up, then, for Tommi, friendship and colours!



Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

How does it sound, the people’s voice? Loud and sometimes clear perhaps, but, as columnist Jyrki Lehtola finds, more often than not shrill and puerile

According to a study carried out by Finland’s biggest newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, 60 per cent of Finns oppose the idea of allowing more immigrants into Finland.

The chancellor of the University of Helsinki, Ilkka Niiniluoto, is concerned about freedom of speech. Immigration researchers no longer dare participate in public debate, because they find themselves the target of death threats.

A hate group was set up on Facebook, the organising theme of which was the idea that an innocent Finnish pop singer should be killed.

Even now many of us Finns are agitating for fewer rights for homosexuals and lower taxes for ourselves, all the while demanding of our fellow travellers, ‘who the hell do you think you are, are you a retard or what?’

When the internet was only seen as valuable because there was porn on it, the internet didn’t bother us. Unfortunately, pornography has now been superseded by the voice of the people. Our voice.

All was well when ‘the people’ were out there, somewhere, in their cottages and forests. We were able to idealise and romanticise them. ‘The people’ represented all that was fundamentally and eternally good.

And since, according to Bertolt Brecht’s quoted-to-death definition, Finland is the nation that keeps silent in two languages, we didn’t even have to listen to the people: the people were, after all, mute. We could put our own desires in the mouth of the people and claim they were the people’s desires.

And the people already had a voice, the official voice. The major newspapers had long ago made a decision on principle that letters to the editor penned under pseudonyms would only be published in exceptional circumstances. As a result, docents, researchers, and teachers argued politely about sundry topics on the pages of the letters to the editor section of Helsingin Sanomat, giving rise to an image of a people capable of articulate argumentation.

Then we were given the internet, and everything fell apart.

The people got a voice, and it was not a beautiful voice. It was angry, bitter and prejudiced. It did not have passable command of its own language, nor did it know what to do when the computer’s Caps LoCK KEY WAS INadvertently left on, but that didn’t bother it: it continued spewing hatred at one and all.

And this people knew how to hate. Ensconced behind usernames and aliases, it hated everything external, different and new. And it did not argue, but rather shouted like an anxious teen from behind the bushes that you should be killed, you’re a fag, and at least your dad was a fag.

And it didn’t just talk that way about the big issues like tax policy, immigration policy or homosexual partnership rights. No, it managed to move everything to the same level of debate, whether it be pasta recipes (‘You f *** ing idiot, don’t you realise there are too many carbs in it! You’re sick!’), or car batteries (‘If you come ‘round here asking about car batteries, you must be gay, if you don’t know already!’)

Two interesting results have followed. The first is that it is not our fault, but rather the internet’s.

When the people’s voice is full of hatred, prejudice and resentment, none of us is really man or woman enough to say that something really ought to be done about this people, maybe civilise it a bit. Instead we blame the medium: something should be done about the internet – it made the people like that.

The second consequence is that populism has now won and elitism has lost once and for all.

Since the people’s voice is now audible, it must be listened to. No one has the right to say that the people are prejudiced and wrong. If more than half of the people are prejudiced and wrong, then the politicians, entertainers and business leaders must also be prejudiced and wrong, so the people will accept them.

Democracy is now the idea that more and more opinions and decisions will get their start in Facebook hate groups or internet chat rooms, and that is precisely democracy’s current problem.

Translated by Owen Witesman

When we think of the future of publishing in these times of electronic reading devices, audiobooks, and the internet, when it seems as if the whole material being of literature is about to be transformed, we may ask how the marketing of books will change.

What happens when publishing goes online? How will authors cope with the new culture of the internet?

The internet is a place of fads: often silly, usually forgettable, but sometimes significant inventions and fashions which change the way we interact with each other on a daily basis. Many of these innovations have to do with communities: the much-touted ‘social media’ of forums, message boards, chat channels and the like, where news of bands, books and movies proliferate much faster than through traditional networks such as newspapers and television.

Because communication is faster, fashions are born and die much faster; the cycle of culture is speeding up. At the same time every dead fashion is piling up in some obscure niche of the web. Nothing ever really goes away on the internet. It has simply lost the attention of the general public. Online, it’s the attention that counts: how do you get it, and how do you keep it?

One has to ask how publishing will mutate in accordance with these new conditions. Will we find ourselves in the midst of a new kind of literary culture centered around digitally savvy writer-celebrities and their fan communities? Or will the internet become a vast graveyard of ghosts whispering about their 15 seconds of fame?

An example of the kind of authorial behavior that we may witness in the future is the up-and-coming generation of authors of ‘indie fiction’, such as the Americans Tao Lin, Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Indie fiction is not a literary school or even a set of stylistic similarities shared by a generation of writers, but rather is loosely attached to group blogs and internet literary magazines, such as HTML Giant (which is edited by Butler, the author of two well-received novels). It is an economic and material category: most, if not all, indie fiction is published and marketed by small presses such as Featherproof Books, Calamari Press, and Publishing Genius on or via the internet, sometimes not even in paper format at all.

But what is this ‘indie’, you might ask, and how does it herald the future of publishing? Well, it is, of course, a popular music term, deriving from ‘independent’, meaning independent of major labels, big money; an alternative to mainstream culture. ‘Indie fiction’ is therefore also a cultural category, and it is true that indie fiction has more in common with the mentality of so-called indie musicians and indie record labels than it has with traditional publishing houses and traditional literary culture – more with social media such as MySpace and Facebook than the institution of literary agents and venerable magazines like the Paris Review or the New Yorker.

As many indie fiction authors also seem to be alumni of creative writing programs, one could almost say: what art school has been for rock music, the MFA (or Master of Fine Arts, the degree awarded by creative writing programs in American universities) will be for literature (the list of significant musicians who went to art school and then changed the face of popular music is quite amazing: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, REM, Radiohead…).

What this means is that indie authors are rooted – unlike mainstream authors, who do not cluster around any such institutions – in the same hotbeds of alternative, twentysomething student lifestyles from which new trends in fashion and music almost always emerge, or which, at least, trendsetters scrutinise in order to find the new ‘it’ phenomena. But what is important is that they emerge independently of mainstream institutions, which can hop on the train only when it is already moving.

‘Indie fiction’ therefore means the subculturisation of mainstream literature: ever smaller niches for ever smaller audiences. This does not mean that indie authors are afraid to ‘sell out’, or that they will not also jump aboard the traditional bandwagon when it comes around. One could even argue that the expertise in self-promotion which successful indie authors accrue is an important skill set for their future careers, since it means that such authors have measured the mental pulse of their demographics and can speak to them on their own terms and through their own channels.

Take the aforementioned Shane Jones, a 30-year-old author who explicitly set himself with the goal of using internet forums to promote his novel, Light Boxes. The novel was originally published by Publishing Genius, a tiny press, and Jones promoted it on the internet by putting up a website, giving interviews to internet magazines, and by sending ‘hundreds of personal emails’ to his readers on the site Goodreads.com, a kind of public bookshelf for people who want to list and review their books. Since the site can also be used to find new books through your friends on the forum, after Jones got himself noticed by more and more people on the site, more and more people recommended the book to their friends.

Ultimately Jones’s marketing campaign was successful, since it got him noticed by the venerable Penguin, who published his novel, and also by Spike Jonze, the Hollywood movie director, who optioned the film rights for his novel.

A more famous example is probably Tao Lin, the self-appointed ‘it boy’ of indie fiction. Lin, who has published two novels, a collection of stories and two collections of poetry, is famous for using the internet in order to get attention for his work. He has, for instance, used his blog to sell $2000 shares in an unpublished novel, each of which would entitle the owner to 10 per cent royalties. This gave him wide coverage by the press in the US and the UK.

Lin is also known for sending relentless amounts of ironically self-promotional e-mail to the editors of almost every major internet magazine having anything to do with literature or culture at large – these messages often detail even his most mundane chores. At one point, Lin and (perhaps, since they all may be Lin) four other authors used Craigslist, the hugely popular internet notice board for classified ads, to shop for interns to promote their books.

But perhaps most famously, he’s claimed to have subsisted on shoplifting and selling the stolen merchandise on eBay, the internet auction house. But since the stolen items were corporate products and Lin used the proceeds to buy, among other good things, organic food, he therefore claims that the thefts were ethically vindicated. He later wrote a book, called Shoplifting from American Apparel, which, to my surprise, I bought from the Academic Bookstore here in Helsinki.

Such antics only work, of course, if the writing is good. And judging by Jones’s, Butler’s and Lin’s novels and short stories, there is good reason to take them seriously. Whereas both Butler and Jones tend toward the surreal, referencing magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, Lin’s work brings to mind both Hemingway and Donald Barthelme, writers of surgically precise prose, the one realist, the other fabulist. Lin’s writing, especially in the 2007 novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, combines these two tones into a voice which, when the amalgam succeeds, is at once funny, serious and absurd, imaginative and deadpan, ironic and minimalist.

The voice of these new authors, at its best, uses humor and absurd imagination to isolate and foreground the existential angst of a generation brought up with the bodiless anonymity of digital life, with text messages, chatrooms and blogs. It is a voice depressed by the narrowed experience of modern networked life in the blue glow of computer monitors, but one that is still yearning for moments of imagination, happiness and meaning – even if such things seem to be only the nostalgic phantoms of their previous incarnations.

Father Christmas / Santa Claus by Mauri Kunnas

What to give the man who has everything? In prizewinning children’s author and illustrator Mauri Kunnas’s Twelve Gifts for Santa, Zac, one of Father Christmas’s little helpers, decides to give him twelve good deeds. Doing so is not as easy as it looks, however, and you can follow the twists and turns of the story on the Kidzone Finland advent calendar from Tuesday, 1 December, with one window opening each day until Christmas Eve.

Mauri Kunnas (born 1950) published the first of his popular picture books for children in 1980; entitled Koiramäen talossa (‘Doghill Farm’), it describes – with the accuracy of a treatise on folklore studies – life in a country farmhouse at the end of the 19th century. His hilarious canine characters, in more than forty books, have now found readers in almost thirty languages.

Kidzone Finland is an interactive website for British schoolchildren aiming to familiarise them with Finland, its culture and lifestyle. In the company of Emilia, Ville and Sofia, children are invited to explore the world of school and work, the environment, and facts about Finland by considering subjects such as a typical school day, looking after forests, helping animals, mobile phones, the internet, saunas and icebreakers.

Although favourably inclined to Finland (you don’t go to school until you’re seven! The language sounds just like it’s written! It’s where the Moomins come from!), Books from Finland‘s young reviewers found the text-rich, image-poor website tough going. Accompanied as it is by directions for teachers, however, it may work much better in the classroom.

Kidzone Finland is published by the Finnish Embassy in London and is an adapted version of a project originally developed by the Finnish Embassies in Washington, Ottawa and Berlin.

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy.

The project is a private one; no one else can order the book. You might ask why I would do something like this – however, a more interesting question, I think, is why it feels entirely natural and logical to do it.

These days everyone is talking about the way that traditional print media are dying because of the internet. But the internet itself has not stopped developing, and where it’s going in 2009 is surprising. The tech-wise and internet savvy are suddenly interested in plain old paper. What the most avid minds are talking about now is something called the ‘papernet’: the extension of the internet on to traditional paper media. But what would a papernet be like? Specifically, what would it mean for a Finnish poet working today?

Let me give you some examples. In 2005–2006, I became acquainted with some Finnish poets who were publishing their work on the web. Janne Nummela had been using search engines to trawl up bits of language from the internet to compose his imaginative, superbly funny surrealist collages. Karri Kokko had a project called ‘Varjofinlandia’ (‘Shadowfinland’), where he had been collecting sentences and bits of discourse concerning depression and anxiety to make a ‘confessional’ short novel. Inspired by these poets, I thought, could we go a step further and make the process of writing a poetry book ‘live’: an ongoing, public event available for comment?

My second poetry book, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, 2008), evolved from a blog into a printed book published by Tammi, a traditional publishing house. In the process, many things changed; working with an editor, a graphic design department, and a publishing house with its own ways of doing things inevitably does that. I feel that the book lost some of its immediacy and resonance once it was taken off the net; it lost contact with the sustaining conversation that had produced it.

I do acknowledge the values of traditional methods of publishing. A good working relationship with an editor is integral for me, not to mention the resources for marketing and publicity, which the poetry scene, as a culture defined by an economy of scarcity, tends to want to downplay. Poetry is, after all, a bad investment for publishers. Then again, the amount of poetry this economy of scarcity makes available is only a tiny slice of what could be out there. Also, do we really want a handful of people (the editorial boards of publishing companies) deciding what’s worth publishing?

An answer to these questions came in 2007–2008, when the Finnish poetry publishing scene changed radically. First, the poetry organisation Nihil Interit began publishing poetry books with the pod publisher Kirja kerrallaan (‘A book at a time’), under the imprint poEsia. These books are available as downloadable ebooks or normal printed versions. Then the poet Leevi Lehto established his own pod publishing company, ntamo, with the aim of publishing more poetry than all the traditional publishing houses put together. The visual and conceptual poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s Ankkuri is a similar company.

And then one day I saw Karri Kokko, who had made an experimental ‘version’ of his unpublished poems using the internet pod publisher Lulu. We talked about the possibilities inherent in pod publishing, some of these being rather practical, as in simply making a collection of everything you have written to take with you to readings.

But other ideas soon became apparent: what would ‘podism’, the DIY publishing revolution with its new forms of production, circulation and consumption of printed materials, really mean for literary culture?

Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print it out for you. Depending on what kinds of feeds you are currently following, your morning paper could be a mix of the best of New York Times, Helsingin Sanomat and Le Monde, for instance. (And I’m not talking about the kind of printers we have now, but much better ones; ones that could print out not only newspapers, but paperback books or broadsheets or even glossy magazines.) Imagine, also, that books were no longer tied to the cost-heavy machinery of traditional publishing houses, which can only produce one book in one edition at one moment of time. If the audiovisual industry is already changing because of electronic distribution, imagine when the same thing happens to books.

Except that these things are not imaginary. They are already happening. Perhaps the most interesting is the current idea of the ‘unbook’. The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

An unbook is, then, more like a community project between authors and their readers than the traditional one-way street of author->publisher->reader. Gray claims such a re-envisioning of the book-making process can change many things: ‘The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.’

It should be clear by now that my own unbook is not a self-publishing or vanity project. Rather, it is an un-book only in the sense that is un-done (I also happen to think that the name ‘unbook’ is a little too coy). What’s central to me is the idea of experimenting with the composition process, but also of taking more control over the material existence of what I write, of trying out ways of graphically representing my work in the best possible way. We writers aren’t usually very good at that; the history of the book trade is a history of outsourcing everything that’s material about writing to everyone else except the author. In the past, this has been necessary, because the technology simply could not be owned or mastered by one person. Now it can be, and you don’t even have to leave your house to be able to do it.

I don’t know if this experiment will lead me to new ways of making books. Poetry is, after all, very different from the kinds of things Cross and Gray are writing: books on visual culture and ‘e-learning’. Sometimes it seems to me that the most I might achieve is an understanding of how to design a book so that it can communicate something by its material form. But all this is so new. We don’t know where the papernet will go.

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Sometimes I’m simply reminded of the aura of singularity and originality surrounding authorial manuscripts as artefacts, something Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the early twentieth century, argued art lost when the age of mechanical reproduction began – but the manuscripts, I think, still retain that aura. Perhaps the unbook could be a way to let the printed book share some of the hand-written aura of manuscripts?

We must constantly invent new containers for books to burst out of, because they exceed their material form: books are never finished. And that’s a good thing for us readers.

Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Just how ‘free’ is free speech? Pay a visit to any internet chatroom, and you’ll see. In the first column of a new series called ‘Journalist’s tales’, the media critic Jyrki Lehtola investigates intolerance on the internet

First there was utopia. Then came people, and utopia suffered.

As with all new inventions, from electricity to the atom bomb, internet social networks were supposed to make our lives better. They were supposed to give us license to network, to participate, to get to know each other, to get reacquainted, to flirt, to find an extramarital lover and to be connected to as many people as possible in as many inconsequential ways as possible.

If only it would have ended with adults being able to feel like children on Facebook. But then these children were forced to face the real world, and listening to their blubbering has been less than pleasant.

Even in social networks we’ve been forced to face the unfortunate fact that freedom of speech also applies to those with whom we do not agree.

Because of this, internet social networks are slowly becoming more politically correct, turning into increasingly more aggressive tea rooms where pitched battles are fought for one’s freedom of speech against others who are using their free speech to disagree about the world.

This is understandable. Facebook freedom of speech easily gives rise to the misconception that the I, the expresser of the opinion, am always right simply because I expressed an opinion, which due to a technological accident, is available for the whole world to read.

Social networks became problematic when instead of flirting on them, people started taking positions on societal problems.

When someone notices something wrong with the world, he/she starts a group on Facebook to oppose this error. These groups sprout up daily because in a Facebook group it’s easy to take a stand and express one’s social conscience. It requires no responsibility, no argumentation, no acknowledgement of the complexity of the world. Just an unfortunate name for a group that has only one idea.

And there are enough of these ideas: in under a minute you can join a group named ‘Stand up for Humanity’ and a group agitating for better grub in the greasy spoon next door. Not long ago there were news reports on the influence of Facebook on daily school life in the U.S.. People over there were throwing their hands in the air because over-eager parents had been creating vociferous Facebook groups to protest school starting times, the size of schoolyards and the style of teaching maths.

And the more people who join utopia, the more surely utopia will be destroyed.

The wrong kind of people moved in next door on Facebook, and they are raising such a racket that it’s becoming hard to be at peace with one’s own docile thoughts anymore.

Utopia became a place where instead of creating friendships we started to found hate groups. Hate groups hate many things, and often the wrong things, like sexual minorities and immigrants.

What should good people do about things like that? In normal, everyday life, we cross to the other side of the street, but on Facebook we show more backbone and found hate groups that hate the hate groups. And thus the reality of Facebook began to change: the bastion of friendship and networking became a hotbed of inflamed emotions, where the anger we restrain in the real world is allowed to run amok. Early this year a new group appeared on Finnish Facebook that publishes the names of criminal informants, and not in the spirit of forgiveness.

And thus utopia has been forced to face the problem of the real world: that freedom of speech also means freedom for words other than yours.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Our idea of what it is to read, and to read literature, has always been – and for many of us remains – bound up with the invention that made the development of western literature possible, the Gutenberg printing press and its successors.

In making this website, we have tried hard to fashion it as a place of repose as well as excitement, a location where the spirit and the imagination, as well as the intellect, can engage with what in the old days was called the printed word.

But of course, we are part of the excitement of the internet, too. We appreciate that websites exist, definitively, in three dimensions – two of space, and one of time. In abandoning the old, printed format of Books from Finland, we regretfully relinquish its seasonality – the natural cycle of our four yearly issues appearing with the spring melt, the white nights of midsummer, the darkness of autumn and the snows of winter. But we quickly realised that our rhythm could easily be rearranged; Books from Finland can be, if not a daily companion, at least a weekly one, with new posts at least every seven or so days.

A journal stands or falls by its capacity to echo, prompt or stimulate conversations in the real world (or, which comes to the same thing, the imaginations of its readers). The internet offers us the opportunity, it seems to us, of connecting with you, our readers, naturally. Instead of a gaggle of writers, all struggling to make themselves heard, arriving through your letter-box every quarter, we can give each writer his or her own space to speak, one by one, as is customary when people really want to hear clearly – and, what’s more, you have the opportunity to join the debate.

So, just for example, our latest addition, in the third week of April: Moscow television correspondent Anna-Lena Laurén recounts her experience of learning how to give and receive in the Russian way. The following week, it is Jyrki Lehtola’s turn to be heard: he uses it to expose the myth of tolerance on the internet. Then, Claes Andersson’s tenderly engaged poetic observations about life at home and abroad will appear, and after them the poet Teemu Manninen’s meditations on the new internet and its most electrifying possibility – the return to paper. Meanwhile, too, our Reviews section features critical readings of the best of what’s currently being published in Finland, while In Brief offers a wider reflection of cultural news. And the continuing project of the digitisation of our own vast database: more than 40 years of the very best of Finnish literature in translation, most of it completely unavailable elsewhere. Everything, of course, remains on the site for future reference, reading and reflection. All in good time.

It feels as if we have come a long way since we published our last printed issue in December, but of course we have only just reached the starting point: Books from Finland’s life on line is only just beginning. You can keep in touch by making ours your start page, adding it to your bookmarks, subscribing to our RSS feed, signing up for e-mail updates, or just by visiting us regularly.

Stay with us – Books from Finland‘s new life is an adventure, and one that belongs to us all!

Leena Krohn on the way to Cape Tainaron, Southern Peloponnese, Greece; this is where Europe ends. Her novel entitled Tainaron appeared in 1985. – Photo: Mikael Böök (2008)

The world wide web, whose services most of us now use for work or entertainment, is a greater invention than we have, perhaps, realised up till now: according to the writer Leena Krohn, it is nothing less than an evolutionary leap

Technology combats the limitations of our senses, geography, and time. The human eye can’t compete with the visual acuity of an eagle, or even a cat, but with the best telescopes it can see into the early history of the universe, with new electron microscopes it can distinguish individual atoms.

The human senses nevertheless have an unbelievably broad bandwidth. About a million times more data flows to our brains by means of our senses than we could ever grasp consciously. Instead, the consciousness of (even us) humans is meagre – as well it should be, since human mental health would collapse if its system were overloaded, if all of a person’s perceptions could pass into consciousness.

The construction of consciousness is more a process of discarding than of accumulation. But the most remarkable aspect of human consciousness is that a person can choose the focus of their attention, and also quickly shift it. Consciousness is an endless process of elimination, a process of choosing. The human mind searches and chooses meanings as a bumblebee does honey: meanings are the food of consciousness.

The information network, the world wide web, is such a notable revolution in telecommunications that it can be considered an evolutionary leap. The information network is also a network of individual consciousnesses, and the significance of the internet is one of a sharing of meanings, much like that in literature.

Within the information network, a person is an inhabitant of both the physical and the digital world. He or she is like an astronaut floating weightlessly in space, out of contact with anything material. For the astronaut, expressions like ‘above’ or ‘below’ lose their meanings, and to the traveller in the information network – the internaut – things both near and far can be ‘here’.

But the reader of a book also lives in two worlds simultaneously: his or her own reality and the reality created by the writer. Both the information network and the literature of the world (every single book) are cosmoses of the mind, albeit very different ones.

Familiarising myself with the internet in the early 1990s clarified a certain reality that should have been otherwise apparent, but simply hadn’t been. Literature is not books. (Neither are all books literature.) The covers of books, their numbered pages, or the black print do not make up literature. Literature consists of aggregates of meanings called works. The meanings are common to all humanity, but the way that they are chosen, combined, and collected into works is extraordinary and unique.

In the 21st century, the internet has moved into a new phase, and this shift also affects literature. No one really thinks, any more, that the net can change literature in such a revolutionary way as was imagined only a decade ago.

New genres such as graphic novels and interactive juxtapositional poetry have not taken the place of reading or buying Gutenberg-type books. Automated story-generating systems have not been able to hold our interest for long. Readers haven’t rushed in bucket brigades to contribute to non-linear niche-fiction begun by ‘real’ writers. They would rather write themselves, and that is a good thing.

The most linear of all literary genres, the diary, is more popular than ever before. What self-respecting person with writing ability who possesses a computer doesn’t maintain at least one blog nowadays? Encyclopedias as well, of which Wikipedia is the most significant, have also migrated to the internet.

There is now talk of a phenomenon known as cloud computing. It is likely that before long the work done on a computer will, like leisure-time computer activities, happen in ‘clouds’. Work will be completed and recorded in the hovering digital cloud that circles the globe by means of trouble-free online applications. There will be no need to buy separate word-processing, spreadsheet, layout, or presentation software for our own computers – instead we can use free software such as Zoho Writer, Buzzword, AjaxWrite, ThinkFree, Writely, or gOffice….

From anywhere in the world, on any computer, writers will be able to retrieve and continue their work on a document and share it with anyone they choose to. And every visitor to the internet’s social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, its marketplaces like InnoCentive, its Semantic Web applications like Twine, and its virtual worlds like Second Life, are also made to practise written culture.

The greatest change from the point of view of literature, however, is the digitisation of text, because apparently the literature of the world is moving to the internet in the very near future, whether that is universally accepted or not.

Project Gutenberg began the digitisation of books as early as 1971, Project Runeberg (which focuses on Nordic literature) in 1992. Their written content was not originally scanned – individuals typed it up and uploaded it from their own computers. The Million Book Project from 2001–2007 digitised 1.4 million mostly non-English-language works from China, India, and Egypt. Online bookseller Amazon now offers a million electronic documents (eDocs) and along with it the Kindle reading device which was recently brought to market has sold well, bolstering faith in the future of the e-book. My guess is that mobile phones will replace the Kindle as a reading device. (I confess I have read both non-fiction and fiction from my mobile phone on sleepless nights for several years now.)

But none of these projects can compare to Google’s ambitious goals. In Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan to Organise Everything We Know, Randall Stross sees the Google BookSearch program as a project comparable to the first missions to the moon. Google’s specific goal is to digitise 32 million books from 25 thousand libraries.

Copyright questions are a problem even for Google, however. At the moment, readers can access approximately 7 million works in their entirety. According to a recent contract with publishers and authors, readers (at first only in the United States) will soon be able to choose from a much wider selection, including copyright-protected out-of-print books that Google has not yet been able to digitise.

As Andrew Keen asked in the Independent, ‘Is Google good or bad?’. Keen answered the question himself. ‘Google is, in fact, an Orwell-Disney co-production. The company wants to know everything about us so that it can help us in every way. Room 101 [Orwell’s chamber of horrors] then, on planet Google, is a brightly lit, cheerful place where we can, at the click of a mouse, know all there is to know about ourselves, our neighbours and the world.’

Google’s goal is a stunning one: an organisation begun as a search engine is aiming not just for the digitisation the world’s literature and its meanings, stamped with its own watermark, but for the organisation of all information. Is any firm fit for such a task?

Reaching the point of so-called ‘technological singularity’ – a complete shift to a new era, in which artificial intelligence reaches and surpasses human intelligence – is an event that has long been anticipated, and feared. Such a moment is not yet in sight. But as data streams expand and combine with one another, are we approaching an ‘information singularity’, a phase in which meanings begin to disappear into the cold, white noise of information?

At that point, the web will have grown into a universal library so immense that even the most advanced search engine robots will be lost in its labyrinths, like the visitor to the infinite library imagined by Jorge Luis Borges in his short story ‘The Library of Babel’ (written in 1941, it depicts a universal library containing not just all existing, but also all possible works, including texts consisting entirely of arbitrary strings of characters). In order to find a specific work in a library as comprehensive as this, a robot would have to be fed the entire text, word by word!

Translated by Lola Rogers