(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity)
Anna Lagos: You are a pioneer in mixing literature and the Internet, how do you think this medium has changed the way readers relate to content?
Hernán Casciari: I think the first big change is that these people are no longer called “readers.” It seems to me that it is the big initial change. For centuries, people who consumed information, both fiction and non-fiction, considered ourselves readers, because the only robust format was the book or the newspaper, but above all the book. The arrival of new technologies mixed readers with viewers and listeners. Now we are users of cultural content in general, whether journalism, fiction or a mixture of both. We go from one format to another without committing to any of them. It is difficult for me to think about readers, in the same way that it would have been difficult for me in 1980, to think differently about what else there is but a reader on the other side of the book we were writing. We wrote, in fact, thinking of a person who was silently going to read what we were mulling over in our heads and not today. Today I don’t think anyone thinks that way when creating content. The consumer of this content will no longer be serenely sitting on a Sunday afternoon with a whiskey and an open book with the entire afternoon available to consume that book. It doesn’t happen anymore, we no longer have that characteristic as humans. So, for example, trying to write a story today whose first four pages are the facial description of the protagonist, as was the case in the 17th century, is unfeasible. Nobody would do it. Nobody could stand four pages where we explain what the protagonist’s house was like and his physical bearing and the color of his eyes. No, tell me the story quickly because if you’re not grabbing me in 15 seconds, I’m going somewhere else, because I have many options! The fundamental change is that the other, whom we previously called the reader and who had the entire afternoon for us, no longer has the entire afternoon for us, nor is he called the reader. So you have to work differently, you have to think in a different way, you have to put yourself in the other’s shoes, who is the other, where is he, what does he want from me, what can I modify in his brain in the short time that he gives me? is giving and all of that is absolutely fascinating.
Anna Lagos: Why read if there are audiobooks or YouTube? What is the sense? I like to read, but I understand why many people have stopped doing so.
Hernan Casciari Sure, I like to read too, but not everyone shares that nostalgia. The book was the best there was when I was a child. Today, my seven-year-old daughter has other technologies. We had books and that feeling of immediacy that was opening them wherever we wanted. It was our version of a “break” on Netflix. My daughter, when I tell her about “Tom Sawyer” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” prefers any format that doesn’t involve spending four hours focused on a book. You can listen to “Tom Sawyer” while doing other things, and still understand and be moved by the story. The important thing is that the story arrives, no matter how. Voice eliminates inequality in experience, and that’s where new formats become exciting.
Anna Lagos: Why do you say that voice eliminates the inequality of experience?
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