on 31 August 2007Put away that credit card. It’s easy to convince yourself that you need a new 24-inch aluminium iMac to keep up with the blistering pace of your own creativity, but you really don’t. A man in Italy, it says here on Reuters, has just written a novel on his mobile phone.
Roberto Bernocco typed the 384-page science fiction chiller Compagni di Viaggio on the way to work, using predictive texting. Evidently predictive texting works a lot better in Italian, and there’s more elbow room on public transport. I’m assuming he was on public transport; being Italian, he may have been driving. With a cigarette in his other hand. Anyway, the point is clear. ‘Thanks to my Nokia, I am now a published author.’
Let’s just pause there, because (like the way the ever-vigilant Reuters spelled Mr Bernocco’s name, and the title of his book) that’s not strictly correct. Compagni di Viaggio was self-published on Lulu.com. Having a book on Lulu is ‘being a published author’ in the same way that doing the science questions on a pub quiz team is ‘being Stephen Hawking’. And even among its peers, Bernocco’s masterwork is currently ranked 19,009th.
To be fair, no novels make it into Lulu.com’s top 10 bestsellers, which range from e-Start Your Web Store with Zen Cart to the unputdownable Java/J2EE Job Interview Companion: 400+ Questions & Answers. The nearest attempt is Jeremy Robinson’s The Didymus Contingency, at number 12, falling neatly between The Ultimate Tattoo Guide and The Ultimate Tattoo Guide: Pro Version. Life seems too short to investigate what the Didymus Contingency might be, but I’m guessing it refers to the eventuality of Mr Sean Combs coming after you for pinching his next nickname.
Published or not, Signor Bernocco managed to input his 100,000 words using a device intended only for txting sht 2 yr m8s. This is a welcome return to the techno-thrift of days gone by, when kids in back bedrooms wrote machine code routines to turn their £200 home micros into sampling synth workstations. Today, the middle-aged husks of those kids are writing emails on £1000 dual-core PCs using operating systems that won’t get out of bed for less than a gigabyte of RAM. And we wonder why the environment’s screwed and we’re skint.
Bring on the low-tech high-tech, I say. Novels may not be the most popular form of entertainment in 2007, but looking at the feature list of the average mobile, it should be just as easy to produce a movie. Shoot your footage with the built-in camera, edit it with the Video DJ software, then upload it to YouTube, where it’ll get better distribution than the major studios would give you for any title not involving a cute cartoon version of the same member of the animal kingdom of which a cute cartoon version topped last summer’s holiday box office, plus a surfboard. Exploiting my inside knowledge of the digital media marketplace, I’m already planning a film about P Diddy’s tattoos, with the working title Pay-per-click Search Engine Marketing in C++.
Maybe this is Steve Jobs’ masterplan. Some say making a cellphone is a distraction from Apple’s real business of designing new Macs, but what they haven’t twigged is that it is the new Mac. Forget third-party utilities that let you play Tetris or find petrol stations: next year’s killer app is Final Cut Studio for iPhone. Taking advantage of the extra processing power in the iPhone 2 (if there’s one born every minute, there’ll be more than enough of them by next summer)*, this will support Hollywood-quality special effects that render really fast because the resolution is only 320×240.
Which is a step forward in itself. TV networks are struggling to serve HD, and ISPs are threatening to pull the plug if users pile into high-bandwidth services like the BBC’s iPlayer. The BBC is doing its best to help by making the iPlayer compatible with as few computers as possible, but still, one day people will get it working, and then we’re in big trouble.
All the Government need do, though, is hire a few of the actors put out of work by the Beeb’s budget cuts to walk around Currys.digital pointing at the HDTV sets and exclaiming, ‘Nine hundred quid for a telly? If I was a muppet I’d have sticks on my arms.’ Pretty soon we’ll all be reverting to seven-inch LCDs, with memory card slots for our BitTorrent movie rip-offs and pixels small enough to hide the glitterball compression artefacts on digital cable. Then, once we’re all sitting with our noses pressed up against our tiny screens, Gordon Brown can come round and divide our living rooms in half, solving the housing crisis at a stroke.
And all thanks to Roberto Bernocco! If you’re ever in Italy, be sure to shake his hand. Just mind the bandages on his thumbs.
Adam Banks’ oratorio for five vocal soloists, eight-part chorus, symphonic orchestra, gamelan and two invisible pianos is currently premiering at the Edinburgh Festival. He wrote it in a week using a garage door opener remote.
*There were. back
adambanksdotcom Google Instant seems like the search equivalent of the Interrupting Cow knock-knock joke