Damek.

My previous meandering post comes from disorganized thoughts on mass production and modernity, really. Learning more about the history of art, it’s interesting how much it demonstrates how everytyhing people do is symptomatic of context — of the always contingent emerging human world — and difficult to fully comprehend after the fact in the changed world.

For example:

I was thinking recently about serial fiction. The BBC has done an updated adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, with cell phones and twitter. The creators’ contention is that Sherlock isn’t defined by 19th Century ephemera like frock coats and gas lamps, but by things like the unique characterization of a detective who solves mysteries by deductive reasoning, and explains his methods and reasoning.

I also learned that House, MD is loosely based on Holmes. Certainly Holmes was a popular precursor to many other popular and recurring characters in detective fiction like Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

I found myself thinking of novels and serial fiction as such modern phenomena: television shows, characters like Poirot, science fiction “universes,” and all these things leading to the peculiar phenomenon of “fans” who follow specific characters or universes. But on reflection, people have always liked to revisit favorite characters and worlds. From Greek gods and heroes to Native American legends and stories, “experiencing a very real social connection to imaginary beings and telling story after story about them” seems, on reflection, to be a human universal.

But where does the Western mass media version originate? The creation of so much serial fiction that we can view it as a phenomenon — and product! — unto itself, with fan clubs (Hercules spawned roman cults, so I guess that’s not necessarily new…) — where does it come from?

Let’s work it backwards: authors can make a living writing serials and reusing characters and worlds because owners of presses (magazines, newspapers, TV networks) will happily pay them. There is an audience. Where does the audience come from? Increased literacy and spending power, perhaps. Maybe also Marxist alienation! But let’s get more material. Where did magazines et al. come from in the first place? Because Wikipedia suggests that serial fiction has been around almost as long as magazines.

It looks like magazines appeared out of the newspaper and gazette subscriptions in the 17th and 18th centuries. But where did they come from? It turns out the earliest regularly-published, standard-format publications were handwritten newsletters in Italy and Germany in the 16th century. Merchants and politicos were willing to pay for information to get an edge. And, I guess it’s not surprising that enterprising publishers inventing subscription busines models and the like saw a benefit to adding entertainment and art into the mix. The first magazines begain in the mid 1700s, and the first serial fiction was being published soon after.

Oh, and those early handwritten newsletters were handwritten because printing presses were too slow at the time! Oh, hello, Internet!