Bill Thompson was once a programmer but came out of the other side to work as a journalist, commentator and new media consultant. Since working for Internet company PIPEX and setting up The Guardian’s New Media Lab he has spent the last three years as a freelance writer and general new media type.
He currently manages the Website for the Regional Arts Boards of England and writes the weekly Dispatches email newsletter. His first book, a guide for 9-12 year olds on how to build websites, was recently published by Hodder Children’s Books. He reads a lot and values literature - but can see where the real power lies.

Past Opinions

Dale Spender: National Computer Strategy

Theodore Roszak: Shakespeare Never Lost a Document to a Computer Crash

Liz Bailey: Britgrrls No Bark and No Byte?

Mark Amerika: Culture Without Lawyers: Does Art Want to be Free?

Do you have an opinion?

Where is the really important writing of the last fifty years? Bill Thompson argues that it would be incomprehensible to the vast majority of readers of novels - for the very good reason that it wasn’t meant to be read by them.

Words matter. As writers we seek the phrase that will convey an idea, the sentence that will alter forever the way our readers see the world. We agonise over the positioning of a comma, fret over whether ; or : is most appropriate for our purpose, and return again and again to the subordinate clause of our first sentence, seeking clarity and impact.

Yet this effort is all in vain, for our words change little and their impact is, if not immeasurable, then insignificant compared to the vast changes wrought by the truly significant literature of the second half of this century. The words that count - the words that shaped our world and influenced our ideas - were never written to be published in small magazines or major novels or, indeed, to be widely read at all.

The literature that matters is not the work of Joyce or Piercy or de Lillo or Weldon or any of the authors we celebrate. The really important literature, from the 1950’s onwards, was written by tens of thousands of programmers writing software for the computer systems that now underpin our world. It was lines of COBOL (for the business users) Fortran (for the scientists, mathematicians and engineers) and C (for everyone else) that changed the world.

The programs written in these languages enabled us to fly to the Moon and back, allowed global capitalism to triumph over communism - whether you think this good or bad is irrelevant - and allowed the security services to listen in to our phone calls. They made the Internet possible, so that the few thousand lines of code written by British physicist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 to implement his ‘World Wide Web’ have changed the world far more than any novelist or poet could.

It may be argued that it is ridiculous to compare a novel like Ian McEwan’s Child Out of Time with the programs that run a bank cash machine, that one is a work of imaginative fiction while the other is just a mechanical listing of functions. But that is to miss the point about computer programming: that the programs themselves are acts of the imagination. Writing a program is a creative act to compare with writing a novel, requiring invention, plot development and even resolution. The difference is that a novel creates a world which we may occupy in our heads, while the programs create a new reality in which we can keep our money (and other things). This is why the programs change the world more than books do.

In his novel Neuromancer (1984) William Gibson coined the word ‘cyberspace’ to describe the non-physical reality created from the connected computers of humanity. When one of his protagonists becomes enmeshed with the computer systems that constitute the Matrix, he realises that ‘here things could be counted, each one. He knew the number of grains of sand in the construct of the beach (a number coded in a mathematical system that existed nowhere outside the mind that was Neuromancer)’.

For Gibson and his readers this text describes a fictional experience. But for the programmers it is a reality: the coder does know how many grains of sand there are on the beach because it is a variable in the program. The coder makes the (virtual) beach and gives it its (virtual) reality. Programmers have power, the power to shape a world that more and more people spend more and more time inhabiting.

Compared to programming, the novel is a poor instrument of change. Furthermore, we are finding it easier and easier to inhabit the imaginary worlds created by our programs. What is the Internet but a shared experience mediated by computer software? The software creates the space in which we meet, in which we do business and in which we may, one day, live large parts of our lives. Who can deny its importance or its impact?

Looking back on the period from 1960 to 1999, the time in which I too came of age, can we deny that ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch’ changed the world less than

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References:
Learn about COBOL at Michael Coughlan’s ‘All Things COBOL’ website, at http://www.csis.ul.ie/cobol/default.htm
Read Neuromancer online at http://www.cyberpunkproject.org/idb/gibson_neuromancer.html or buy it from any bookstore
The line of poetry is from ‘Morning Song’ by Sylvia Plath, published as part of the Ariel collection.