booktwo.org made this FieldNotes book for SXSW 2010. Great use of Lulu.com self-publishing.
You already know the potential gains: edgier, riskier books in digital form, born from a lower barrier-to-entry to publish. New modes of storytelling. Less environmental impact. A rise in importance of editors. And, yes — paradoxically — a marked increase in the quality of things that do get printed.
— Craig Mod on Books in the Age of the iPad
HYPERITY
Yesterday, the entire Newfangled team gathered for a one-day mini-retreat. This is something we do each winter as a sort of state-of-the-company event, where we go over company news, talk about various topics related to what we do as a group and individually, and think about where we’re headed.
As part of that event, I gave a brief presentation on the notion of hyperity—that we’re in a state of being connected all the time, and everywhere—and how that affects and will affect our company.
Hyperity
After a particularly intense work week recently, I remember coming coming home and thinking the word “insanity” over and over again in my mind. I was frustrated by what seemed to be a generally accepted expectation that we all be connected and available all the time, and receptive to unceasing input—emails, instant messages, phone calls, text messages, alerts, etc. I think I had just hit my threshhold for it all, and as I repeatedly thought the word “insanity,” it began to morph a bit—insanity, humanity, hyperhumanity, hyperity…
I checked the entry for hyper on Wikipedia to make sure this made sense. According to their entry, “the prefix hyper- (comes from the Greek prefix “υπερ-” and means “over” or “beyond”) signifies the overcoming of the old linear constraints of written text.” Seems pretty suitable for my new word, meaning “the state of being over connected, all the time, everywhere.”
You can see the slides and read about the rest of my presentation here >
An Online Debate: Do School Libraries Need Books? →
Participants:
- James Tracy, headmaster, Cushing Academy
- Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, English professor, University of Maryland
- Liz Gray, library director, Dana Hall School
- Nicholas Carr, author, “The Big Switch”
- William Powers, author, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry
Meanwhile, the digital age is in full force on other fronts as well as Search engines are promising to give everybody access to the aggregate knowledge brought forth by human culture. Recently, I had some firsthand experiences with a number of institutions whose existence appears to be under siege due to the public’s changing relationship with all this information. For a project I’m currently working on, I visited the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle public library, which is a gorgeous architectural ode to the book, expressing great optimism about a culture worth saving. But in reality, the library holds only 780.000 books, all of which can be contained on one external hard drive you may find on sale for $240 at your local electronics store.
In the coming decades, lovers of the written word may find themselves ill-equipped to defend the seemingly self-evident merits of text to a technology-oriented generation who prefer instantaneous data to hard-won knowledge. Arguing the artistic merits of Jamesian prose to a generation who, in coming years, will rely on conversational search to find answers to any question will likely prove a frustrating, possibly humiliating endeavor. If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively. But it’s up to us, as the consumers and producers of technology, to insist that the would-be replacement demonstrate authentic superiority. It’s not enough for new devices, systems, and gizmos to simply be more expedient than what they are replacing—as the Gatling gun was over the rifle—or more marketable—as unfiltered cigarettes were over pipe tobacco. We owe it to posterity to demand proof that people’s communications will be more intelligent, persuasive, and constructive when they occur over digital media, and proof that digital media, and proof that illiteracy, even in an age of great technological capability, will improve people’s lives.
Today…the familiar letters of the alphabet are more abundant than ever. One of the most astonishing consequences of the rise of digital media, and particularly the Internet, is that we’re now surrounded by text to an extent far beyond anything we’ve experienced before. Web pages are stuffed with written words. Text crawls across our TV screens. Radio stations send out textual glosses on the songs they play…I have little doubt that in 2050 — or 2100, for that matter — we’ll still be happily reading and writing. Even if we come to be outfitted with nifty Web-enabled brain implants, most of the stuff that’s beamed into our skulls will likely take the form of text. Even our robots will probably be adept at reading. What will change — what already is changing, in fact — is the way we read and write. In the past, changes in writing technologies, such as the shift from scroll to book, had dramatic effects on the kind of ideas that people put down on paper and, more generally, on people’s intellectual lives. Now that we’re leaving behind the page and adopting the screen as our main medium for reading, we’ll see similarly far-reaching changes in the way we write, read, and even think.
I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways … Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article - sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument. [As reading shifts to networked devices,] I fear that one of the great joys of book reading - the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author’s ideas - will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
— Steven Johnson, on How the E-book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
It’s a nice dream, and a common one: the shucking off of material possessions to achieve a purer, spiritually richer life. But there’s a deep, perhaps even tragic, flaw in [that kind of] thinking, at least when it comes to those books. [We assume] that a book remains a book when its words are transferred from printed pages to a screen. But it doesn’t. A change in form is always, as well, a change in content. That is unavoidable, as history tells us over and over again. One reads an electronic book differently than one reads a printed book - just as one reads a printed book differently than one reads a scribal book and one reads a scribal book differently than one reads a scroll and one reads a scroll differently than one reads a clay tablet.
How Teachers & Classrooms Will Need to Change in Our Hyperconnected Age →
From The Futurist:
How will digital technologies and hyperconnectivity affect learning and the classroom of the future? We at THE FUTURIST magazine, for our January-February issue, addressed this issue with communications scholar Janna Anderson, an associate professor in Elon University’s School of Communications and the lead author of the “Future of the Internet” book series published by Cambria Press.
Before the Internet, most professional occupations required a large body of knowledge, accumulated over years or even decades of experience. But now, anyone with good critical thinking skills and the ability to focus on the important information can retrieve it on demand from the Internet, rather than her own memory. On the other hand, those with wandering minds, who might once have been able to focus by isolating themselves with their work, now often cannot work without the Internet, which simultaneously furnishes a panoply of unrelated information — whether about their friends’ doings, celebrity news, limericks, or millions of other sources of distraction. The bottom line is that how well an employee can focus might now be more important than how knowledgeable he is. Knowledge was once an internal property of a person, and focus on the task at hand could be imposed externally, but with the Internet, knowledge can be supplied externally, but focus must be forced internally.
— MIT researcher David Dalrymple’s answer to the question, “How is the Internet changing the way you think?”
(via Matthew Yglesias)
A large-scale study by the University of California at San Diego and other research universities revealed what some of us have long suspected: We’re reading far more words than we used to as we adopt new technologies.
“Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet,” found a University of California at San Diego study (.pdf) published this month by Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short of the University of San Diego.
The perfect case in point is that of metadata. There’s a word you hear a lot on the web. It means the data about the data – the author’s name, the date it was written, and so on. In its purest and perfect sense, any story has an infinite amount of metadata: this piece you’re reading now was written by me, on my macbook air, on the 29th December 2009, in London, in part in Whitehall, in part in the Milk Bar, Soho, and in part in my office in Notting Hill, this paragraph being written with an ambient temperature of about 20 degrees c, while the local weather was cold and rainy, etc etc etc. It concerns electronic publishing, and refers to…and is classified as…and is linked to…and is part of a collection called…and is built on thinking done in… You can go on and on. The problem is that metadata is incredibly fragile. If you don’t capture it when you can, it is lost forever. The date you wrote that piece? The websites you looked at when you were researching it? The music playing during that photoshoot? You didn’t write it down? Ah, then it’s gone.
— Ben Hammersley from his musings on e-books
This is the “Bibliotheca Alexandrina is an attempt by Egypt and the city of Alexandria to recreate, in spirit if not content, the original Library of Alexandria.”
Did you know that the Bibliotheca Alexandrina has a complete backup of the Internet Archive?
