is a 30-year-old human being, lives in Chapel Hill, NC, works as Vice President of newfangled.com, reads, writes, draws, and thinks about the future.
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Christopher Butler
Christopher Butler
"Now, about this Age of the Internet. It’s an exciting but strange thing to consider, the panelists agreed. Strange because no one yet has firm answers to questions about the Internet’s effect on the future of reading and writing and publishing, although we insist on prophesying. And strange because although we are quick to attempt to label our age, it is almost impossible to do so accurately, considering we are caught up in it and have no real idea of its trajectory. (Noting that a number of London Review people were left scrambling to reach the United States in the midst of “ash cloud” madness last week, Toibin pointed out that future historians may look back and decide to call this the Age of the Volcano.) In other words, the mere title of the event was enough to throw panel and audience into an existential tizzy."
— Jennifer McDonald, on the London Review of Books panel on writing in the age of the internet
"The thing was, Monson’s book, in deploying these daggers, succeeded in eliciting exactly the kind of reaction I think he’s going for: as I read, my thinking was “exploding everywhere,” beyond his essay, beyond the page, and yet also immersing me deeper in the text. I had this bizarre sensation of being linked to it. Of its being a living document, manipulating my actions and desires, which on that subway included being able to get to the bottom of “the memory of vanilla."
— Jennifer McDonald, on Ander Monson’s book, Vanishing Point, which employs daggers (†) to take the reader beyond the book.
"Home library size has a very substantial effect on educational attainment, even adjusting for parents’ education, father’s occupational status and other family background characteristics…Growing up in a home with 500 books would propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average, than would growing up in a similar home with few or no books."
"Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the “universal book”: a handheld reading device that would give you instant access to every book in the Library of Congress. In the tablet era, it’s no longer technology holding us back from realizing that vision; it’s the copyright holders."
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."
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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.
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