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RE: Unbound for glory May 13, 2006

Posted by Steve in : comment / add a comment

Occasionally I post a comment somewhere that I’d like to make linkable. I’m going to start including them as “asides” in my blog…

Nicholas Carr’s Rough Type is one of the best blogs I’ve stumbled across. It’s a must-read from a fascinating author with contrarian views about the “Web 2.0″ revolution and a dryly humorous writing style. Here’s my response to his recent article “Unbound for glory” about Kevin Kelly’s New York Times feature story:

The problem with Kelly’s case is that it’s completely unsubstantiated. There’s no argument, only picture-painting. He does a great job of describing a utopian orgy of communal surf-reading, but he provides no evidence that this orgy will either happen as he describes it or, if it does, that it will make us smarter or wiser or otherwise better, either individually or as a society. There’s actually already a great deal of literature available in digitized form online, complete with hyperlinks. If there is any evidence that it’s making us better readers or improving our ability to make deep connections between works, I haven’t seen it. More generally, where’s the evidence that surfing linkwise through information brings us to a deeper understanding than old-fashioned, page-turning reading does? Again, I haven’t seen it. Like the true believer he is, Kelly demands that we take his prophecy on faith.

You claim to have not seen the evidence of more efficient reading through digitization and hyperlinking, but I see the evidence right in front of me. I won’t have to read Kelly’s article if I don’t want, because I can quickly find five trustworthy sources (of which I certainly count you one) and get not just an overview of his ideas but also some additional insights. Instant access to citations and analysis is one immediate benefit of a “liquid fabric”.

Other benefits: Directly embedding others’ work means the length of your book is proportional to its new ideas rather than meeting some standard size. Books become timeless as you can jump in at any point, say an original work, and navigate to the followups, retractions, derivative works, condemnations, etc. that appeared afterwards. The structure of the “mashups” that have always been present can be exposed (as footnotes, etc do today) with only as much visibility as the user has interest. Etc.

None of those ideas are very radical, they’re just evidence of how hyperlinked literature has already changed my reading habits. None of this is impossible with traditional literature, it’s just much, much harder to do right. I think it’s a bit hypocritical to invoke the “mindlessness of the crowd” when you yourself are addressing that crowd - and I don’t find your writing mindless at all. If more people were providing your kind of insight in blogs rather than books I think the benefit of interconnected texts would be much more obvious.

Basically, I imagine the “liquid fabric” as a big literary database that is only as interesting as the queries you can perform against it. They start with simple things like keyword search — pure syntax without meaning — then get more complex with hyper-linking — muddled meanings — and even moreso with tagging, reputation management, etc. until perhaps someday structured blogging/semantic web ideas *may* allow you to make very meaningful queries. (Not that I’m a big believer in the cap-S semantic web, but something will emerge.)

So no, snippets are not literature, but the queries may allow you to create a new kind of personalized literature from snippets. Through queries that help provide context you can come away with a better/more efficient understanding of a whole topic. And yes, if they are noisy (like today’s keyword searches and forum conversations) you can also get confused or distracted. But digitizing and linking (hyper- and user-) turns “context” into a problem that some Google/Technorati/whoever can at least attempt to solve on a large scale.

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