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January 29, 2007
radio silence (our apologies)
Hello everyone, I just wanted to send out a quick collective beg-your-pardon for not having yet weighed in on the exciting postings and discussions going on here in the days since the retreat. From the moment we got back from New Jersey, we (Eddie, Jesse and myself) have been racing against deadlines for several other projects, one of which crashed and burned rather spectacularly last week and has required disaster management on all fronts (more on that later). We're still deep in the trenches getting MediaCommons renovated, and Sophie to behave herself, and probably won't get to put anything up here until later in the week. Just wanted you all to know that we're paying attention and are greatly appreciative of all that you guys are bringing to this process.
Posted by ben vershbow at 4:35 PM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2007
Yikes
Mary, wrote:
Oh, and I know this is rather long for a blog entry. Is there a politer form I could post it in?
Yikes . . . we desperately need these fantastic posts in commentpress so we can have a decent discussion.
Posted by bob stein at 1:54 PM | Comments (1)
January 25, 2007
the network made visible: some thoughts following the january retreat
1. Disclaimer
I've structured the following as a kind of schematic history, and histories are always to some degree rhetorical. So I offer this in that light, as a set of speculative pathways, from the tradition of print literature, through the Net, to some ponderings about what the shape might be of a culture able to wield and interweave both without privileging either.
I've left in-depth discussion of oral culture to bigger brains than mine.
Oh, and I know this is rather long for a blog entry. Is there a politer form I could post it in?
2. Summary
I've had a look at what I know of the tradition of the print book, its reader and its writer, so as to compare this culture to that enabled by the Internet. From this follows some more schematicising about the ways in which the roles of 'reader' and 'writer' invert and converge within the Web, and to suggest how an attempt to translate print-specific notions of either to a networked environment risks a category error. I've touched on what I see as a misguided emancipatory idealism around network technologies. I've offered some mildly manifesto-like thoughts on how the writers of the future/present might bypass this to put network technology in perspective, and finally on how the form of the Net might help us imagine truly multimedia culture capable of withstanding ecological or political disasters or, even, the collapse of the internet itself.
3. The tradition of the book
I've listed five attributes that I see as important to the tradition of the book. There are of course counterexamples to all of them; the aim is not to try and totalise a tradition that in many ways contains me, but rather to foreground some common and often unexamined assumptions that underpin the tradition of the book.
Physicality - Books are physical: text and sometimes pictures organised in a linear form, and collected in physical libraries.
Authority - Books are time-consuming and expensive to make. Their 'authority' exists in proportion to this scarcity. The implication is that no-one would bother laboriously to typeset, print and bind drivel; so if a book doesn't make sense then the fault lies with the reader. , and hence failure to comprehend a text lies with the reader, not with the text. This principle of authority in proportion to scarcity can be seen by comparing the medieval reverence for hand-copied books, through to modern offhand treatment of mass-produced 'airport novels'. Authoritative texts reinforce their authority with reference to one another.
Fixity - The physicality of books perpetuates the impression of text as something immutable. This physicality also give rise to a tradition of books holding otherwise ephemeral knowledge in fixed form for posterity, and thus of books' being timeless in a way that human life is not.
Universality - This is the trope most heavily challenged by twentieth century theory. The traditional ideal - and arguably the central proposition of the canon - is that books marked thus are of value to everyone, regardless of who, when and where.
Boundedness - Being a physical object, a book cannot contain everything.
4. Reading and writing in the print era
NB: I've taken for the purposes of this essay a tradition of print reading and writing that holds fairly good for English literature from approximately halfway through the eighteenth century.
The tradition of the reader
The reader approaches with a sense of reverence books that, he - for, traditionally, it is a he - understands, conform to the tradition of the book. He enjoys a typically solitary experience of relatively passive communion with its content. He may write in the margins of the book, but does not seek to change the actual text. The reader accumulates knowledge from his reading, which gives him status in the world, and reads as much with reference to other books as to life.
The tradition of the writer
The Writer is held to be the sole author of his words. He is the avatar of Authority: words arranged by him carry a supplemental charge of value specific to his status, and must not be appropriated, rearranged, misunderstood or otherwise corrupted. The name of the writer comes to stand for the aggregate of all discussions had about his work. The above is considered not a historically-specific set of assumptions but a set of eternal truths.
5. The Net
Into the midst of this (by the 80s rather stale) tradition the Internet arrived. In some ways, it resembles an acceleration of the transmission of knowledge hitherto accomplished by printed media, and as such a logical step 'forwards' into an era where communication can potentially become total. I wish to argue that this is not so.
The Net is not the replacement for texts of the kind I defined under 'the tradition of the book', nor does it enable the tradition of the print reader or writer to continue in any recognisable form. Rather, the Net is a manifestation - and a partial and politically lopsided one at that - of the cultural phlogisthon within which such texts have hitherto been created. Rather than offering a new format for print culture, it enables a kind of communication related to it but fundamentally different. In particular, the kinds of authorship and Authority that constitute its invisible structures are deeply different.
Writer and reader converge
So what happens to the traditions of reader and writer? They converge. The networked reader is also writer. She goes beyond passive reading/consumption of content to participatory activity through blogs, message boards, MUDs, email/IM, social networking tools and so on. Rather than a fairly stark division between 'professional' writers and their readers, quality is decided by reputation and easily trackable readership. Good Net reader/writers function as personal-recommendation mechanism, helping the less discerning (or less concise) to filter the Babel of content available. A new literati begins to emerge, operating as filters, commentators, curators, consolidators of online content, and/or creators of algorithms for channelling it.
The promise of utopia
The Wild West of the networked world reveals many voices hitherto unseen. As such it has bred much utopian rhetoric. The Web will emancipate the poor, educate the underprivileged, make visible the unseen etc etc. Some of this is at least partially true. But among the utopianism of information lurks a what Hakim Bey calls the 'Gnostic fallacy' of attempts to tnrascend the human body altogether in online self-reinvention and apolitical late-consumer wish-fulfilment. Yiffing, adult chat, conspiracy theories, slashfic, Robin Hood fantasists, conspiracy theorists. Anyone can speak out and the Net will carry their voices.
Meanwhile, the commercialisation of social networking, incursions of PR into viral memes and ARGs and other colonisations of this discursive space continue apace. Far from seeming straightforwardly emancipatory, the West is looking more and more like a chance to make a quick buck from those too dumb to read between the lines.
And up in the clouds, the new literati continue to proclaim a uotpia that conveniently elides the 'digital divide' to propound a networked future that skips blithely over matters such as war, climate change, political fissures and the like. Instead, we are to hail the Web as apotheosis of human ingenuity, repository of our collective memory, successor to print culture and ever more inevitable helter-skelter toward 'the singularity'.
It is as though the price of free information is cultural atomisation and commercial rapacity, and the utopia of the Web a kind of autonomy and diversity that only holds in the disembodied and self-referential online world.
Whither Authority?
On the Net, readers write, and writers read. Anyone can self-publish. So, following the principle that the status and authority of a text is in direct proportion to its scarcity, to write is no longer to be the privileged accessor and producer of canonical, authoritative texts. Notions of authorship and any but the most provisional and conversational kind of intellectual leadership become meaningless.
The boundary between 'worth reading' and 'worthless blah' is blurred by the visible, trackable emergence of content from the swamp of chatter. And, watching content emerge, it is plainly impossible to posit for the Net a set of human-centric values as (however speciously) the literary canon allowed. The Net has no transcendental signifier except itself, no cohesion to celebrate except that of technologically-enabled pseudo-diversity.
The grammar of the Web is not one of human languages or literary forms, but one of computer languages. Online, the Writers (in the sense of those invested with weight, status and Authority) are software developers. No text writer may have the final word; nor will he shape the grammars he works with. Coders, on the other hand, create the enabling conditions for interaction. Online tools, social networking apps, tagging devices and so on are the online equivalent of literary genres and rhetorical turns. It is no coincidence that creators of ARGs, the closest contemporary contender for consideration as a Net-native literary form, are as likely to be skilled at cryptography, concealing IP addresses and scrambling QuickTime as arranging paragraphs or working up a good gradatio.
6. Temporary certainties
The transformation of Authority online into positionality and consensus relativises the tradition of the book beyond any attempt by that tradition to appropriate the energy of the Net, or vice versa. But that does not mean that the tradition of the book and the culture of the Net exist in some kind of presumably teleological continuity. Rather, they operate in counterpart to one another: if the tradition of the book encompasses authority, fixity, universality, boundedness and physicality, the kind of reading and writing enabled by the Net represents positionality, ephemerality, specificity, endlessness and abstraction. The culture of the Net is the photographic negative of the tradition of the book. From all this it follows for me that to attempt to translate the tradition of the book onto the Net would be a fundamental category error. But knowing this doesn't render that tradition useless.
One unique and beautiful property of the Net is that it makes visible a discursive penumbra within which emergence, complexity and the activity of entire networks are rendered visible and imaginable. This is having a profound effect on human culture: from the current Lynx advert to the kinds of stories, movies and theories people want.
The Net's ability to render visible the exquisite chaos-patterned micro-complexity of discourse in formation makes impossible to discuss books solely with reference to one another, or else with reference to nothing but the author's experience. It is further untenable to propose authority, fixity and so on as having any kind of objective or immutable value as - once translated online - these values become their inverse. But it is the uncritical acceptance of the truth of this tradition which is obsolete, not the kinds of interaction that tradition made possible. Extended thought, offline storage of human culture, tactile interaction with words and thoughts from the past - all these things have been discussed elsewhere on if:book. As 'temporary certainties', the traditions of the book still have much to offer.
To gallop towards an entirely networked future, without scrutinising its relationship to our past, is to risk abandoning several thousand years' worth of admittedly partial but by no means worthless human history. And, in Santayana's words, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
7. http://www.getafirstlife.com
In conclusion, I want to return to that aspect of the tradition of the book that has been most thoroughly obscured by that tradition's self-created mythology: the physicality of the book. In this context, it stands for the physicality of us, human beings with finite lives who eat and sleep and are busy running our planet out of resources.
The physicality both of the book and of us returns us to two things. Firstly, the desire to upload our consciousness into the Net conceals some dubious assumptions. And secondly, pre-Web technologies of communication don't just disappear. The vision I have of the future of intellectual discourse is one in which this multiplicity - and the consciousness of multiplicity that is gained from experiencing the wild diversity of the Web - is foregrounded. I want to see orality and print not superseded but augmented and recontextualised, in an on- and offline web of discourse that includes viral messages, community fanzines, micro-literature, print libraries, desktop printouts of Web-circulated literature annotated in Biro, along with printed books and online communication.
I envision the place of the Web in this network not as a disembodied space for self-reinvention, sexual fantasy and transhuman pseudo-utopia but as a tool connecting actual, physical communities conscious of themselves as such. At its best, I see the Web's quality of visualising emergence and complexity as a potential means for our culture to realise a decentralised culture where hierarchical governance and centralised culture are seen as the mirages they are.
Online, I envision a multimedia environment that broadens the concept of 'reading' beyond the strictures of the canon, without losing sight of what the canon achieved. In this culture, I imagine the writer as bard, coder of groups and websites, custodian of community history: the author not as individualised transcendental signifier of a self-referential canon hell-bent on erasing the material and political traces of its production, but as selector and archivist of culture, equally capable of poetry-slamming or handling a printing press, manual typewriter, word-processing package, server and local wifi network. I imagine both readers and writers conversant in the specific qualities of different media and capable of translating between them without privileging one form.
8. I hope apocalypse doesn't arrive in my lifetime
So, in conclusion, I see the Web as having the potential both to drive a disastrous atomisation of human culture, and also - perhaps - beginning to seed the kinds of community that could still redeem us from this fate. But I think that in order to avoid the former, it is essential that the relativising force of the Net is itself relativised, however provisionally, and that it becomes a tool in our service and not we in it. We owe ourselves a deep engagement with these new technologies, and with the patterns in human culture that they render visible.
But to stop there is to render ourselves desperately vulnerable. What the Net teaches us about human culture needs to be translated into cultural forms that could - if required - survive the death of the network. And that includes thinking through the tradition of the book and learning what we can from how it has structured and filtered knowledge to date. And it means avoiding the temptation to translate this tradition into a form structurally other to it, and risk hollowing our culture worthless in the process, but to look for ways of embodying the best of our past that make fruitful use of the new tools we have.
Which parts of the tradition of the book does the Institute for its future still support?
Posted by sebastian mary at 4:59 PM | Comments (1)
alan lomax & the long tail of culture: an idea for the future
This is a review of Chris Anderson's The Long Tail which I've scanned from p. 27 of the print edition of the 19 January 2007 edition of the Times Literary Supplement. (The TLS has a month delay on posting their articles to their online archive, so I couldn't find an online version, hence this scan; click for a fullsize version.) This starts off like an ordinary review of The Long Tail, summarizing the ideas of the book; I've clipped the first column. Where this gets interesting is in the second column of the scan, the sentence that starts "Undeniably, computers and the internet". I really like how Hamilton turns back to Alan Lomax's vision: this seems not dissimilar from many of the ideas we were throwing around, and might be a useful point of discussion.
Posted by dan visel at 9:34 AM | Comments (2)
January 22, 2007
some notes on a manifesto
this isn't in opposition to what brian wrote. just some notes i made to clarify points i think need to be included. one big question i have is what is the purpose of the manifesto -- what do we want people's response to be?
humanity at a crossroads (always true, but currently the choices made will have profound long-term implications.
new digital technologies have unleashed powerful forces which can take us in quite different directions
complexity and atomization . . . 19th century technology could be understood and wielded by individuals. not true of 21st century technology which requires complex chains of effort.
future depends significantly on the character of the discourse that takes place
(major difference between allowing the market and drive for profit to determine the future vs. careful consideration of where we want to go and the design of technology and social institutions to get us there)
changing nature of the role of the individual . . .
under capitalism the primacy of the individual is revered above all else; new technologies redefine the relation of the individual to the group; nodes in a network, the extent of interconnectivity locally, regionally and internationally
books carry ideas across time and space so that we can have extended conversations about the ideas in them. we need the conversation to be both deep and broad. need better tools and mechanisms for representing complex ideas and the conversation they engender.
cannot just be a think tank, need to think and do . . .
Posted by bob stein at 11:48 AM | Comments (3)
January 19, 2007
climate change, technology and culture
There's been a lot of talk in the press lately about the possibility that climate change may be closer to the point of no return than people thought. It suddenly occurred to me that in all the retreat's discussions about the future of the book, we didn't really touch on the potential impact of external factors such as this on people's use of technology or way of thinking.
This may come out somewhat garbled, as it's the middle of the night (3.45 GMT) and I'm not sure why I'm awake. But I think that any sense of the inevitability of technological 'progress' needs to be checked against the extreme likelihood of climate change dramatically altering our way of life in a way that includes our relationship to and use of technology.
To put it more simply, what happens to the networked book if (for instance) all the lights go out? If this is even possible, is it not profoundly short-sighted to be championing digital culture without some capacity for moving or archiving that culture offline as well?
Is this a fruitful avenue to explore, or simply way too apocalyptic? Either way, I think it merits naming.
Posted by sebastian mary at 10:40 PM | Comments (1)
manifesto draft from brian -- please discuss
There are diametrically opposed cultural forces ranged in conflict across the world. In the face of increasing atomization, suspicion and hierarchical privilege, the digital age has opened vast new possibilities for human creativity and communication. It is challenging and transforming the ways in which ideas are transported between cultures, countries and communities. It threatens the power of gatekeepers and censors. It has made possible and visible networks of human discourse, collaborative production, critique and action.
Paradoxically, networked communication is fostering intense individual creativity. The Internet, born as a tool for scientific collaboration, has opened a dramatic new universe of cultural cooperation. There is a synergy between an emerging networked culture and creative individuality. It finds metaphorical parallels as we more profoundly grasp the vast network of stars and galaxies in which our small blue dot is a vibrant, intelligent and totally dependent speck; as we more profoundly grasp the dense network of life on this planet of which we are only one, brilliant manifestation.
The birth of the networked culture we are observing seems spontaneous, a force of life itself. But in reality it is the intentional creation of hundreds of thousands of people who work painstakingly to invent the tools that make it possible. The forms of this communication do have a spontaneous aspect that is both exhilarating and deeply unsatisfying. Some are put off by the banality inherent in mass communication. Some fear the dictatorship of the crowd. There is no guarantee that the promise of communication in the digital age will not emulate earlier technologies breech of hope. Already sharp battles are emerging in the market place over access and content control.
Yet it is certain that something new is being born within the constraints of the old economies of creation and communication. Collaborative authorship, interaction between creator and reader/viewer, collapse of time and space between production and consumption, new criteria of authenticity, versioning, fixity of boundaries and media.
Publishing in the digital age is undergoing a profound metamorphous. The Institute for the Future of the Book is a focused project to explore and test the possibilities that the constantly developing digital technologies are opening for human discourse. The Institute is an experimental publishing node in the network of authors, artists, editors and filmmakers, discovering new ways to present their creations and to generate interaction between them and the networks of people who are drawn to respond to their work. We will continue to explore new ideas for collaborative, networked production and intend to build a library of networked publications that can be widely tested for their substantive originality, usability and impact.
We invite you to join us.
Consumers of Culture Arise. We have nothing to lose but our eyesight. We've got a world of merriment to gain!
Posted by bob stein at 7:05 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2007
agenda in process
the purpose of the meeting is to reinvent the institute -- institute 2.0
there is a loose agenda covering four large and general areas . . . . the intention going in is to tackle them in the following order, however we're also going to try to be flexible and see where the discussion takes us. . . .
THE FUTURE OF THE BOOK
• what have we learned during the past two and a half years about the future of the book
-- the new role of author/reader
-- the role of books in society
-- the book as a social space
-- expanding the notion of a book to include both process and conversation
SOPHIE
(see dan's Quo Vadis, Sophie post)
• can we make a case for Sophie now
-- what sort of tools do we think the future of the book requires
WHAT WE DO -- IN A META SENSE
• what is the proper relation for us between:
-- between theory and practice
-- institute as publishing lab and institute as policy think tank
-- experiments and fully realized projects (institute as lab vs. institute as publisher)
HOW WE PRESENT THE INSTITUTE AND HOW WE WORK IN THE WORLD
(see Ben's "housekeeping" post and Bob's "in the open" post)
-- if:book
-- website
-- the role of design (see Jesse's comment on the "housekeeping" post)
to what extent do we need to understand the broader context of the world we live in to understand the future of the book
as dan pointed out we tend to take the internet, and the WWW particularly as the givens in terms of "where" our work is located.
Posted by bob stein at 8:17 AM | Comments (3)
January 12, 2007
extended thought
I have another concern which has been coming up recently in a variety of guises, and which I haven't had the chance to think about as much as I'd like. This is at least partially triggered by reading the new edition of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies. What's most surprising to me was how much I've found to agree with in that book: I remember it (from reading parts a long time ago) as being a collection of reactionary texts, and, by and large, it's not the book I remembered at all.
I have realized, for a while, that many of Birkerts's concerns are my own; I wasn't particularly disagreeing with him when we had our "debate" in Boston. This isn't tremendously surprising, seeing as I come from a liberal arts background and value the place of reading in my life to a worrying degree. Reading is almost certainly the primary lens through which I view the world, a mode of thinking. Lest I tread into the swamp of mawkishness: I don't want to sentimentalize this. I don't think reading is important in and of itself. I don't buy the argument that it's better for the kids to be reading garbage than to be reading nothing. This is an assumption that underpins my argument about fantasy and Pan's Labyrinth over on the Second Life thread.
What Birkerts is championing, and what I find myself agreeing with, is the value of long-form reading as a method of shaping consciousness. This is a clunky way to put it. But this comes back around to our continuing problems of defining what exactly a book is, in the context of the Institute. To me, I think, a certain kind of extended thought on the part of the reader is important. It's extremely difficult for me to qualify or quantify this extent. To make it more clear where I'm coming from, I can see a film qualifying as this kind of book; a lot of book art wouldn't qualify as a book, unless it's sufficiently interesting that a discussion could happen around it. A telephone book is not a book; the vast majority of what's on YouTube wouldn't be a book, though some might well qualify. To me it's not so much the extent of the book that matters – an essay would qualify – but the extent of the engagement of thought.
Birkerts isn't phrasing it in this way. He understands – very well – the opposite: the problematics of media for a short attention span. He tends to fall back on print books as the only alternative which I think isn't quite right. This is why he's taken as a Luddite. (This is also, I think, Neil Postman territory, though I haven't done as much of the reading there as I should.) But he's not arguing for old technology in favor of new, or against new technology: he's arguing for a specific way of thinking. I think this is important and worth preserving as we move forward. Presenting this kind of thought isn't something that comes naturally to the internet; I think this might be something we should be thinking about when we talk about networked books.
Posted by dan visel at 4:57 PM | Comments (0)
the future of future projects
One of the most exciting things about working at the Institute is that we can propose new and interesting and run experiments without having to worry about their sustainability. Some ideas work and some don't. But when have ventured into experiments, we have always had very interesting results. I think we should work towards putting more emphasis on this methodology. Here are some ideas that I think we should explore:
* Experimental Prototyping: Of the many topics we discuss, we should look to build prototypes and releasing to the public as quickly as possible. We do not have the capacity for large software engineering tasks, so let's not. This will allow us to play with many more ideas and look at problems from a variety of angles without getting stuck with any model.
* Open Source: Launching a successful open source project is difficult. I think we should gain experience building online communities with small projects. A good start, and I think CommentPress and its derivatives will be a good start. If we have a few of these small projects under our belts, and have even just a few developers documenting, debugging or just giving us feedback, it'd be great experience for larger, more ambitious projects.
I think we could build a community of eager developers who *await* our prototypes and then run with them.
* Live Commenting: I think it'd be great if the comments appeared real time in web projects like CommentPress. It's a medium sized project with important ramifications for blogs. Example: when a user submits a comments, all other connected users to the website will get notification and the comment will appear without reloading. This will allow conversation to have more of a real-time feel to it.
* Innovative Wiki Interfaces: We love Wikis. But they have serious problems, especially in interface and ease of use for new users. I think we should experiment with a drag and drop interfaces for words (like magnetic poetry) so anyone can move words around on the document without ever having to enter "edit mode". I think this can take us into interesting directions.
* Word Level Commenting: Like CommentPress, which group discussions by ideas or paragraphs, I think figuring out a flexible way to discuss ideas at different levels is important. The "word-level" will be an important challenge.
* Document Perspective: We read documents from top to bottom. In our projects, conversations, - and believe we've pigeon holed ourselves into - happen on the side. I think we should explore depth (zooming into text, with UI cues to encourage users to read "closely" or at a "distance") as a way to show/hide discussions.
I in no way think this is all we can explore. We, to some extent work like this already, but I would to, if possible, move in this direction even more. I believe we would be able to stir things up quite a bit and build anticipation for creative projects that we produce.
Posted by eddie a. tejeda at 2:40 PM | Comments (0)
housekeeping
I want to air a few thoughts about how the Institute presents itself to the world, in particular the organization and design of our websites.
If this little planning page is the Institute's "back porch," then if:book is the front stoop -- our main public hangout. Beyond the stoop, up the stairs and through the door, is our main site, which for a while now has felt more like Miss Havisham's house than a proper, well tended home. Things there have ground to a halt. The exhibition and link pages are untended, the mission statement gathers cobwebs, the page describing our projects is conspicuously out of date. The one breath of life is the window in the center column on the front page that automatically pulls in the latest content from the blog. It's the blog that's keeping things going. But is that enough?
Perhaps because it has been an effective-enough tool for so many different facets of our work, we've become comfortable with the idea that if:book can serve as discourse central for the Institute. We never intended for it to assume this pivotal role, but within the first few months of blogging it became obvious that working in the open, in close to real time, was a much more interesting way to develop ideas and document projects for a 21st-century insitute. It also seemed to be the portal through which most people (at least the more interesting ones) were finding their way to us. Seb Mary being case in point. Most important, the blog made us feel (and still does despite our mounting dissatisfaction with the form) that we're part of a larger conversation spanning across the web and beyond. Home pages are relatively static structures while a blog feels more like a living discussion. So we've rolled happily along, embracing the blog as our primary outlet while our main house drifted further and further into neglect.
One might be tempted to say at this point that we should just ditch the home page altogether and be a fully blog-based organization. But there are clearly a number of things that the blog does not do well and I fear that we're shutting out a lot of people and possibilities as a result. First off, as has been grumbled about in numerous posts, blogs are shitty at dealing with time. Their daily diary format works fine for covering the news cycle, or the development of a software project, or for stream of conscious ramblings, but it's pretty rotten for tracing the development of big ideas over an extended period since all but the most recent posts get relegated to the obscurity of the archives. Categories and tags try in their limited way to address the problem, but for a site as eclectic as ours, and for a group of people that generally prefers to do a thing first and understand it later, all attempts at taxonomic discipline have more or less tanked.
Week after week, month after month scrolls by and all sorts of complex patterns and interlinking threads develop, but the site exists in a perpetual present that is difficult for all but the most determined to break through. To people just stumbling upon us, there's a feeling of an insider conversation going on that's hard to break into. The ideas all seem in mid-stride and it's not at all clear how or where to get up to speed. As a result, we're constantly having to explain and re-explain ourselves. In part, this is the healthy byproduct of perpetual self-definition ("book" is a word that can be endlessly unpacked) but it's also due to the lack of any clear, prominently featured overview of our philosophy, not to mention a comprehensive catalogue of our projects. The mission statement comes the closest to doing this, but I think we could write something much more electrifying and original, and in a form that engages the content in a more direct way.
There must be a way to redesign the home site, so as to capture the Institute's work and ideas at a slower time signature than the blog. A way to draw on if:book's dynamism and funnel it into a more stable and accessible form that will be useful for anyone who wants to get a sense of us of our work and ideas as a whole. I'm not sure what this would look like... A library? A gallery? A map? A manifesto linking out in multiple directions? That's one of the things I'd like to discuss at this retreat, although I certainly don't want to get bogged down in info architecture minutiae. Rather, I think we should draw on the first-order questions that Bob raised, and Sol glossed, and that the rest of us have begun to address in our comments and see how those can be channeled into a more tangible framework. One thing I'd like to figure out -- and I'm particularly looking to Rebeca and Josh for inspiration -- is a visual concept for the Institute. Not so much a brand as a structure -- a shape or pattern -- that will provide a better way into our universe and more fully express who we are.
Posted by ben vershbow at 2:25 PM | Comments (2)
January 11, 2007
quo vadis, sophie?
Sophie, Sophie, Sophie: she's still the monstrous child in the basement that we're afraid to bring into the light even though we know she has idiot-savant capabilities.
It's another year, and Sophie's still not ready to present to the public, and still seems a way away from being in a state where we could feasibly do this. This is a problem. It's a problem partly because we have responsibilities (to our funders, to people who want to use Sophie); it's also a problem because while we wait for Sophie to be ready to use, our ambitions outstretch what Sophie will be able to do by more and more. We're constantly talking about things similar to Sophie; inevitably, Sophie becomes more disappointing in comparison.
What to do now? Clearly if the Sophie project is to be continued (I'm speaking strictly in the hypothetical here, having no particular authority on the matter), we need to have a good argument for the use of Sophie. As a personal caveat, I'm not particularly good at synthesizing arguments: I'm much better at taking them apart, and when I do create them, they tend to err in the direction of the messianic or the manifesto. There's the old PDFs I wrote last year arguing for Sophie; it might be worth taking apart the arguments there to see if they still hold water.
More to come, but I want to throw this out now.
Posted by dan visel at 5:43 PM | Comments (6)
January 9, 2007
some important points Bob brings forward
Growing up in catholic school, yearly we had a retreat in the Jesuitical tradition of withdrawal from secular things in order to get in close contact with the spirit. I actually enjoyed those days of reflection on my faults, weaknesses, doubts, and so on. It helped me to know myself at a young age, and to act upon that knowledge. I think it would be a good idea to begin this retreat by visiting the Institute's strengths but also its weaknesses. It would be interesting to hear you guys analyze what has been good and what has not. I suspect there is a lot to learn there, and perhaps that will provide some guidelines for further
conversation.
some important points Bob brings forward:
1. Second Life: is a brilliant prospect This is quite interesting from the view point of postmodernity. We call "real time" something that is not quite strictly time, not real either, all takes place in virtual reality. Thus, the antinomy time/space that was true for almost two thousand years is cancelled. This is perhaps the most significant change in our present/future. This is intimately related to the concept of new forms of orality. However, even though this is a concern of the Institite, it's not a direct concern of the future of the Institute. (The same with our indebtedness to the Greeks, the validity of the canon, and so forth.) For the purposes of this meeting, it's important to keep that into perspective. It's easy to get diluted in the details. What is central here is, if adopted, is how to push forward such fabulous idea.
2. we like to believe that we are good at combining theory with practice: which has been possible thanks to your ability to persuade Macarthur. For how long can the Institute count on unrestricted grants from a foundation which trusts you to, "do something interesting?" Who decides what is interesting? This seems a rather shaky financial terrain on which to erect a future.
3. projects which feel much more like full-productions rather than experiments: this seems to be counterintuitive to the Institute, but it has served as a springboard for more thinking, and the realization of what practice really means. Which brings us to the next point:
3. the further we go with these experiments the more we realize the necessity of inventing radical new forms which are capable of dealing with complexity in useful ways. increasingly it seems that two dimensions aren't sufficient. what would it mean to reconceive the book as a three or four dimensional (social) space: this takes us back to the first point, but also to the recognition that what you call "dimensions" are here defined under absolutely new terms. This is quite virgin territory. You have to collect your specimens and experiment before you produce treatises, and way before you think of the library where they'll reside. I believe it is important to think of the Institute as a lab. You have finite resources, you cannot be everything.
4. authors and readers are undergoing substantial changes. what experiments are necessary to take this strand of inquiry to the next stage: this is what you are already trying, and becoming experts at. Your web-based projects, and Sophie, with all its problems, seem to be the experiment at hand. Is the Institute ready for the next stage? What resources would that take?
5. Sophie may be a viable tool in the next several months. Is Sophie promising enough for us to really get behind it and push, or should we abandon it for web-based alternatives. if Sophie is something we should support, to what extent should we be planning a "publishing program" around Sophie to explore and show-off it's potential: What is at stake here? Are web-based alternatives incompatible with Sophie? Do you trust Sophie will do what you want it to? Meanwhile, web-based alternatives are there to explore. These explorations could feed future Sophie-based projects.
6. concerns about google's role as archivist and gatekeeper of our collective culture have led us to try to pull together a movement aimed at encouraging the creation of a public trust (in opposition to google and other private, for-profit entities). and this in turn raises huge questions about the socio/political context for everything we're doing. how political can we/should we be, and in what way?: this is important, but not crucial for the existence of the Institute at this moment. You can be activists, but have you the resources or the time for this huge endeavor? If your political concerns come before anything else, then the Institute must be absolutely, and honestly, restructured. Which brings us to the last point:
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7. we've either got to scale down our ambition substantially or else gear up for significant fund-raising. if we go for expansion, the question is how do we do that and not sell our souls for funding. if we opt to stay small and lithe how do we concentrate our efforts so that we continue having an impact. can we achieve our goals (whatever they are or should be) within the context of the institute or is it time to consider another structure?
Posted by sol gaitan at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)
January 8, 2007
in the open
our mission statement, about a year old now, included the following section:
NEW FORMS, NEW PROCESSES Academic institutes arose in the age of print, which informed the structure and rhythm of their work. The Institute for the Future of the Book was born in the digital era, and we seek to conduct our work in ways appropriate to the emerging modes of communication and rhythms of the networked world. Freed from the traditional print publishing cycles and hierarchies of authority, the Institute seeks to conduct its activities as much as possible in the open and in real time.
wondering if we should seriously explore the idea of locating the institute in Second Life? have been thinking about this for awhile. an article in today's NY Times moved this up in my internal queue.
Posted by bob stein at 3:58 AM | Comments (4)
January 5, 2007
'for that a feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example'...?
In terms of the role of author and editor. Sol G (I think) posted some wonderful thoughts a few weeks back about the role of editors in mass creativity. I'd really like to hear more from Mitch about his experience curating the networked-book experiment that he's just started working up offline. How do you deal with arguments? How do you edit arguments? How do you judge where to namecheck a comment and where to just incorporate it?
I want to know what's going on in MItch's head as he tries to turn a cacophony of input into a muscular text. And I'm not sure there's really any discussion about that experience out there. There's plenty of mythology about 'the writer': the solitude of creativity and all that. Think of Thoreau, Virginia Woolf and so on. But I can't think of anyone who writes about the experience or role of a new-media editor or curator as such. And it is different to the role of a print editor.
I suppose you could argue that the ancient orators were curators or editors of the 'commonplaces' or topoi that Ong describes as typical of an oral culture. Hence, as an online editor watches consensus emerge out of discussions, absorbs the results back into the discourse, and enables its redeployment elsewhere, they could be said to play a similar role to an ancient orator. But that would be to elide the differences between aural and written culture; I know Bob remarked on the effect of the Web in appearing to do just this, but as I'm not sure if we should accept 'a new orality' uncritically. Also, there's a whole didactic/political ideology that goes with the 'philosopher-poet' model. Last time they had a go at reviving this ideology (for an example of which I strongly recommend having a look at Sidney's Defense of Poetry if you haven't already) we in the UK ended up with a civil war, while the precepts Sidney advocated are now most clearly seen in the world of advertising and marketing.
And yet, on if:book, the questions of mass creativity, rhetoric, politicisation, orality/textuality and so on keep coming up. It all smells of Aristotle. And I think the question of what wordsmiths do, what they do it for, and how it feels to do it is central to what if:book is doing. I want to take a look at the really old, pre-print theories around that. I think they have a lot to offer this discussion.
In particular, I wonder about all this in relation to fiction. Whether it's single-authored, slash-fic or whatever, there's something about storytelling, fiction, 'feigned examples' (Sidney) that bewitches people in a way academic collaboration just doesn't. And, partly due to the ideologies that underpin print authorship, storytelling is currently deeply lost. I mean, what's it for? What's the point of making up stories at all? Is there any difference between slash fic and print publication, and if so what? Are airport novels any better than 'literary' fiction? Or is it the other way round? What about royalties for authors? Etc, etc.
I think storytelling needs a practice to match its potential choice of media. I dont' know that it has one at the moment. So perhaps if there's soemthing missing from if:book's current portfolio it's a solid experiment in collaborative or curated storytelling? Fiction? Academic research is one thing, but how do you tell stories in a Holy of Holies form? Would fiction work at all? Would you have to rethink the form completely? Is anyone doing this at the moment? If they are, I want to know. And if not, I want to have a go. Even if it doesn't work.
I suppose what it comes down to for me is this: Second Life, World of Warcraft, various MUDs and their ilk are basically collaborative fantasies. Do these things (the textual ones particularly) even need an editor, an author, an organising rhetorician/poet? Would they benefit from it? Is there an art form that could emerge there? And if not, should I just abandon storytelling to the advertisers and find something else to think about?
Posted by sebastian mary at 12:06 PM | Comments (0)
January 3, 2007
from Mary in response to the request for readings
if i was being expansive i'd say aristotle's poetics, sidney's defense of poetry, possibly derrida's white mythology, and a book called 'allegory and violence' by gordon teskey (ithaca press) which is one of the best books on the evolution of attitudes to story i've ever read. it's not everyone's cup of tea though.
there's a handful of essays on the decline of rhetoric which are worth a look too, but i'll have to wait till i'm back from seclusion chez mother before i can dig them out. something on the eighteenth-century boom in printing (grub street, in pope's words) might be nice context too. will see if i can find a title.
for some local uk colour, you might be interested in the successes and not so successes of the university of openess (sic), which is here:
the back-end of this collaborative newsletter i used to edit might also start some interesting discussions about mass authorship, though that might work better in person than distributing usernames to the ether. but that depends on what you're planning.
oh, and i have some questions for everyone too. i've been trying to work out how to co-write fiction for years and a few successes and failures around that. is that within if:book's remit?
etc, etc
yours, in dopey post-holiday mode,
sM
Posted by bob stein at 5:18 PM | Comments (0)
first thoughts about the january 07 retreat
here are some notes from me about what we're hoping to accomplish with the retreat. this is inevitably a partial answer, offered here to try to tease out the rest of the story and set the context as usefully (and interestingly) as possible. please weigh in here and/or start your own threads.
the elevator pitch on the institute is that our raison d'etre is to understand (and influence) how intellectual discourse is changing as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens. we like to believe that we are good at combining theory with practice; i.e. we don't only think about things, we also test out our ideas in the real world. the concept and various iterations of the networked book is our most important (and identifiable) contribution to date, but we've also gathered some respect for the breadth of our interests relative to the "future of the book" and at times the unpredictableness and offbeat sensibilities of our collective vision.
to the extent that we've created something interesting over the past two years, it's thanks in large part to the unrestricted grant from the macarthur foundation which trusted us to, "do something interesting."
success however has brought it's own significant pressures.
some of the questions we've investigated during the past two years have led us to projects which feel much more like full-productions rather than experiments. to go down this path would require significantly more funding and a quite different measure of success. for example, the question of academic blogging brought us indirectly to mediacommons, a wildly ambitious plan to found a new academic press, based on the radical idea of returning the press to its original purpose of encouraging discourse. another example is our inquiry into the question of why there is still no credible (networked, electronic competition for the print textbook) has put us in a position to collaborate with people in american history, rhetoric and composition, spanish, music etc. to create open source texts of unimagined power -- if only we had the resources.
other questions we've considered, have placed us in the center of significant policy issues. for example our considerable concerns about google's role as archivist and gatekeeper of our collective culture have led us to try to pull together a movement aimed at encouraging the creation of a public trust (in opposition to google and other private, for-profit entities). and this in turn raises huge questions about the socio/political context for everything we're doing. how political can we/should we be, and in what way?
then of course, our experiments, particularly Gamer Theory and the Iraq Study Group report have yielded much deeper questions than the ones we started with. for example:
-- we now understand that one way to think about what we're doing, is that we are expanding the boundaries of the book to include, not just the content at a moment, frozen in time, but the process that created the content and the conversation it engenders. think of "without gods" as foregrounding the process of creation; think about gamer theory or the Iraq Study Group report as exploring the possibiltiy of extended asynchronous conversation taking place within the context of the book itself. but the further we go with these experiments the more we realize the necessity of inventing radical new forms which are capable of dealing with complexity in useful ways. increasingly it seems that two dimensions aren't sufficient. what would it mean to reconceive the book as a three or four dimensional (social) space.
-- our work on the networked book has made it stunningly clear that the traditional roles of authors and readers are undergoing substantial changes. what experiments
are necessary to take this strand of inquiry to the next stage.
-- if it's true that the "history" of a wikipedia article or other many-authored work is as important as the "last version" how do we present the history in a useful way.
-- the more we consider new forms for the book, the more we realize the importance of the related questions of how knowledge is, archived and retrieved. we define "books" rather broadly -- for our purposes, it's the vehicle humans use to move big ideas around. if we were to define libraries just as broadly -- the vehicle humans use to store and retrieve knowledge, could we, should we be the institute for the future of books and libraries -- asked figuratively rather than literally.
Sophie may be a viable tool in the next several months. Is Sophie promising enough for us to really get behind it and push, or should we abandon it for web-based alternatives. if Sophie is something we should support, to what extent should we be planning a "publishing program" around Sophie to explore and show-off it's potential.
we've just gotten a second grant from macarthur but it only covers three salaries and basic expenses for this year and only half that the year after. we've either got to scale down our ambition substantially or else gear up for significant fund-raising. if we go for expansion, the question is how do we do that and not sell our souls for funding. if we opt to stay small and lithe how do we concentrate our efforts so that we continue having an impact. can we achieve our goals (whatever they are or should be) within the context of the institute or is it time to consider another structure?
Posted by bob stein at 11:54 AM | Comments (1)