Whew. I expected my review of the if:book archive to take me a few days, and selecting/commenting on posts to be a quick job requiring at most a handful of posts. Wrong. It took me a week of digging to get through the archive. As for reviewing what’s there, it is hard to know how to do justice to it.
In the process of reviewing, it became clear that while a whole category of post reads more like extended, thoughtful essays many of which are as relevant now as they were three or four years ago, others tell the story of developments in the world of discourse online in a more journalistic style. It makes no sense to privilege one kind of post over the other; to foreground ‘newsy’ posts would be to imply that nothing stays the same long enough to merit commentary, and to privilege ‘thinky’ ones would be to suggest that if:book is merely a collection of arcane musings with no relationship to the world at large. Then of course, much of the time the ‘newsy’ and ‘thinky’ strands are inseparable, complicating matters still further.
In any case, I’ve chosen to break the posts down thematically as well as chronologically, and in this way attempt to trace developments both in the fields the posts describe, and also – where relevant – in the Institute’s thinking on different topics. Though I’ve worked closely with other if:book folks on the period before I arrived at the Institute, this tracing, collating and commentary is naturally a partial activity that will to a large extent reflect my personal taxonomies and interests. But arguably archiving will always be somewhat guilty of this.
So over the next while I’ll be posting my take on if:book past and present, along with whatever thoughts about linkrot, Web entropy, digital archiving and so on occur along the way. All help gratefully appreciated. First post to follow shortly…