what i’ve learned since posting a proposal for a taxonomy of social reading

a little less than three weeks ago in conjunction with the Books-in-Browsers meeting at the Internet Archive, i posted a proposal for a taxonomy of social reading. here’s a brief summary of what i’ve learned from the discussion so far.
Process
People are very resistant to leaving comments in a public space. There was a much more extensive discussion of this draft on the private Read 2.0 listserve than what you see in the public CommentPress version. i begged people on the listserve to post their comments on the public version, but with few exceptions no one was willing. The really sad thing from my pov is that by refusing to join the discussion in CommentPress, people deprived themselves of the opportunity to experience category 4 social reading first hand. I am very respectful of many of the people on the read 2.0 list and would have loved to have had their first-hand reactions to the experience of engaging in the close-reading of an online document with people whose views they value.
The resistance to public commenting isn’t surprising; it’s just not yet part of our culture. Intellectuals are understandably resistant to exposing half-baked thoughts and many of them earn their living by writing in one form or another, which makes the idea of public commenting a threat to their livelihood. [I’ve long proposed the inverse law of commenting on the open web — the more you’d like to read someone’s comments on a text, the less likely they are to participate in an open forum.]
Changing cultural norms and practices is a long haul.
Content
The comments I did get, privately and on the CommentPress site, helped me realize that, the first draft needs lots of work.
Several people pointed out that the focus on “reading” obscured the fact that the flip side of “social reading” is “social writing.” Think of it this way. When i put the draft up in CommentPress i thought i was offering people a chance to experience “social reading.” It’s obvious to me now that the public comments people left are not only a permanent part of this draft — a part of the work itself — but also extremely helpful to me in terms of making version 2.0 stronger. this is indeed not just not just “social reading.” it is also collaborative thinking and writing.
This has interesting rights implications. In my speech at the recent Books-in-Browsers meeting i suggested that readers “own” their annotations and have to have the right to export and transport those annotations to other environments. I now realize that’s simplistic. if a reader has made comments in the margin AND specified that those comments should be public, the “ownership” of those comments has to be shared with the author or publisher. Since those comments become part of the public record, the author or publisher should have the right to include them forever as part of the work. However, the reader who made the comments must have the right, in perpetuity, to take those comments with them to other reading environments and places of conversation. if a reader specifies that comments are not to be made public, then it seems that the author/publisher has no right to do anything with them.
The second serious problem with version 1.0 is that its structure strongly implies that category 4 social reading, conversations that occur IN the margin, are the “highest form” of social reading. That’s just plain wrong. People read and write in order to play a role in their culture and time. Mysteries or romance novels have a cultural point of view that forms the background for the plot and communicates a world view. From this perspective, even reading “for pleasure” is in part a way of looking at an aspect of society through someone else’s eyes. If a central purpose of reading is to engage with the issues of the day, then a platform for close reading is best seen as a valuable tool, useful in helping readers join a broader discussion. put another way; if the comments and ideas someone writes in the margin never make it out, then it’s like a tree falling in the forest that no one hears. [note: yes i understand that the private thoughts someone has while reading, may show up later in public forums. i’m trying to make a point about how much more valuable the comments written in the margin become when they escape the private tributary and join the river of public discourse.]
A big thank you to everyone who has chimed in. it’s been a wonderful example of how social reading and writing can help elucidate complex problems.

lost book sales

Jane Litte recently launched lostbooksales.com, a site where readers tell the tale of how a publisher lost a sale because a book wasn’t available in a certain territory or format. While lostbooksales.com is a valiant effort to collect and codify examples of friction in the current supply chain, I think it’s important not to exaggerate how much of the problems facing publishers are a function of the mismatch between an outdated rights structure and the electronic distribution pipe which is technically geography agnostic and format flexible.
Jane explains that the motivation for the site came from a comment someone named Suze posted on her DearAuthor blog

If I had the time and computer savvy, I’d set up a lostebooksale.com site where people could submit each book they didn’t buy, and why. After the first three or four hundred stories about “I didn’t buy Book X because it’s not available in my country, so I got a pirate copy”, maybe somebody in publisher with the drive, imagination, and ability could prod the industry into action.

God knows publishers need to be prodded into action, but the action needs to be much more extensive than rationalizing rights. The shift from page to screen is taking place in a much broader context in which media consumption, in all it’s rapidly proliferating forms, is moving from atoms to bits. And those bits all swim in the same sea and move through the same pipe. All of them competing for our attention.
I’d be keen to see lostbooksales expanded so that people could say “i didn’t buy a book because i got the information i needed off a website, or because i figured i would rather watch Season 2 of The Wire, play World of Warcraft, or even read some of the classics which are now available free in almost every electronic format.

the web and our evolving sense of self privacy

John Battelle (first editor-in-chief of Wired) has written a very thoughtful piece on how our sense of self and privacy is evolving on the web. it begins as follows:
Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing interactions with digital platforms, and in particular, through what we’ve come to call the web?
I believe the answer is yes. I’m fascinated with how our society’s new norms and mores are developing – as well as the architectural patterns which emerge as we build what, at first blush, feels like a rather chaotic jumble of companies, platforms, services, devices and behaviors.
Here’s one major architectural pattern I’ve noticed: the emergence of two distinct territories across the web landscape. One I’ll call the “Dependent Web,” the other is its converse: The “Independent Web.”
The Dependent Web is dominated by companies that deliver services, content and advertising based on who that service believes you to be: What you see on these sites “depends” on their proprietary model of your identity, including what you’ve done in the past, what you’re doing right now, what “cohorts” you might fall into based on third- or first-party data and algorithms, and any number of other robust signals.
The Independent Web, for the most part, does not shift its content or services based on who you are. However, in the past few years, a large group of these sites have begun to use Dependent Web algorithms and services to deliver advertising based on who you are.

the truth is in the back and forth

James Bridle (designer and programmer of the Institute’s Golden Notebook project in 2008) just published the complete history of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War.
bridle wikipedia.png
James writes on his blog:
This particular book–or rather, set of books–is every edit made to a single Wikipedia article, The Iraq War, during the five years between the article’s inception in December 2004 and November 2009, a total of 12,000 changes and almost 7,000 pages. It amounts to twelve volumes: the size of a single old-style encyclopaedia. It contains arguments over numbers, differences of opinion on relevance and political standpoints, and frequent moments when someone erases the whole thing and just writes “Saddam Hussein was a dickhead”.
As early as 2006, i wrote in if:book that the truth in Wikipedia articles lay in the edits, rather than the surface article:
In a traditional encyclopedia, experts write articles that are permanently encased in authoritative editions. The writing and editing goes on behind the scenes, effectively hiding the process that produces the published article. The standalone nature of print encyclopedias also means that any discussion about articles is essentially private and hidden from collective view. The Wikipedia is a quite different sort of publication, which frankly needs to be read in a new way. Jaron focuses on the “finished piece”, ie. the latest version of a Wikipedia article. In fact what is most illuminative is the back-and-forth that occurs between a topic’s many author/editors. I think there is a lot to be learned by studying the points of dissent; indeed the “truth” is likely to be found in the interstices, where different points of view collide. Network-authored works need to be read in a new way that allows one to focus on the process as well as the end product.
Four years later, we don’t yet have the tools that would let people read Wikipedia articles in “a new way” but hopefully Bridle’s very impressive experiment with this one article will spur efforts to develop new tools for reading online works which are constantly being changed and edited.

open peer review

The New York Times ran a front-page story yesterday about open peer review, featuring an experiment conducted by MediaCommons for The Shakespeare Quarterly using CommentPress. The article is here and the experiment itself is here. Both MediaCommons and CommentPress were born at the institute; it’s exciting to see our efforts get such prominent notice.

hospice for publishers

One of my best friends’ parents both became very ill this year. Her mother, 87, elected to have a feeding tube inserted permanently. She is confined to her bed, alone much of the time, and in constant pain, waiting for the inevitable end, which thanks to the feeding tube may be many miserable months ahead. Her father, 90, elected to enter a hospice facility where he spent his last three weeks eating yogurt, sipping the occasional last whiskey, and having long wonderful visits with his three children, their spouses and his beloved grown grandchildren. By all accounts it was a very good death.
Thinking about my friend’s parents makes we wonder why their couldn’t be a “hospice” option for publishers, many of whom — my low-end guess is at least 50% — won’t survive the transition from print to networked screens.   If a publisher doesn’t have the requisite vision, desire and resources to embrace digital, what’s wrong with saying, “Gee, it’s been a great 25, 50, 100-year run. Instead of beating our heads against a wall and dying an ugly death, why don’t we go out in style.” Once this difficult decision is arrived at, it would be a matter of selling the assets that can be sold, providing staff with generous severance and really helping them to find new jobs, and then at the very end giving some wonderful parties, celebrating the end of an era. A death with integrity and dignity intact.
Please understand that I make this suggestion with huge love and respect for publishers. At their best they have played a crucial role in the complex discourse that moves society forward. Like a beloved parent, there’s no reason why they should suffer more than necessary at the end of a full and productive life.

the future of the app

Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called “a book,” people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it’s true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called “a book,” since we don’t have that word yet, “book” works better than “institute for the future of discourse” or “institute for thinking about what comes after the book.” I end my answer by suggesting that one day we’ll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.
I’ve always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman’s First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate — “app.” It’s not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right.
The aha moment went like this . . . . while zoning in and out of the Feldman piece I started to think about the iPad that I’d been using for the past six weeks — not only for most of my reading, but for playing expressive games like my current favorite, SoundDrop, answering email, surfing the web, watching videos, and listening to music. The iPad has become the center of my media universe, much more than my computer, iPod, or iPhone have ever been. My text used to come in an object we called a book; movies came on tapes, laserdisc, and DVDs, music on records and CDs and games on cartridges and CDs. Now they are all appearing as apps of one sort or another on my iPad.
The distinction between media types was a lot more important during the analog era of the mid-twentieth cenury. In 1950 no one would confuse a novel with a movie or a song with a TV show. But today we have e-books with video sequences, and movies published with extensive text-based supplements. Is Lady Gaga a music star or video star?
While I think it will take some time to deeply understand the long-term implications of this flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps, i don’t think it’s too early to suggest that “app” is on its way to linguistic hegemony.
In the past we had books, movies and songs. now they’re all being bundled into one category — apps — to be further delineated by a descriptive prefix. It’s easy to imagine today that movies will have back stories and fan elaborations available on the web and new fiction forms will explore and make use of a complex almagam of media types. the categories- books, songs, movies- meant something in the past that loses specific meaning in this fluid digital domain where each can incorproate aspects of the other. In its media agnosticism and inclusive fluidity, “app” already describes this landscape.
Consider the word “book.” On its own, “book” usually refers to a minimally defined material object, a generic container. It’s not until there’s a qualifier that we know much about what’s inside: fiction or non-fiction book, cookbook, textbook, art book, children’s book, how-to book, illustrated book, history book, religious book, and so on.
From this perspective, “app” has already arrived. Book apps, cooking apps, movie apps, game apps, productivity apps, how-to-apps, children’s apps, music apps, photography apps etc. are all available. And of course we already have the App Store which is rapidly gaining a place in public parlance.
And yes . . . . I have now gone and registered futureoftheapp.org