Categories 1, 2 and 3
Category 1 — Discussing a book in person with friends and acquaintances.
(offline, informal, synchronous, ephemeral)
Permalink for this paragraph 1 At lunch in the cafeteria, a colleague says, “OMG, I’m inhaling the Stieg Larsson books. Have you read them yet?” Or over drinks a blind date asks “Have you read anything good lately?” Talking about what we read is a fairly common behavior among certain strata. However, online in chat rooms or offline, these casual discussions tend to peter out fairly quickly and rarely get beyond the superficial; their purpose at least as much social glue as intellectual back and forth.
Category 2 — Discussing a book online
(online, informal, synchronous or asynchronous, persistent)
Permalink for this paragraph 5 As soon as people went online they started talking about books. At first these discussions took place in synchronous chat rooms, but later, specialized sites developed for readers — Shelfari, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and Amazon’s review pages. I would also include a raft of lit–blogs in this category, as well as Zotero, which technically isn’t a site, but rather a tool used widely by scholars. Social bookmarking tools such as Reddit, Digg, Delicious are an increasingly popular way of recommending and commenting on web–based texts. These sites and tools enable people to create and share annotated lists of what they’ve read, write extensive reviews and engage in deeper, more nuanced asynchronous discussions about specific books or more general themes and subjects applicable to particular genres or themes. Generalized social networks such as Facebook provide many of the same reader–centric features as the dedicated–to–reader sites. Some of this functionality is now moving into the ebook readers themselves; e.g. sending recommendations or quotes from within the book itself. The Kindle reader’s ability to show you passages that have been highlighted by others is an example of very low–level (particularly because they are anonymous) social connections being made in the reader. Kobo’s reader for the Playbook effectively combines an ebook with instant messaging, which will be used in the main for general conversation.
Permalink for this paragraph 1 Note: While people have come to expect their contributions on websites to be archived “forever,” the difficulty of actually finding specific comments possibly renders much of the discussion more ephemeral than not.
Category 3 — Discussing a book in a classroom or living–room book group
(offline, formal, synchronous, ephemeral)
Permalink for this paragraph 2 Formal discussions of extended duration tend be much richer than the ad hoc conversations of Category 1. Holding the book being discussed in their hand enables people to enliven the discussion with quotations read aloud to the group, affording a level of specificity not available to Category 1. While the specificity associated with quotation is theoretically possible in the asynchronous exchanges of Category 2, the awkwardness of complex online conversations means that online discussions are usually much less specific or deep. There is a tremendous amount of important information conveyed by body language and tone of voice in an offline discussion that is just not available today online. Unless audio– or video–taped, these conversations are not normally archived for future reference.
Permalink for this paragraph 2 A good example of the arbitrariness of these categories is Infinite Summer, a site which coordinated a group reading and discussion of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. While in terms of this taxonomy, a Category 2 activity, because the discussion didn’t take place “in the margins” or “on the page” as in Category 4, a relatively formal discussion took place which was both wide–ranging and noticeably deeper than what you normally see in Category 2 experiences.
Margaret Ikeda
JulietS
Bob,
The first issue I have is that these are describing modes of phenomenological interaction, but not necessarily the genres of communication that take place within these interactions. I suspect that a genre/model needs to accompany this — otherwise I suspect that this model may risk becoming a bit determinalistic.
Case and point with Cat #1 – the context that frames a discussion will greatly influence the content of the interaction. Cat 1/Case 2 – Blind Date – which I’d sort into “book small talk.” That produces/structures a type of conversation that could grow into another category (exegesis – i.e. what myself an collegues do when we often discuss books) but doesn’t necessarily have to.
To follow up on the previous comment, here’s an attempt to better sketch out this concept of interaction types (with corresponding taxonomic categories)…
category 1 with what we might call “Book Small Talk”
category 3 and 4 with “Exegesis” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis).
One that I see missing is “Book as Metaphor” – where the book(s) is invoked as a shorthand for a specific point of view, or proof of a certain fact. The book may be used throughout this sort of conversation without it necessarily ever being specifically about the book.
Another one to consider is “Participatory (Meta) Feedback” in which, as Kathleen Parker and others have noted, the conversation is directed as gathering feedback to aid in the development for the author.
“Instrumental Commentary” is probably another category, especially important for business (and tech) books, which deal with identifying the most important/useful aspects of the text and then thinking about how they apply (or fail to work) in a specific situation.
Reviews are of course another type of social reading mode.
And, using Youtube comments as another source, “I read this and Loved/Hated it (and you should also read…)” is another type of global conversation.
[...] suit Bob Stein de l’Institut pour le futur du livre, cette application se situe dans la deuxième catégorie de sa typologie de la lecture sociale. #gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { [...]
[...] suit Bob Stein de l’Institut pour le futur du livre, cette application se situe dans la deuxième catégorie de sa typologie de la lecture [...]