Matrix — a Taxonomy of Social Reading
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| CATEGORY 1 informal face-to-face discussion |
Offline | Synchronous | Informal | Ephemeral |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CATEGORY 2 informal online discussion |
Online | Asynchronous | Informal | Persistent |
| CATEGORY 3 formal face-to-face discussion |
Offline | Synchronous | Formal | Ephemeral |
| CATEGORY 4 formal discussion IN the margins |
Online | Synchronous or Asynchronous | Formal | Persistent |
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I think that these four initial categories (location, timing, formality, persistence) are good starts.
One thing I don’t see accounted for here is different “circles of readers/permissions to participate.” If the “reader circle” isn’t formally theorized in the taxonomy, I’m concerned that we risk losing it in the overall model and ending up with a concept of “reader” that’s not unlike Facebook’s “friend” (i.e. an undifferentiated, binary state).
Bob’s entire system revolves around groups of readers in relations (a pair on a date, co-workers at lunch, teacher and students in the classrooom, online “reading club/event”). In each of these groups there are people who are “allowed/invited/recruited” to participate, there are those who are “allowed/invited/recruited” to read/listen, and there are those who are explicitly or implicitly *NOT* included. Any platform for reading is going to have to deal with how to accommodate differentiated circles of readers so we don’t end up with “I am” or “I am not” a reader.
If readers are using a platform like CommentPress, then there is effectively still a container around the conversation. Readers in that social reading experience are all engaged in the same conversation with each other about that text, and publishing their comments where the text lives.
But consider turning that inside out. Social behaviour linked with books is happening all the time, online and offline, asynchronously, through a distributed network. All categories of reader are participating in varying numbers. So, instead, imagine a platform that hoovers up all of that social behvaiour that’s already going on, all the conversations, all the shallow “I loves it” and “RPatz is, like, so hot as Edward”, along with the deeper analysis and contributions to the author/text, and anchors it all together alongside the book. I’m not a programmer so I have no idea how this might be achieved, but I imagine it’s a function of something like tags and/or metadata.
Suddenly a reader coming new to the text is automatically joining a social reading community, and one that is as deep and broad (with all the complexities that throws up) as Facebook.
Which is a complicated way of saying that I don’t think this is a matter of whether readers will try something new like annotating and commenting on books. They are already doing it. They do it voraciously. It’s just those annotations and comments aren’t being published alongside the text of the book to create a social feedback loop for the book’s readers.
Kate, while, i’m completely in favor, for a variety of reasons, of hoovering up all the annotations on a particular text, i’m resistant to calling this the effort of a “social reading community.” I realize it’s arbitrary, but for the present, i think that it’s best to reserve the word “community” for groups where members know something about each other.” Context is important and we don’t yet have good ways of assigning context to the annotations of strangers. [note: i'm not disagreeing with your main point, just making a plea for semantic clarity in terms of how we use "community" when applied to groups of readers].