***making e-books into “real” books
rapid serial visual presentation
buddybuzz is a reading community. from
IftFotB
bionic memory synthesized?
“To create stability and permanence is the job of an archive; to facilitate a definitive statement is the job of an editor; and to make that definitive statement is the job of the author/academic. We imagined that all of these steps would take place online. But we had not considered that, perhaps, lasting and definitive is not what the web does best; rather than a fixed and stable archive, the web creates a flexible, fragile archive. Rather than a definitive interpretation of that archive, social software creates a forum for evolving, democratic statements that leave the question permanently open. Thus, the digital environment gives us a new way to think about archiving. It creates a collective memory environment that is truly collective. It provides a memory machine that supports a permeable and perpetually changing “memory,” which is, perhaps, akin to the way human memory really functions. And it gives us a way to quickly and efficiently collect and store a large body of work on almost any subject of interest.” Kim White, from
Making Sense of a Networked Archive
The description of the new archiving sounds eerie. It sounds like pre-literate memory except that it is out of body. This mechanisum, a planet and universe pervaded with information is detailed in Steven Wolfram’s New Science. But the human dimension is, possibly, not so expansive. Particulary as we migrate our hard won understandings to silicon based neural systems. There is a reason that we convey some conceptual works in physical objects such as books and attend to other conceptual works only as memories.
Memories and books scale well with our life span. That unit of one is divided by memories and multiplied by books.
“Understanding the networked aspect of digital books is central to understanding the trajectory of the bookís evolution. Electronic books are, like their paper counterparts, by-products of the surrounding culture. This is precisely why we are predicting that the networked structure of electronic communications will become an integral part of emerging book forms. The ubiquitous interconnectedness of the world wide web; the nature of exchange taking place in social software environments, and networking behaviors like email and text messaging, will spawn a type of book that incorporates these new modes of thinking, imagining, understanding, and interacting.” Kim White, from
Making Sense of a Networked Archive
This statement and the wonderful taxonomy of the future book that follows is a terrific achievement. I only wonder about the newness. It has always seemed to me that all the inventions that we currently credit to our time, actually were achieved in the 19th century. And they were then achieved in a context of pardigm shift.
Many of the network features such as instaneous transmission, digital encoding, photo imaging are from the 19th c. That’s when they were really new.
Think of how miraculous it was to encounter a railroad track and realize that the piece of rail in front of you was actually bolted to all the others that connected a vast continental web. And it was a web of steel. That’s how the late Victorians were actually awed by newness.