home | archives & search | the shallows | nicholasgcarr.com

Don't say you weren't warned

February 11, 2012

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not "to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie." In one chapter he predicted the creation of a high-speed worldwide communications network (he thought it would be satellite-based) and discussed some of its probable consequences. The physical mail system, he wrote, would be replaced by "an orbital post office," which "will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future." The new system will "of course" raise "problems of privacy," though these "might be solved by robot handling at all stages of the operation."

The revolution in communication won't be limited to correspondence, though: "Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling - the orbital newspaper." News reports would come to be transmitted to video screens in homes. To get "your daily paper," you'd need only "press the right button." Moreover, each reader would be able to create a personalized bundle of stories: "We will select what we need, and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have little more than the name in common with the newspaper of today."

"Nor will the matter end here," Clarke continued. "Over the same circuits we will be able to conjure up, from central libraries and information banks, copies of any document we desire ... Even books may one day be 'distributed' in this manner, though their format will have to be changed drastically to make this possible."

The technology would transform the publishing industry, Clarke warned. "All publishers would do well to contemplate these really staggering prospects. Most affected will be newspapers and pocket-books; practically untouched by the coming revolution will be art volumes and quality magazines, which involve not only fine printing but elaborate manufacturing processes. The dailies may well tremble; the glossy monthlies have little to fear."

He ended on a jauntily apocalyptic note: "How mankind will cope with the avalanche of information and entertainment about to descend upon it from the skies, only the future can show. Once again science, with its usual cheerful irresponsibility, has left another squalling infant on civilization's doorstep. It may grow up to be as big a problem child as the one born amid the clicking of Geiger counters beneath the Chicago University squash court, back in 1942."

Posted by nick at 07:01 PM | Comments (7)

Words in stone and on the wind

February 03, 2012

After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that "typographical fixity" - to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein's term - can manifest itself in a book. I've been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability - not all of which are typographical in nature - that influence the permanence of a book (or other written work) and that change, sometimes radically, as we shift from print publishing to electronic publishing. I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but I hope it's a useful start:

Integrity of the page. At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you're able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn’t create this type of fixity - it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet - but it did extend it into the modern age. (It's true that a person armed with an X-acto knife, an eraser, a jar of Wite-Out, and a Sharpie can undermine a page's fixity, but I'd argue that that's an exception that proves the rule - and, importantly, the fact that a printed page has been messed with tends to be pretty obvious to the reader.) The integrity of the page has been so intrinsic to the technology of the book (and the book's predecessors) that most of us assume it to be intrinsic to the very idea of a book. But, as we're now discovering, it's not. Page integrity is not an inherent quality in ebooks, particularly when they're stored on a networked device or in the cloud (as almost all of them are). Because an ebook's words are composed of software and a page needs to be refreshed each time it's viewed, the contents of a page can change from one viewing to the next. We can see this loss of integrity already, and on a broad scale, with Amazon's Popular Highlights and Public Notes features for its Kindle books. If a reader turns on these functions, highlights and notes will be added to a book's pages automatically, and remotely. The contents of a page can change from one refresh to the next. Technologically, it's just as easy to change the words on a page as to add notes or highlights.

The introduction of page malleability to the book will have good consequences and bad ones (and in some cases, one person will see a particular consequence as good while another will see it as bad), but however the consequences play out, the loss of page fixity looks like a revolutionary change to our conception of and assumptions about a book.

Integrity of the edition. A second level of fixity – one introduced with the printing press – was the fixity of content across a large edition of a book. This kind of fixity was impossible with the scribal book, when copies were produced one at a time. There has been a great deal of debate, in book history circles, about how quickly books became consistent across editions - printing remained a manual, artisanal craft, with considerable variability, until it was industrialized early in the 19th century - but there's no doubt that ultimately the printing press introduced far greater standardization across large press runs than had been possible with handwritten books. (The emergence of copyright laws in the 18th century also increased the fixity of a book's contents by imposing more constraints on who was able to print a book.) This fixity never extended to different editions of the same work, which could include large and small variations - either deliberate revisions or errors. Nevertheless, fixity within editions, often very large editions of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of copies, became a basic characteristic of publishing. If I go out to my local bookstore and buy a copy of John Grisham's new novel today, and somebody a thousand miles away goes out to their bookstore and buys the same book tomorrow, and somebody else orders a physical copy of the book from Amazon, we can all be reasonably certain that we'll be reading the same book. (There is the occasional weird exception, but again it only serves to prove the general rule.)

The integrity of an edition, an inherent quality of modern printing technology, is not an inherent quality of the technology of the ebook. Ebooks have no print runs, and the very idea of an "edition" gets fuzzy with an ebook. A publisher, or a self-published writer, is free to change the source file of a ebook at pretty much any time, and there's no requirement that readers be alerted to the change. Indeed, the self-publishing software offered by Amazon and other companies make such changes a snap. There's no assurance that the copy of a book I download (or read online) today will match the copy of the same book that someone else downloads tomorrow. Again, this flexibility may have a mix of good and bad consequences, but it substantially changes our assumptions about a book's stability.

Permanence of the object. Printed books don't last forever, but, with a modicum of care, they can last a very long time. And as long as a book lasts, it remains readable (assuming the reader knows the language). Because an ebook is not susceptible to the kind of physical decay that can afflict a paper book, it theoretically can last longer. But in this case there is a vast gulf between theory and reality. What we know about computer documents is that, due to rapid changes in computer operating systems, computer media, software applications, and file formats, they don't tend to have much longevity. I have a box of floppy disks from fifteen or twenty years ago sitting in a closet, and even if I still had a floppy drive (which I don't) my current computers would be unable to read most of the files on the disks. As software, ebooks will likely suffer from this same impermanence, a problem magnified by the wide range of proprietary and open formats in which ebooks are sold today. A printed book is a printed book is a printed book. An ebook is not an ebook is not an ebook. The good news is that, if we make smart technological choices, we can alleviate this problem in the future. The bad news is that, if history is a guide, we probably won't make smart choices.

Sense of completeness. Fixity and permanence matter not only as real qualities of technologies and objects, but also as perceived qualities. As the printing and publishing trades matured over the last half millennium, the publication of a book went from being a vague, ongoing process to an event – a date on a publishing calendar – and, in turn, the sense of a book as a final, finished creation strengthened, particularly in the mind of an author but also in the minds of editors, proofreaders, and book designers. This sense of finality, of completeness, was, I believe, essential to the emergence of literary culture in its current form. That doesn’t mean that a particular author might not revise a book for subsequent editions - if you write a "Song of Myself," you will probably want it to change as you change - but it does mean that each edition was a thing in itself – at best, a work of art aimed at posterity as well as the present day.

Because it lacks the necessity and the fixity of a print run, e-publishing once again can become an ongoing process rather than an event, which is likely to change the perceptions of writers and their collaborators. And when you change your perception of what you're creating, you will also change how you create it. I think it's fair to say that these kinds of shifts are subtle and play out over a long time, but in some ways the erosion of the sense of a written work's completeness and self-containment may ultimately change literature as much as the underlying technological changes.

So there you have four facets of a book's fixity or stability that are shaped by the prevailing technologies of creation, production, distribution, and reading. The permanence of a book is not just a function of technology, of course. Many other factors - laws, commercial interests, reader preferences and habits - also exert an important influence. But technology matters, and it seems likely that we'll be celebrating, and rueing, the consequences of today's epochal shift from printing to electronic publishing for centuries to come.

Posted by nick at 02:05 PM | Comments (15)

Saint Zuck

February 02, 2012

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company," writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company's IPO filing. "It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected."

Hosanna!

One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people's pasts - I mean, their timelines - and see what they were doing and thinking way back when. And when you scroll Zuckerberg's timeline back to Facebook's formative days, you do indeed see a young man filled with philanthropic fervor, a man without worldly desires who is putting his heart and his soul into a grand social mission.

Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the "hottest." It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their looks. It's hard to imagine a more altruistic project. What Zuckerberg had already realized is that, in order to create seamless online connections between people, you have to first turn them into objects.

And then the fledgling humanitarian really spread his wings. He agreed to write the code for a dating site being planned by some classmates even as he was clandestinely pursuing his own plan for a similar social-networking site, then called The Facebook. He struggled mightily with the ethical dilemma raised by this apparent conflict of interest, at one point pouring his heart out in an instant-message exchange with a high school friend named Adam D'Angelo:

When you're deeply engaged in pursuing a social mission, and not at all concerned about any sort of crass business interests, you naturally obsess about ways to "fuck over" your competitors so you can get to market first, pour investors' money into "advertising and stuff," and "win." It's a simple fact: When you're guided by high social ideals, you can never be "too dick."

haha

Posted by nick at 10:58 AM | Comments (9)

The camera in the stands

January 31, 2012

The wisdom of Pudge Fisk, channeled through Jon Udell:

Posted by nick at 01:19 AM | Comments (5)

Why publishers should give away ebooks

January 30, 2012

I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore. That's not to say I don't listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I'm no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I've rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck.

But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn't aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that lets you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no longer have to choose between the superior sound and packaging of vinyl and the superior mobility of digital. When I'm near my turntable, I spin the platter. When I'm not, I fire up the MP3s.

Buy the atoms, get the bits free. That just feels right - in tune with the universe, somehow.

There's a lesson here, I think, for book publishers. Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they'd be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business. After all, in order to play vinyl you have to buy a turntable, and most people aren't going to do that. So vinyl may be a bright spot for record companies, but it's not likely to become an enormous bright spot. The only technology you need to read a print book is the eyes you were born with, and print continues, for the moment, to be the leading format for books. If you start giving away downloads with print copies, you shake things up in a pretty big way.

So why give away the bits? Well, traditional book publishers have three big imperatives today: (1) protect print sales for as long as possible (in order to fund a longer-term transition to a workable new business model); (2) help keep physical bookstores in business (for the reasons set out in this article by Julie Bosman); and (3) do anything possible to curb the power of Amazon.com, the publishers' arch-frenemy. Bundling bits with atoms helps on all three fronts. First, you give people an added incentive to buy a print book. When it comes to paperbacks, in particular, a customer essentially gets the physical and electronic copies for the price they'd pay for an electronic copy alone. That changes the buying equation. Second, you do something that helps physical bookstores in their own end-of-days battle with Amazon. Suddenly, they have a strong new sales pitch. Third, by offering the ebooks in a standard, non-proprietary format (ePub, say), you make the Kindle, which doesn't handle the ePub format, considerably less attractive, particularly for anyone buying their first e-reader. (Why buy one that's not going to accept those free ebooks you're going to get when you decide you want a print edition?) Either Amazon stands firm with its proprietary format, or it retools the Kindle as a general purpose reader that can handle ePub. If it chooses the former course, it loses e-reader market share. If it takes the latter course, it weakens its grip on sales of ebooks and weakens the rationale for subsidizing Kindle purchases. There's also one other potential benefit for publishers, which could be very important in the long run: By setting up their own site where customers download free ebooks, they open a direct relationship with book readers, something they've never really had before.

I'd like to say my plan is a no-brainer, but it's not. I can see at least three obstacles, and there are probably more. On the commercial side, you're going to have some cannibalization. There are probably households today who, to get the best of both worlds, buy a book in both print and electronic versions. Give away the ebook, and you sacrifice those ebook sales. I have to believe, though, that that's not going to amount to that many copies, and if you're talking about your long-run survival those duplicate sales are trivial. Also on the commercial side is the question of how this would affect Barnes & Noble, the struggling behemoth of physical bookstores which also, with the Nook, is Amazon's top competitor in the e-reader market. I'm sure there would be both benefits and costs for B&N, but since I don't know the details of the company's finances I don't know what the net effect would be. Still, if you're losing as much money as B&N is, business-as-usual is not exactly an attractive strategy.

There's also the technical challenge involved in actually distributing the free ebooks. Vinyl records are sold sealed in plastic. The only way to get the code for the free e-copy (other than engaging in vandalism in a retail store) is to buy the album, crack the seal, and fish out the code. The books on bookstore shelves aren't sealed in plastic, so how do you prevent creeps from writing down the code in a store and then going home and filching the e-book from your server? I don't know the answer to that question - I'm thinking maybe you print a code on the sales receipt - but I have to think there's a geek somewhere who could come up with a boffo solution. Some publishers are already experimenting with physical/digital bundles, including ones that include an ebook download for free, so there are clearly already some test cases to learn from. The good news is that book buyers, as a group, probably aren't the most criminally minded segment of the population.

Will giving away ebooks secure the future of the printed book, save the corner bookstore, and let publishers go back to enjoying three-martini lunches? No. But I think it would help, and at the very least it would annoy Amazon. When you're on the receiving end of Massive Disruption, it's not a bad idea to foment a little disruption yourself.

POSTSCRIPTIVE QUESTION: In that article I link to above, Bosman writes that "sales of older books — the so-called backlist, which has traditionally accounted for anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the average big publisher’s sales — would suffer terribly [if physical bookstores disappear]." I had assumed, following Long Tail logic, that online bookstores, which can "stock" far more backlist books than even the largest physical bookstore, would spur more backlist sales than physical stores. I guess I was wrong. Can anybody with inside knowledge of the book trade confirm the truth of what Bosman wrote? And if it is true, what does that say about the power of the Long Tail effect?

Posted by nick at 01:45 PM | Comments (16)

Power to the data!

January 27, 2012

Seth Finkelstein, a long-time crusader against online censorship, made what seemed like a jaundiced comment on my recent post Piracy and Privacy. I had raised the possibility that online activists, fresh from their SOPA fight, might now come to the support of efforts to give people more control over the personal information that companies collect and trade online. Will the activists rise up again? I wondered. To which Finkelstein replied:

Turns out Finkelstein wasn't being jaundiced. He was being prescient. Shortly after he made his comment, a Harvard Law School blog posted a lathery rant, under the judicious title "More Crap from the E.U.," by Jane Yakowitz, a professor at the Brooklyn Law School. Yakowitz blasted the European Commission's new proposal to strengthen online privacy protections. Europe, she wrote, has been "flailing around" with internet regulation. It has enacted "miserable" policies. The EC's reasoning is "complete and utter hogwash." Its actions are "regressive." Its proposed new directive represents "a misguided attack on the information economy." Goodness. I think Professor Yakowitz must have eaten a bad mussel in Brussels once.

Having ventilated, Yakowitz went on to make her own proposal: "Google and other major Internet companies might want to start coordinating a protest similar to the effective campaign we saw here in the states in response to SOPA. If Google makes every person with the first name 'John' ungoogleable for a day, and if online retailers refuse to access cookie data for a day, and if content providers double the amount of advertising for a day, pressure can build before the Directive comes to a vote." Observes the Register's Andrew Orlowski: "Not only is this a little presumptuous – she must think Google can turn the fury of the crowd on and off like a tap – she either forgets (or doesn't know) why people are concerned about privacy in the first place."

When you get past Yakowitz's bombast, it's not all that clear how solid her objections to the E.C.'s proposal really are, or why she would impugn the E.C.'s motives. Her main gripe is that the proposed "right to be forgotten" is too broad, and would require social networks like Facebook to track down a member's postings and pictures across the Net should that person have a change of heart and ask for the stuff to be deleted. No doubt, wiping the internet slate clean would be extraordinarily difficult as a practical matter - and, more generally, it seems unwise to offer adults a blanket protection from the consequences of their own choices, foolish or otherwise, in posting stuff publicly. But it's not clear that the proposed directive is so sweeping. It provides for several exceptions to the right to be forgotten, and its main focus is on personal data collected by companies rather than on the information that comes through the public speech of individuals. Moreover, as Ars Technica's Peter Bright notes, the new rules build on data-management requirements that are already in place. The proposed directive "is not a fundamental shift in the demands placed on data-holding organizations. They must already be able to identify personal data, they must already store it securely, and they must already be able to provide it on-demand. Doing these things requires that systems are designed appropriately, and this can certainly incur costs—but they are costs that should already exist today."

The Economist's Babbage blog makes the sensible point that, even if the EC proposal has "rough edges" that need to be ironed out, providing for a right to be forgotten is nonetheless a salutary - and overdue - goal:

Yakowitz seems to think that companies' desire to manipulate personal data should outweigh the desire of people to control the data. It's true that if people choose to withhold their data, or limit the way it's shared or processed, there will be some useful services that companies will not be able to provide to those people. And a broad movement to withhold data would mean that some useful research that draws on large online data sets would not be possible. But that simply puts the onus on companies, and other organizations, to prove to people that, first, the benefits of allowing them to use their personal data will outweigh the costs and risks, and, second, that they can be trusted to use the information wisely and securely, and not in exploitative ways. The ultimate goal of attempts to strengthen and rationalize privacy controls is not to lock data away; it's to ensure that data is used in a way that strikes the right balance among commercial benefits, economic benefits, social benefits, and personal well-being. To characterize that as a miserable, regressive attack on the information economy is to peddle FUD.

UPDATE: The FUD deepens, as Google's chief lawyer warns that the EC proposal could "break the internet." As the FT's John Gapper notes, that was "the slogan used by web companies to defeat anti-piracy legislation in the US."

Posted by nick at 02:21 PM | Comments (3)

Pieces of mind

January 25, 2012

In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading:

Posted by nick at 12:12 AM | Comments (0)

Words are numbers too

January 24, 2012

Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it portends, in two nicely circuitous longforms: Longform #1 and Longform #2.

Posted by nick at 04:08 PM | Comments (0)

Piracy and privacy

Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms of intellectual property. The activists were joined in the cause by many large internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The motivations of the corporations and the activists overlapped to some degree, but there were also important differences. The activists were fighting for the cause of freedom; they worried that the bill would impede the flow of information online, to the detriment of people using the net. The corporations had business interests to protect. They feared a wave of litigation and other operational and legal headaches, as well as the possible rise of obstacles to the development of new products and services.

It will be interesting to watch how internet activists will deploy their considerable power in the future, and it will be particularly interesting to watch how much muscle they'll flex when their opponents on an issue are the same corporations that joined them in the fight against SOPA. We may actually get a good idea of how the "internet spring" will progress very soon - tomorrow, in fact. That's when, according to reports, the European Commission will unveil a sweeping proposal to defend people's right and ability to control the personal information that's collected about them online by internet businesses, advertising syndicates, and media companies. The proposed law, which if approved would take the place of the current hodgepodge of national privacy regulations throughout the EU, would, according to the BBC, require that companies obtain people's consent before collecting information about them, notify people when they collect data on them and explain how the data will be used and stored, allow people to easily review the data held about them, and allow people to transfer personal data from one company to another. The law also includes what's being called a "right to be forgotten," which means that companies would have to delete personal information they store when people request it. Companies would also have to divulge any breaches or losses of personal data within 24 hours.

Data-hungry companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter have yet to weigh in on the proposal, but if history is a guide they are likely to oppose it. Their opposition will be motivated by some of the same business concerns they had about SOPA: the threat of litigation and operational headaches, and the restriction of some types of innovation, in this case ones that require the unfettered use and exchange of personal data for commercial gain. No doubt, they'll also whine about how difficult it will be, technically, to obey the law. These are companies that can build a car that can drive itself, but making data collection transparent and giving people tools to control it - well, gee, that's really hard.

Internet executives like Mark Zuckerberg like to argue that "privacy" is an outdated concern. But when people talk about privacy, what they're really talking about is freedom: the freedom to be in charge of their own information. Guaranteeing the freedom of information online entails not only questions of flow but also questions of control. Frankly, it sometimes seems like Silicon Valley is more interested in the freedom of data than in the freedom of people.

So will internet activists rise up again, this time to protect people's freedom to control their information online? If Facebook and Twitter don't get behind individual rights in this case, will activists organize boycotts of their services as they boycotted those of companies that supported SOPA? Will the Google employees who spoke out eloquently against SOPA on their personal blogs and through social network accounts speak out with equal eloquence in support of the protection of personal privacy? Will Wikipedia go dark for another day? When it comes to shaping the future of the Net, fights about privacy are at least as important as fights about piracy.

Posted by nick at 02:07 PM | Comments (8)

The Summers' Tale

January 22, 2012

"Before the printing press," writes Lawrence Summers in the Times's Education Life section today, "scholars had to memorize 'The Canterbury Tales' to have continuing access to them." That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came along, and people were writing stuff down - on scrolls, tablets, blocks of wood - long before the book was created. In the 100 or so years between the writing of Chaucer's masterpiece and the establishment of a printing trade in England, handwritten copies of "The Canterbury Tales" were fairly abundant, particularly for those who would qualify as scholars. It was one of the most popular books of the time. If you wanted "access" to the work, you didn't have to pull Chaucer's lines from your memory; you could read them from pages that looked like this:

Maybe Summers was confusing Chaucer with Homer, and the printing press with the alphabet.

Anyway, Summers' historical howler comes, amusingly, in the service of an argument that students don't need to learn stuff anymore: "in a world where the entire Library of Congress will soon be accessible on a mobile device with search procedures that are vastly better than any card catalog, factual mastery will become less and less important." I'll leave aside the question of why Summers didn't whip out his iPhone and google "Canterbury Tales" or "printing press" or "codex" while writing his article. But this idea that knowledge can be separated from facts - that we can know without knowing - really needs to be challenged before it gains any further currency. It's wonderful beyond words that we humans can look things up, whether in books or from the web, but that doesn't mean that the contents of our memory doesn't matter. Understanding comes from context, and context comes from knowing stuff. Facts become most meaningful when, thanks to the miracle of memory, we weave them together in our minds into something much greater: personal knowledge and, if we're lucky, wisdom.

Posted by nick at 11:53 AM | Comments (9)

Thinking about reading

January 03, 2012

To mark its 21st birthday, Vintage Books has released a collection of essays on reading called Stop What You're Doing and Read This! Contributors include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. I also have a piece in the book, "The Dreams of Readers," in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars like Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, that's being done on the psychology of literary reading. Here's a short excerpt from my essay:

Stop What You're Doing and Read This! is available as a paperback in the UK and as an e-book in the US.

Posted by nick at 12:02 PM | Comments (2)

The industrialization of the ineffable

It dawns on me that there may be a correspondence between Steven Johnson's vision of serendipity as the output of a properly manipulated digital mechanism and Nick Bilton's belief in the scheduling of units of daydreaming as a means for the optimization of problem-solving. The Like button seems to be part of the same trend. Let's call it the Industrialization of the Ineffable.

Posted by nick at 12:04 AM | Comments (1)

To tweet, perchance to dream

January 02, 2012

The future, it seems, is too much for Nick Bilton. The New York Times's in-house webstud, and author of the book I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works, had something of a Joycean epiphany last week. Perched atop a rocky cliff, watching the sun dissolve majestically into the Pacific, he immediately did, he writes, "what any normal person would do in 2011": he whipped out his iPhone and started farting around with it, eager to come up with something "to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter."

But then a wave of self-doubt broke upon his consciousness:

That gave him pause. It was like one of those moments when Pandora stops the music stream and asks you if you're still listening. And so, "after talking to people who do research on subjects like this," Bilton made a resolution for 2012: he will, he says, "spend at least 30 minutes a day without my iPhone." He is nothing if not ambitious.

Now, followers of Bilton may at this point be feeling a little shiver of deja vu running up their spines. It was just a year ago, after all, when he announced his resolution for 2011, which was - you guessed it - to spend a small amount of time offline every day. He would, he wrote back then, be "retreating just a little bit from the digital paraphernalia."

I will leave it to the addiction experts to interpret Bilton's behavior. What interests me is what he plans to do with his half hour of daily disconnectedness this coming year. He's going to devote the time, he says, to daydreaming. "Daydreams, scientists say, are imperative in solving problems," he explains.

I used to think that daydreams just sort of happened, that they weren't really something you could plan ahead for, like a dentist appointment. But, I have to say, Bilton's plan sounds appealing. You schedule a 30-minute daily daydreaming slot onto your Google Calendar, and when the moment arrives you switch off the iPhone, iPad, etc., and immediately enter a fugue state in which your subsconscious is allowed to work its magic. You emerge, a half hour later, refreshed, bursting with creativity, and ready for some high-octane problem-solving.

In fact, now that I think about it, maybe this isn't a case of Bilton retreating, tail between legs, from the future. Maybe, even in taking his daily 30-minute daydream break, he will actually still be dwelling in the future. I bet when the Google Brain Plug-in finally ships, it will come with a Daydream App. For a half hour every day, your brain will automatically be switched into blue-screen mode. Disconnected from the data flow, you will be plunged into a regenerative state of unconsciousness, broken only by the occasional subliminal advertisement.

Posted by nick at 01:55 PM | Comments (6)

From movable type to movable text

December 30, 2011

The Review section of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal includes a brief essay by me on what I think will prove to be one of the most radical consequences of the rise of electronic books: the ability to perpetually revise a book even after it's been published. We take for granted the fixity of text in a printed book. But on a Net-connected digital reader, fixity disappears, replaced by endless malleability. Here's how the piece begins:

Read on.

Posted by nick at 08:26 PM | Comments (8)

Older posts

Subscribe to Rough Type

Now in paperback:
Pulitzer Prize Finalist

"Unceasingly interesting" -The Sunday Times

"Riveting" -San Francisco Chronicle

"Rewarding" -Financial Times

"Revelatory" -Booklist

Order from Amazon

Visit The Shallows site

The Cloud, demystified: "Future Shock for the web-apps era" -Fast Company

"Ominously prescient" -Kirkus Reviews

"Riveting stuff" -New York Post

Order from Amazon

Visit Big Switch site

Greatest hits

The amorality of Web 2.0

Twitter dot dash

The engine of serendipity

The editor and the crowd

Avatars consume as much electricity as Brazilians

The great unread

The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock's avatar

Flight of the wingless coffin fly

Sharecropping the long tail

The social graft

Steve's devices

MySpace's vacancy

The dingo stole my avatar

Excuse me while I blog

Other writing

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

The ignorance of crowds

The recorded life

The end of corporate computing

IT doesn't matter

The parasitic blogger

The sixth force

Hypermediation

More

Nick's first book: Order from Amazon

Visit book site