The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article on networked books, including discussion with McKenzie Wark on GAM3R 7H30RY (an online book posted in draft form for weblog-style open commenting), researchers from the Institute for the Future of the Book, and several university press editors and related folk. Not much new in the article if you've already been following these topics, but it gathers some important issues together. And a couple of bitter exchanges between the old and avant garde.
It's interesting to watch, from the margins (hey, I made a pun), as this slow cultural shift takes place. In many ways, the outlines of it have been inevitable since the rise of the Internet (and pretty clear way before that—Englebart's NLS/Augment, Nelson's Xanadu, or Bush's Memex). Here's Peter Suber's Timeline of the Open Access Movement that documents some of the early incarnations: the first RFC (Request for Comment (1969); USENET (1979); and Steve Harnad's groundbreaking Psycholoquy (1989), which I used to follow when I was in grad school.
But forecasting cultural change is always hazy business, and the specifics are still up in the air. A book or a journal article run by different conventions than, say, weblogs or wikis. Some of those differences have decayed into empty tradition, while others have important effects. It's popular to condemn older media as being slow or too conventional (or conversely to deride new media for being all flash and no substance), there are aspects to all those varied articulations that are worth considering: the weblog or the wiki shouldn't simple replace the book. The question things like GAM3R 7H30RY and IFB ask are what aspects should we retain from each medium? How and why do these things function the way they do? How can we participate in their productive mutation?[via Ray Cha]
Posted by johndanseven at July 24, 2006 04:06 PM | TrackBack