I don’t really - it’s kind of pointless. Unless of course a meteor lands in front of this train I’m on is there anything that I could write from my phone that couldn’t have waited for a proper text editor? Are the misprllings and typos worth it?

Perhaps.

There might be some twisted literary justfication to be made. Maybe Kerouac would have been down with this kind of first thought best thought style - but I’m just doing this to survive.

Any junior college convenience store clerk or “B2B” media CEO could tell you things are changing… That’s obvious. What they can’t or won’t tell you is how they’re all scared shitless. I’m not talking mere concern here friend - I mean flat out life threatening fear.

It’s hysteria really. Good old honest, healthy, American hysteria. And nobody has a clue as to what comes next - we just have this vague sense that technology - the ability to post poorly copy edited missives from a move train - is the answer.

It might be. I don’t know - and people a lot smarter than me don’t know either. When what comes next is that uncertain - when the future is that high up in the air (so high up we can’t even make out the soles of it’s shoes - can’t tell Nike From New Balance) the only thing to do is try everything. Go with the flow.

So this post was written and posted from a train speeding through suburban New Jersey. Hopefully the future will get here soon.

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It’s really a fascinating story - for the first time we are able to see and record the evolutionary process at work! The rapid pace of change has given us an amazing opportunity to witness the human animal undergoing a profound evolutionary leap. How we think and process information is getting a major re-write.

Yet Carr’s piece is not about that, not really. No, Carr’s piece is a cheap shot across the bow of the digerati. His argument is a thinly veiled (when veiled at all) assault on the business of the internet rather than an astute analysis of how the shift toward networked cognition might effect the ways we govern, the ways we create, the ways we report, the ways we debate and collaborate. Take this passage:

In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

This is not only combative, but essentially wrongheaded. The basic idea and primary payoff in Google’s vision of AI (and to a large extent the internet itself) is not to upgrade the brain but to network it. Not a faster processor or bigger hard drive, but an ethernet jack. Rather than being chained to our stale and rigid individual perspectives we can take steps toward (and perhaps make a return to) a collective, tribal, social intelligence that offers the possibility to lessen the impact of xenophobic bigotry and promote an atmosphere of empathy and understanding.

Perhaps if Mr. Carr wasn’t so preoccupied with Google’s market share he might have written that story. If he wasn’t so busy thinking up pithy metaphors about ambiguity he might have realized that, in the networked mind, ambiguity is an environmental constant and that contemplation (the mind’s primary method of disambiguation) is a continuous, always on process rather than an episodic, stop and think moment.

So why is Mr. Carr so pessimistic? What is he protecting? What loss is he lamenting? It seems that he’s not ready to give up on the deeply felt, narrowly prescribed experience of reading another person’s thoughts at length. It seems that he feels that exposing yourself to a limited number of perspectives - really, truly, deeply, exposing yourself to them - will make you “smarter” than getting a wide range of ideas from countless perspectives. It seems he feels that the best way to “make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas” is to ruminate on the ideas of one other person for a long time rather than continuously contemplate constantly shifting and evolving information from diverse and conflicting points of view.

Ultimately the fallacy that Carr and folks like Maryanne Wolf promote is that this deep, slow, narrow way to process information and ideas is the only way to achieve what they call deep thinking. They can’t seem to understand or accept that the evolving human mind can “make rich mental connections” - can think deeply and continuously about a large amount of chunked, mixed, mashed, diverse and networked information. That’s the story that Nicholas Carr should have written - but I guess his deep, cemented, fixed, author induced cognitive processes just wouldn’t let him see it.

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After getting to work, while sifting through my morning news feeds, I came across this article - The Digital Future of Books by L. Gordon Crovits - in the 5/19 Wall Street Journal (actually I found it through Jeff Gomez’ blog for his book Print is Dead). Needless to say, with McLuhan on the brain and McLuhan mentioned in the piece, I jumped into response mode. I would have left a comment on the WSJ site but the only options were to hit the forum or send an email - so I wrote the following up in an email. Not satisfied with the uncertainty of email I decided to post it here as well.

If anything comes of the WSJ email (writer response, etc.) I’ll update here.

UPDATE: I’ve posted this to the Journal’s Opinion Forum as well.

———————–

Mr. Crovitz
I don’t think the McLuhan quote you use in the concluding paragraph of your piece “The Digital Future of Books” is inherently pessimistic. McLuhan was simply stating the fact as he saw it. If anything your reading of that statement as such betrays your (our) stubborn affinity to visual, individualistic print culture (as McLuhan would refer to it).

It’s that affinity, that need to dress the emerging technology in the clothes of the preceding technology, which spurs the development of things like the Kindle. Still, as you point out, the real question isn’t how long it will be before the inconvenience of the printed page yields to the convenience of the screen, but whether or not we are undergoing a transformation, both cultural and cognitive, that will lead us back to orality. The real question is whether or not “we’re giving up on words.”

No matter how much we may want it to the Kindle (and devices like it) won’t save - and I might argue don’t need to save - the book. If anything its very nature as a digital device helps to push us further down the rabbit hole. It’s that very immediacy and simultaneity of information, those 100,000 books that can be delivered wirelessly in a minute, that hold the knife to the throat of the long form book. That we will have, as Jeff Gomez indicates, “the ability to read a passage from practically any book that exists, at any time that you want to, as well as the ability to click on hyperlinks, experience multimedia, and add notes and share passages with others” will only hasten the fragmentation, heighten the simultaneity, and further open the traditionally closed experience of reading printed material. The strictly controlled flow of information inherent in the traditional author/reader relationship begins to leak and the reader inevitably becomes part of a community of readers. Perspective is opened. Information is shared, communal, challenged, aggregated. The more we use the device the more we trend toward participatory, de-specialized modes of thought. Ultimately it is our use of the digital device that transforms our relationship to information and compels us to adopt the core characteristics of orality.

So the main question: Whither the book? That depends on how complete the transformation (or relapse) into orality is. If we revert completely into orality, if the characteristics of orality come to dominate the cognitive repertoire, then the book is dead. The human animal just won’t be interested in investing time and energy into one person’s perspective in the way that the book format demands. Don’t worry though, we won’t even notice the difference… we’ll most likely be dead and gone with the book by the time that kind of change is complete.

Personally I see something more along the lines of Walter Ong’s secondary orality emerging (“essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print”). A multi-sensual hybrid of literacy and orality where both digital and printed information share/fight for cognitive space in a kind of yin/yang dance - each informing and transforming the other. In that scenario long form books still have a place - though primarily in the less distracting medium of print. Those who are able to tap into both the literal and oral cognitive spaces (those people who both read books and engage digital information) will be the ones best outfitted for intellectual battle in the hybrid world. In short: the book lives pretty much as it always has - printed. Not dominant, but alive.

As you might have guessed, this leaves little space for the digital book. It’s a nice, reactionary idea, but if anything will kill the book format, you can rest assured it will be the digital book. So my advice to you is simple… if you want to save the book, don’t by a Kindle - get a library card.

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This video by Italian graffiti artist Blu is absolutely beyond words. I can’t imagine how much work something like this entails… I’m just glad that there are creative folks out there doing it.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo

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I think we need to change our philosophy of what a magazine is. We are no longer a cheap means of dispensing information, and that’s what we were until the Internet came along. Now we are an inefficient and expensive means of distributing information. … We need to reinvent ourselves as a luxury item that people want and are willing to pay for. And until we change our own image of who we are, we’re going to find out that our vendors are gong to change it for us. Because, right now, postage is a premium. Paper is a premium. Soon printing will be a premium. How long can we buy at a premium and sell at a discount? We can’t.

Damn straight. I’ve been singing this song for a while now and it’s refreshing to finally see these kinds of blunt words in the pages of an old school cheerleader like Publishing Executive (I couldn’t find them on the PubExec site that’s why there is no link for the quote - had to transcribe it myself).

Hopefully this marks a turning point in the direction of not only Publishing Executive’s reporting, but in the reporting of all the media that cover the magazine and printing industry. Hopefully they’ll awaken from the coma that has produced little more than a sleepy rhetoric of change management and stir the pot a bit. They need to give publishers a sense of urgency. They need to stop rewriting and regurgitating vendor press releases and start doing some hard, studied thinking.

Ultimately - when you get right down to it - the road ahead is uncharted and there isn’t a vendor alive today that has anything close to a solution for the kinds of questions we face. To answer those questions we need journalists, not marketing contacts.

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This is a fairly short, extremely relevant speech given by Clay Shirky at the Web 2.0 conference on April 23, 2008. It’s an absolute must view if you want to understand the ongoing shift from passive to active, participatory media. I also highly recommend Shirky’s latest book Here Comes Everybody for the same reason. The more I see, hear, and read from Clay the more I am convinced that he is without a doubt one of the most important and inspiring social media and technology thinkers in the world.

If you want like reading instead (or if you just want to thumb your nose at Steve Jobs) here is the text on Clay’s blog.

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Wake up fool there’s no time for a shouting match. That’s the next line after the headline of this post as it sits in Mike Doughty’s sublime anti-war tune Fort Hood. Embedded above is the newly released video for that sweet, sorrowful, hopeful song. It’s up on Youtube and it should be shared. But why sit here and read my words on it when the author of the tune sums it up so well:

Actually, by posting it here, and making it available on YouTube, and embeddable, we’re bumming the record company out. They liked it when we showed it to them, and wanted to coordinate a whole marketing and radio campaign about it. We were going to wait, and let them do their thing, but I watched the primary last night, and hearing Obama and Hillary snark at each other while this terrible nightmare is still going on, I realized I didn’t want to wait.

No time for a shouting match indeed.

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An interesting video by my friends William Mallory and Jessica Licciardello made it’s way into my inbox today. It’s the video for the song “Shoes” (a catchy romp if there ever was one) off of William’s latest album I was Never Here. If you like white rabbit LSD freakout visuals with a good pop music soundtrack, then this is your kind of video. I’d love to hear the backstory on this. Will - if you’re out there you might want to comment and fill us in - that is Fairy Tale Forest, right? New Jersey can feel that way sometimes.

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Yochai Benkler, for those who may not know him, is a Harvard law professor and author of the absolutely eye opening book The Wealth of Networks (you can read that book the same way I did - for free online - by going here). This video is from the July 2005 TED Conference and it still resonates today. Benkler has been touted as “the leading intellectual of the information age” by Lawrence Lessig (a contender for that title himself) and you could do a lot worse for your mind than spending seventeen minutes listening to him speak.

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Creative people really jazz me. Joseph Arthur is a creative kat… a musician (a good musician who writes and sings weird, interesting, sublime, demented, twenty-first century psychedelic folk songs) and a painter (a pretty good painter who paints colorful, dissected, distracted, emotional, stringy, twenty-first century pop art) and now a man with a museum (of sorts). MOMAR is a space - a temporary space - in DUMBO Brooklyn that (according to the about page at http://www.museumofmodernarthur.com) can, and will, party. There are some other high minded bullet points on that page that attempt to ground the concept more firmly in artspeak, but really the place seems to be a celebration. It’s that sense of art as a conversation, a chat, a party that has pushed me into posting this (well, that and the fact that Joseph Arthur’s music is hauntingly good). So if you find yourself in DUMBO stop by and talk with some art.

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