David Rose is building a company based on smart objects.
When you have a physical device that is representing a single piece of data, you get to do away with the user interface. The key word for Ambient Devices is “glance-able.”
Enchanting indeed.
Time for a recap of sorts as we hit our 50th post. We’ve written a great deal about books, but also about other media from film and album cover art right through to the humble business card. With more than six months under the bridge, a number of themes have emerged.
Human relationships in the 20th century were, in delicate and subtle ways, managed in part by the values we grafted onto objects produced and distributed by traditional — industrial — processes. These personal metadata were ‘stowaways’. We didn’t necessarily mean to tell people about ourselves by reading Infinite Jest on the subway — but glances were stolen and judgments were made nonetheless.
These communications were essential to enable some basic interactions. Flirting. Dating. Partying. Business networking. With these incidental transmission channels closing down as we consume content in new ways, we’re going to have to renegotiate, collectively, experimentally, how we communicate. Cultural objects — business cards, book covers, shared music experiences — no longer function in the same way. What does it mean for our relationships? Will we, now, be bowling together — or bowling aloner?
And so we’ve been thinking and writing about the conversations we are now beginning to have — about how to converse.
Along the way, we’ve written about everything from the perils and pleasures of filter failure, the transformative effects of audiobooks, and how Twitter dissolves cognitive dissonance. Along with much, much more.
We’ve also made at least two Lebowski references. This seems shockingly low. We promise to redress over the next 50 posts. Thanks for sticking with us.
As Mark hinted the other day, AcrossAir’s augmented reality iPhone apps suggest what some aspects of the networked book concept might resemble.
Indeed, it’s surprising that there aren’t already iPhone apps that replicate such fine book/city tours as already exist.
Knoxville's bridges, from Wes Morgan's Searching for Suttree
These seem like fertile ground for an app developer, particularly given the possibility of add-ons available via OS 3′s in-app billing.
On the subject of subway-based iPhone apps, there’s Exit Strategy NYC (via Kottke). Does anyone have plans to take the TTC Subway Rider Efficiency Guide in a similar direction?
I’ve been thinking about Clay Shirky’s argument that ‘filter failure’ is a better model to explain what we are currently experiencing as a culture than the rather tired meme of ‘information overload’. It’s no accident that we Datachondrians chose that as the tagline that currently adorns this blog: Datachondria is about how various aspects of our lives — creative, leisure, work — intersect with the range of information that’s available to us, and the interfaces through which they do so.
For those of you who haven’t yet seen Clay Shirky’s presentation from last September’s Web 2.0 Expo, here it is:
Whose Filters?
A subtext of Shirky’s thought is that the burden of responsibility for filtering has shifted to the consumer, where in the past it lay with the producers and distributors (publishers, networks, studios, retailers) that selected which information was available to us.
This is a pretty fundamental shift. Think of the generations of TV consumers from the 50s through the 90s, passively consuming the schedules laid out for them by the networks. The YouTube viewer of today, by contrast, surfaces content for themselves and exercises selective attention on their own terms. It’s going to take a while for our systems — and our collective mindset — to catch up to change in approach. What’s more, we’re currently in a transitional phase wherein one generation is used to passive consumption; another is used to viral or voluntary distribution of content. The former associates content distributed by the viral means as amateurish and unofficial. The latter expects a certain samizat credibility with their content, and associates the waterhose model of content distribution as fundamentally suspicious, boring, bullying, stultifying, and uncool. Anyone who has tried to explain to their parents the appeal of a YouTube hit, or why Lost or 24 can seem so astoundingly dull, can probably sympathize with this.
Bridging the Gap
However, at this historical moment, content creators have to bridge this divide, which often means distributing and marketing in quite distinct channels. There is still a generation of music-buyers who buy CDs; bands who have found success in that market segment have to advertise and distribute in the traditional ways that best appeal to those consumers. And they have to do so even as the economies of scale that made that medium profitable are collapsing, and new listeners simply do not conceive of music as being available in high-street stores.
The kind of multi-faceted approach that this requires from content producers is obviously very expensive and difficult to achieve — and one for which most companies are seriously under-prepared. Consumers are poorly equipped to tune out content that is being broadcast in such a variety of ways. And there’s nothing to say that this isn’t the permanent condition that goes with rapid technological and cultural development. So while everyone grapples with these changes, things are going to feel broken, messy, misdirected, and confusing.
And it’s going to be a great deal of fun. Here’s why:
1. Filter failure is the engine of development
Walt Whitman would have had a hell of a Twitter feed
This is an idea that Richard Rorty outlines in his fabulous little book Achieving Our Country:
[Walt] Whitman picked up [the theme of diversity] from Mill and cited On Liberty in the first paragraph of his Democratic Vistas. There Whitman says that Mill demands “two main constituents, or sub-strata, for a truly grand nationality — 1st, a large variety of character — and 2d, full play for human nature to expand itself in numberless and even conflicting directions.”
Mill and Humboldt’s “richest diversity” and Whitman’s “full play” are ways of saying that no past human achievement… can give us a template on which to model our future. The future will widen endlessly. Experiments with new forms of individual and social life will interact and reinforce one another. Individual life will become unthinkably diverse and social life unthinkably free. The moral we should draw from the European past…. is not instruction about the authority under which we should live, but suggestions about how to make ourselves wonderfully different from anything that has been.
This romance of endless diversity should not, however, be confused with what nowadays is sometimes called “multiculturalism.” The latter term suggest a morality of live-and-let-live, a politics of side-by-side development in which members of distinct cultures preserve and protect their own culture against the incursions of other cultures. Whitman, like Hegel, had no interest in preservation or protection. He wanted competition and argument between alternative forms of human life — a poetic agon, in which jarring dialectical discords would be resolved in previously unheard harmonies… This new culture will be better because it will contain more variety in unity — it will be a tapestry in which more strands have been woven together. But this tapestry, too, will eventually have to be torn to shreds in order that a larger one may be woven, in order that the past may not obstruct the future.
That “poetic agon” is exactly the kind of filter failure essential so that microcultures — ethnic, sociological, generational — do not remain barricaded behind their own ossified practices and prejudices. So that, instead, innovation can occur, leaving society, culture, and technology better equipped for the present.
2. Filter failure is the counterpoint to heat loss
The overt message of Shirky’s piece is that users (and interface designers) will have to become better at filters in order to to sift and segregate our inputs. reducing the extent to which we feel “overwhelmed” by information. The users who are most successful at this — pruning their Twitter follow lists, refining the feeds that they follow in their RSS readers — can feel good about themselves as they reduce the ‘noise’ to which they are exposed. And feel smugly satisfied as they become more efficient than their peers.
But left unguarded, this rigorous pruning of inputs can lead to entropy and feedback. All information sources have a tendency to decay: people stop updating blogs; institutional culture co-opts investigation; recognition stultifies the urge to innovate. In short, our information sources narrow. We need to be continually exposed to new sources, new voices, in order to even maintain the same volume of information. And the surest way to do that is by accident.
3. Filter failure is the insurance against Siege Marketing
When your filters are too good, you're going to face this
What’s more, content producers — to the extent that they remain discrete from consumers at all — are going to be up against filters erected in order to protect users from unwanted inputs. As these filters improve, there will be constant experimentation to get more and more information to the people who are perceived as being the most receptive market. At worst, producers will become belligerent in their attempts to penetrate these walls, encircling potential customers to capture every possible eyeball. Already, viruses and spam are the digital analogue of the worst practices of siege warfare, poisoning the water supply or hurling diseased biological material over the castle walls.
But there is a more benign model, in which none of this is necessary, because our filters failure with enough regularity to expose new customers to information at a rate that keeps our business models sustainable. It’s a question of balance. Better yet, intelligent businesses and information producers will use permission marketing to achieve wider distribution and more credibility by having consumers themselves disseminate information.
4. Filter failure is good for our institutions
We are already seeing how our traditional industrial institutions are increasingly inadequate to the volume and nature of new, networked data flows. These aren’t just institutions in the obvious sense: corporations being outpaced by open source development, nation state governments undermined by instantaneous distributed opposition. Conceptual institutions — copyright, privacy — are similarly under threat.
This is good for institutions: it requires that they remain supple, remain responsive to the needs of our society as it evolves. Open society requires institutions that serve social and cultural needs. Filter failure can be painful — even lethal — for those at its edges, be they grandmothers prosecuted for music piracy or underground bloggers hiding from failing police states. But filter failure is the only mechanism by which these institutions can be well maintained, preventing them from becoming bulwarks of power and guarantors of the status quo.
5. Filter failure is funny
Finally, there will inevitably be some spectacularly amusing pratfalls as companies attempt to market to one demographic in the terms of another. Microsoft’s hastily pulled ‘puke’ ad is a case in point. And then there are the daily juxtapositions which are so incongruous that they not only provoke laughter but make us think about how different aspects of our lives interact with one another.
In short: consistent, habitual filter failure is going to be a fact of life for a very long time. Filter failure is the new black. Filter failure is good for you.
Back in 2006 Hans Rosling blew the minds of TED participants as he demonstrated the power of the structured data he had collected on developing countries. In 2009 the OECD has debuted a front-end for their datasets — called the OECD FactBook Explorer. Like Rosling’s data the factbook lets you chart fertility, population growth and the like. From the stats it seems we Canadians need to get busy having kids 
Hugh McGuire’s post “The Question Concerning Digital Technology” sets out some of the things that are coming in web technology. Including:
- All data on the web will become structured, and mostly available
- More data sets (eg government-owned) will arrive on the web, and more people will participate in using that data to understand the world, and make decisions, to order nature
That reminded me that the Open Data Commons has finalized an open database license with “Attribution and Share-Alike for data/databases”. It is Creative-Commons-like goodness for data. Spread the word. 
… or, Charles Dickens Wants to Show You London
1. Arguing About Reading
Nathan and I had one of those “we’re not as smart as we think we are” / “thank god we aren’t crazy” moments at BookCamp Toronto last weekend while listening to Peter Brantley talk about the possibilities of “the networked book”.
When your regular conversations about the implications of digital distribution tend to be vociferous discussions about publishing — intellectual property, maintaining cost structures, etc. — it’s easy to find yourself thinking far less about the implications for reading. But the discussion that Peter initiated was an exciting tease about some of those possibilities (before it veered, perhaps inevitably, to the “safe ground” of industry change). And it was reassuring that they are some of the things that we Datachondrians have been kicking around for a little while, in particular about technologies that will enable granular user-generated metadata.
But let’s zoom out for a moment.
2. Getting Content to Audiences
Suppose you could tour London in the company of Charles Dickens or Samual Pepys. See the Yosemite Valley alongside John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt. Read Invisible Man while listening to the jazz that Ralph Ellison heard while writing it.
The 26th President's memoirs...
... will not fit into your North Face Jester backpack
There is a vast amount of content out there that already exists, but is barricaded behind forms — whether physical items like books or intellectual concepts like genres — that prevent it from reaching its natural audiences. Exposure to a larger audience is always a win-win situation: more readers, more reading experiences, and an exponential increase in contacts to even more audiences. That isn’t just more entertainment value or more revenue: there’s an obvious gain to society when more people are exposed to more ideas: those ideas can be put to better use, often in ways not imagined by the original authors. As the exhaustive discussion about long tails and fragmented markets has shown, we’ve already seen tremendous progress in bringing content to previously unrealized audiences. But to some extent the physical forms and intellectual conception of cultural items like “the book” and “the film” remain obstacles. The weekend visitor to Yosemite might love to hear what Theodore Roosevelt had to say about Half Dome, but doesn’t necessary want to read through (still less carry) his diaries alongside essential camping gear. Why not direct them straight to the paragraphs that matter to them?
There is, of course, a lot of institutional resistance to breaking down these units and releasing this content, which would essentially to allow readers to make use of it in whatever ways they can imagine. Some of these forces are legal (copyright); some are economic: what business model would continue to allow the production of value that the publishing industry is currently structured around? Some forces are more purely conceptual: what is the role of the author? Where does the involvement of the author — their original idea, their intent, their control of presentation, their control of interpretation — end? Where, for that matter, does it begin?
But there are tremendous countervailing forces — namely the interpretative processes that readers already employ while consuming content. Readers, listeners, and viewers already associate the content they experience with memories, relationships, and other pieces of content. In the past these have been primarily personal associations. They have been communal only in the narrow set of situations that technology allowed: discussions among friends, within book clubs, and so forth. But they have been there, obscured somewhat by the fact that they left no physical mark upon the transmitter of the content (although many of us treasure a particular edition of a book because of the emotional associations that it carries: who gave it to us; what we were doing while we were reading it). As more than a few participants in the BookCamp conversations pointed out, some of the most meaningful “reading” experiences we have had were due to the conversations that they provoked with colleagues and friends, or the access to memories that they allowed.
All this, now, is possible to a degree and in methods hitherto unimaginable. You can already see it taking place. Set up a Twitter search for the title of your favourite novel and you will see, in realtime, the ways in which it is slotting itself into other people’s lives. In doing so it is enriching those new readers and (since it is happening in ways so different from your own experiences) actually enriching the book itself as an amalgamation — a touchstone — of collective experience. For the first time, books are visible not just for what they contain but for what they release.
And users, given the tools, will enable, organize, and share that universe of possibilities.
3. A World of Associations
So what could that look like?
Suppose that users could geotag passages of text, works of art and design, pieces of music, audio clips, moments of film. This would allow you to engage in tours of cities, landscapes, and parks with a variety of contextually relevant materials (further reading, illustrations, maps; music and artwork inspired by these locations). Art galleries and museums would not only be augmented by those now ubiquitous curated audio materials, but by user-generated recommendations and commentary on what to see, how to look at it, and what music and writing has been inspired by or associated with it. As these user-generated elements age, they become instant historical tours, sitting alongside (for example) the impressions of Samuel Pepys, Thomas de Quincey, and Charles Dickens to enrich your experience of Oxford Street or Charring Cross Road.
There are obvious business applications — the links to real-world and online goods and services, where you could purchase a poster of that William Turner painting, that reproduction of Harry Beck’s first underground map, or a copy of the Dickens novel that you where just listening to an excerpt from.
Then there are the in-your-armchair experiences. Suppose you could write a soundtrack for your favourite novel? Suppose you could read Blood Meridian with in-text prompts to the music it has directly inspired, to the music that people have associated with it? Inline explanatory footnotes and historical information; photographs and contemporary artwork; moments from classic Western movies that illustrate its spirit and landscape?
Imagine purchasing a work of literature with an interwoven ‘annotation’ pack to provide explanatory material — or a ‘translation packs’ for ESL students? A book club pack that could allow groups of users to share tags and embed conversations about specific passages. Imagine a book at which — within the text — the author and readers were staging a real-time discussion on specific passages. Imagine if cookbooks would suggest similarly-tagged recipes or dishes appropriate to a menu, and point to the location of a local specialty store for cooking materials.
In short — imagine everything that can happen to content if it can be broken into distinct pieces which can be rated and evaluated on the basis of their contextual usefulness, rather than only on their relationship to ‘the rest of the book’.
4. Liberating Content
Much of the challenge will of course be about the interface design — a theme underlined, in a variety of contexts, in a number of Saturday’s sessions. What is the physical product design, and the information design, that would enable this reading experience? As Nathan pointed out, we should not assume that this need be a traditional book-based reading: a device should allow ‘media switching’ to let you to continue to enjoy the content regardless of your current physical activity. Should each chapter, point, paragraph, sentence, or word contain ‘hooks’ on which readers could hang associations, discussions, and other aspects of metadata? Should this entire question, as we have argued before, be available for constant redefinition in whatever terms make sense for the “reader”?
These appear to be narrowly technical points, although there is a big conceptual debate behind them. As Peter Brantley suggested, the recent Google book search settlement, by entrenching the concept of “the work” as a unitary entity defined by authorial intent, may reinforce the legal and conceptual walls mentioned above.
But the possibilities here are enormous, and the pressure may become unstoppable to liberate content from the old physical forms we built to allow its distribution. Ultimately, if our legal, economic and conceptual receptacles cannot adapt, then writers and readers may simply opt out of the system. Their cultural works will emerge independent of the copyright/publishing system and immediately sit in an open-source universe alongside Antony and Cleopatra and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, awaiting the arrival of content from a historically narrow period — the period in which copyright held sway and books were closed from the designs of their readers.
LibraryThing has a wonderful “local” functionality which enables users to indicate their favourite bookstores and libraries — the places where books as physical objects can be found, acquired, purchased.
But why not allow users to indicate their favourite public places to read? Favourite cafes, parks, beaches, hotel lobbies, bus shelters. These are the places at which the various social and personal functions of books are best served — whether those be isolation or flirtation, communication or solitude.
What does it mean as we move away from cultural objects as objects — things — and towards cultural objects as nexuses of cultural and social moments?
We’ve written elsewhere about the way in which books are not just containers for their ideas, but also become receptacles of our memories, of the images we hold of ourselves, and of the images that we want to project of ourselves to others. The same, obviously, is true of music, of art, of all cultural pursuits in which we engage — and should be true of the metadata by which we navigate all of this stuff.
That’s all true at a conceptual level, but has implications for how we live with these objects. When you are free from dealing with books primarily as stuff requiring storage space, you can start to organize them according to aesthetics or other whims and fancies.
For all of our “cultural objects”, we should start to think about how our world is (or should be) organized around their cultural purposes — not their physicality.
At last month’s BookNet Canada Technology conference, DailyLit founder Susan Danziger and BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn both touched on the social utility books have for flirting — Tamblyn coining the term “Date Repellent Mode” to describe the current state of eBook devices (skip to 10:02 if you don’t want to watch the entire — wonderful — presentation).
We need to become better at recognizing the social and personal spaces that our cultural objects serve, rather than the physical spaces that were previously the most manifest — and challenging — aspect of their existence. When that takes place, we will have an ecology of business and services around those objects that serves them all the better. And, most probably, better books too. Let’s stop making the best ideas for the physical form they have to inhabit, and concentrate simply on the best ideas. In the best places.
Sharing some love for the extraordinarily attractive Harvard Business Review Classics series, which appears to be devoid of any presence on the web as an independent entity.
This I don’t understand. A series obviously aimed at capturing and retaining a consumer — attractive design, brilliant product aimed at a specific market, consistency in both to encourage that ‘collect them all’ instinct. I will buy them all as they come out.
So why isn’t there an RSS feed or Twitter account to inform me when each new volume comes out?
Contrast the blog maintained by 33 1/3, Continuum’s series of books on classic albums. There are usually five or so posts per month (I know this, obviously, because I can look at the Google Reader stats), featuring news on new additions to the series, alongside events and media surrounding each publication. It’s low volume — but enough to alert me to things in which I have already indicated my interest. What’s more, it’s done with an openness and transparency — for example taking readers step-by-step through the submission process for new titles — that encourages me to think of it less as a marketing tool, but more of a dialogue on a subject (and with a product) with which I’m already engaged.
It’s surprising how few companies are aware of the change in consumer mentality that is taking place with the increase in available data and the appearance of filters to help users better manage their inflow. RSS readers, Twitter, even Facebook — these are content aggregators allowing incredibly supple management of inputs at a granular level. My Twitter account is a highly idiosyncratic mixture of friends, information pertinent to my job, and select entertainment/leisure news. It’s unique to me, and it’s something that I’m continually redesigning to meet my needs. Which means that I’m spending more time with it than I am in the presence of content distribution hubs — magazines, websites, bookstores, TV, the transistor wireless machine — over which I can exercise less control. So if you’ve made it onto my Twitter follow list, you’re there because I want you to be. It’s permission marketing in the purest sense.
Indeed, there is the possibility for the impact of your message to be amplified; as Matthew Forsythe points out, ReTweets are “socially targetted”:
People usually only retweet things they’re interested in or they think their followers might be interested in. So as the tweet travels through the twitterverse (for lack of a better word), the message is finding people who are more and more likely to be interested in its content.
I’m not asking you to beg for my attention. That would get on my nerves. Just send me a little note every now and then when you have something new that I would like. Cost to your business = zero (well, thirty seconds each time you publish a new volume). Increased revenue to your business = more than zero.
Why not help your customers build their identification with your product? This is a recession, isn’t it?
Update: More offenders from the world of publishing. Hesperus Press‘s striking On series: Stendhal On Love; Virginia Woolf On Not Knowing Greek, John Donne On Death… are there more? Who knows? Bloomsbury‘s indescribably elegant The Writer and the City series, so far only catalogued by enthusiasts on LibraryThing.