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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
Obviously, cellular carriers are nervous as all get out because everyone’s iPhone just gained the ability to place calls to just about anywhere over wifi, which means that when those first-gen iPhones’ contracts come up for renewal there’s a real chance many users will find themselves umotivated to keep paying for cellular network access (effectively erasing the difference between their iPhone and an iPod Touch of similar storage capacity).
So what? It’s the usual battle between technology making stuff cheap and easy and institutions that profit when stuff is hard. It’s going to end the way these things always end: the things we used to pay for now will become cheap and easy and people will find other ways to make money.
In the meantime, look what just happened to the cellphone.
What is a cellphone, anyway? The best I could come up with is this:
a cellphone is a device for realtime two-way audio communication over a wireless network that isn’t exactly the internet.
Describing the iPhone as a cellphone with various other applications is analagous to describing a PC as an electronic typewriter that also does other things: call it the iType. If it’s a cliché to say that the iPhone is so much more than a phone that it’s actually a pocket PC, then why is it (and the many devices similar to it) the size and approximate shape of the device it is not (its name notwithstanding)?
It really doesn’t have to be phone-size anymore, nor did it ever really need to be from a functional standpoint. But making it phone-like was a design decision that made it for, rather than ahead of, its time. Like all good design, that decision was an elegant reaction to a restriction: in a world of single-use devices, the universally useful device needs to be clearly for one thingif it’s to make sense.
It’s Swiss Army-multiple-use-collapsible-pocket-tool vs. Swiss Army knife.
But the restriction that made the iPhone a phone is fast on its way to obsolescence. The cellphone is a vestigial piece of technology. In the way that wisdom teeth remind us that we used to have much bigger jaws fit for chewing tough, raw plant matter, the cellphone shows how we used to transmit information wirelessly: vocally in realtime two-way exchanges.
When you’re young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you’re single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.
We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves — to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we’ve undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections — consciously or unconsciously — to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.
What’s true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books — just like prominently reading Gravity’s Rainbow on the subway — is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.
What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?
This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element — the ability to have one’s music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?
Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It’s been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.
Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you’ve got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you’re already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.
Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.
It’s the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us — about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time — and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.
I recently listened to When Markets Collide by Mohamed El-Erian. Great book. I think. At least someone thought so. Anyway, delighted as I was to get it on audio, because there was little chance I’d tackle it in print, I wasn’t surprised to find that there was a PDF file on the last disc containing charts and tables referred to in the text. This I saved to my desktop and opened after pausing the narrator at “see figure 4.1 in the included PDF”.
Now I listened to it on standard compact discs, 8 in all, through wireless headphones. I was restricted to consuming the book strictly as audio through my stereo and required my computer to call up the visual elements. Often as not, this meant dashing from the laundry room or kitchen to my desk, where I’d left the PDF open, but I digress. But suppose I had downloaded the audiobook from the iTunes store and was listening on my iPod, which can easily display images and text. How nice it would be to have my iPod chime like one of those book & tape sets I used to enjoy as a pre-schooler: when we got to “see figure 5.2″ the image would come up on the screen, I’d glance at my iPod as the narration carries on, then go back to listening.
But wait a second. If can look at my iPod for book content while listening to an audiobook, what about listening to an eBook? Not possible, I’m afraid. Ebooks are eBooks and audiobooks are audiobooks and digital though they both might be, never the twain shall meet. Though the second generation of Amazon’s Kindle can apparently read to you, I doubt it’s a very pleasant experience over long durations. At this point, invoking Sklar with the flip of a switch remains just a dream.
When I buy a book, I’d like to think I bought the privilege of reading it in any way I choose. If I buy a book as an electronic file containing text and images, why should I have to buy it all over again if I’d like to use my ears instead of my eyes as my primary organs for consuming it? Ultimately, I don’t want a Kindle with audio capabilities or an eBook app for an iPhone as much as I want a new kind of necessarily electronic book format that takes full advantage of the device through which it’s consumed.
Publishers need to stop seeing eBooks as a substitute for printed pages and start thinking about them as a means for transmitting content — any content.
I want to be able to read with my eyes while seated on the subway, then switch to audio when I have to get off and walk down the street to meet a friend for lunch. If there’s an element I need to see, sound a chime to get my eyes on the screen, then fade out to conserve battery life and keep the narration rolling. Google’s already got the technology to sync the printed page to audio narration and plenty of podcasts feature images that change at different points during playback. So near, yet so far…
HarperStudio has made a gesture in the direction of selling books in multiple media by offering ebooks and audiobooks for a small fee on top of the cost of the printed book. It’s still very early days, but I believe that at the heart of this move is the acknowledgement that publishers aren’t manfucturers: their product isn’t paper and glue. But whether HarperStudio’s model a) works financially and b) pushes anyone to develop an integrated audio/text standard remainds to be seen. Or heard. Or whatever.
Like everyone else, I’ve been tremendously excited about the possibilities of user-generated metadata for some time now. I mean, I’ve been up nights with this stuff.
I’ve watched the inspirationalvideos (enjoying with a feeling of smug superiority the utopian Austriandowntempo music that I was prescient enough to have purchased when it first came out). I’ve enjoyed David Weinberger’s wonderful Everything Is Miscellaneous. And I’ve been thrilled that some social networking sites (I’m looking at you, LibraryThing) have been imaginative in exploring the technology’s implications, even though their innovations — like ‘tag mirror‘ and ‘tag mash‘ — have occasionally been somewhat limited by resources available to a small startup competing against land-grab services like the Amazon-funded Shelfari.
In short, there are a lot of exciting ideas out there. Tagging, semantic markup, microformats, faceted browsing — all technologies that bring the possibilities of digital categorization to the armchair user.
Unfortunately, it’s still incredibly hard to make use of all this potential functionality. That’s because most businesses have done exactly what you’d expect: buried their heads in the sand or gone to market with half-hearted implementations because they want to look like they’re part of the Web 2.0 revolution. Many of these efforts have been failures. Amazon’s attempt to get users to tag its wares failed to ignite, just as you’d expect if you invited users to conduct an inventory count at their local store. These offerings have usually been under the hood of awkward user interfaces that obscure, rather than reveal, the possibilities of the technology.
Tagging in disguise
True, there have been some honest attempts to bring this technology to users — but they have typically relied on conceptual models inherited from previous media. Gmail is a great example. ‘Labels’ allow you to tag your email in as many combinations as you imagine — but most people use them just as they would use a paper-based filing system: no more than one label per email.
Let’s just put that in perspective. We’re still organizing our correspondence in the same one-place-per-item system that would have been available to Babylonian scribes working with clay tablets. In spite of the fact that technologies to allow us more powerful systems are now abundant. We’re doing this out of habit. Which usually means that our interfaces, both graphic and conceptual, are holding us back.
You see the same thing with iTunes playlists. Playlists essentially are tagging, but are restricted behind the wall of each user’s own library. And the mix & match possibilities of tagging, though possible via ’smart playlists’, are basically hidden behind the pretense that users are building something just like a radio playlist or a cassette mixtape.
Metadata is not macrodata
The result of these outdated conceptual models is to put digital classification back in the box. Users believe that metadata is ‘higher’ data: a summary of the item in question. They can put a song in multiple playlists, classify a book with multiple tags. And that’s as far as the revolution goes. But that’s the crudest form of metadata possible — in fact, it’s not much more than a user-generated classification schema.
As a result, users tend to be pretty conservative. Here, for example, is a snapshot from my LibraryThing account:
Really? That’s all I could come up with? Sure — because that’s what most people do with their tags: use them like shelf labels for their personal libraries.
But tags — even at this higher level — promise far more freedom for idiosyncrasy. Tags should allow you to indulge your own personal responses to a book, song, film, or object, rather than slavishly follow the conventions of classification that we’ve inherited. Here, for example, is a first stab at what is admittedly the most taggable book ever written:
There’s one thing that’s even worse about this tags-as-summary model. It doesn’t adequately represent how we interact with the world. We don’t treat songs, books, articles, and films as great flat surfaces onto which one-line summaries can be slapped. We don’t form an emotional attachment to a piece of music because of its unified formal merits, but instead because of the place it has in our lives: what we were doing when we first heard it, who we were with, what it reminded us of.
Often it isn’t an album, or even a song, on its own, that brings these associations. Perhaps it’s just a moment. The mixture of plaintive regret and warm consolation in Aretha Franklin’s voice when she sings the first eight words of “Soul Serenade”. The weird way in which the first 18 seconds of The Stone Roses’ “Fool’s Gold” filter “Shaft” (via Young MC’s “Know How”) and James Brown’s “Funky Drummer”, and yet are still overwhelmingly redolent of the Manchester scene of 1989 and the amazing possibilities of a new moment in English popular music.
We enjoy passages in a book — phrases, paragraphs, lines of dialogue. We thrill at scenes in a movie. We want to highlight parts of an article to show to friends.
So we need the technologies that will help us share those moments and associations — and to combine them with others in ways that produce exciting and unexpected results. High-level classification actually obscures the richness of our relationships with content, rather than reveals it. And right now that’s where we’re stuck.
Splice & dice classification
What we really need, then is user-generated splice & dice classification. We need the ability to go from this:
Tags for I Wish courtesy of Last.fm
To this:
Splice & Dice Tags for I Wish
Data wants to mate
What are the key principles?
Users define the boundaries at which their metadata is be applied: For a book, I might want to tag the entire book, a chapter, a passage, a paragraph, or a phrase. Or even just a Cormac McCarthy’s use of the word “bedlamites“. For a movie: the entire film, a scene, a snippet of dialogue, a particular tracking shot, the cut between two shots.
Users define the nature of their metadata: My metadata might be textual, audio, video. I might want to impose my own classification system on Suttree to make it easier for me to enjoy the book; I might want to highlight passages that correspond to the title character’s occasional but impressive use of alcohol. Or I might want to associate certain passages with songs from Tom Waits and Buck 65 and clips from Jim Jarmusch films. We’ve reached the point where tags don’t take us far enough. Data doesn’t just want to be free. It wants to mate.
Interfaces must be designed around the functionality, not around conceptual handrails: We may have passed beyond the point at which the conceptual models of former eras — tags, playlists, labels — can handle this stuff. The key concept here should not come from taxonomy but from evolution: radiation. Content must be freed to expand, evolve — and to do so in promiscuous and profuse ways that its creators could not have begun to imagine. The interfaces we design to enable this must make the functionality extremely intuitive. It needs to be hard not to use it.
Bringing hypertext to the masses
We’re pretty excited about this idea, so expect to see a bunch of posts on the possible applications. What kind of devices and interfaces will enable (and interpret) user-defined relationships between units of content? What kinds of opportunities exist with user-defined boundaries around what those units of content actually are? What tools will allow users to weave content together at the interrstices of their own choosing? How can all types of content make use of the ‘atomization’ of their content, freeing the smaller components — moments, passages, phrases — from their contexts, and allowing users to combine them in ways that make sense to them, intellectually or emotionally?
Several companies are already chipping at the edges of this — Flickr’s “notes” feature, for example, is the most high-profile current application — but it remains to be seen whether open standards and copyright can keep pace with the extraordinary implications.
Hip-hop has thrived off this approach to content for decades, but in other genres and media it doesn’t go far beyond quotation, allusion, or homage — and none of it generated by the consumer of information instead of the producer.
Much of the original excitement about hypertext was that it would foreground the connective relationships between areas of knowledge. But the first content-management systems for the internet left the responsibility to maintain these relationships with the individual writer. Writers were expected to include hyperlinks in their texts as they published them. This was a mistake. These relationships should be available for maintenance by the consumers of content — the crowd — not the producer. That is how the promise of hypertext can be realized — providing the ability for users, readers, and consumers to constantly update the relationships between tiny units of content based on what seems relevant to them now, not at the time of production. Based on what they use the content for, not what it was intended for.
That’s how we interact with the world. Data should be no poorer.
