Billy’s Days Are Numbered, or The Return of Tapestries

Underemployed in the new economy: Billy, his brother Billy, and his other brother Billy

If you haven’t already heard, 2009 is the year of the e-book. Or so it’s been said. Anyway, it seems it’s the thing to talk about in the world of books these days. It seems the older the news outlet, the more arguments there are against the technology, which suggests to me that the people with the best means to make themselves heard are the most worried. But I don’t want to use this space to argue about whether or not we’ll all be reading ebooks by the end of the Obama’s first administration (many of us will be).

When wifey and I moved into our new digs in November we hired professional movers for the first time. We could afford it, my brother who’d moved just a few months prior recommended them, and we couldn’t see ourselves repeating, let alone expanding on, the epic migration that was our last move.

You see, we are book people. We have many of them, they are heavy (one of the moving guys said we’d better re-read all of them), we’re always adding to their numbers, and they travel with an entourage of furniture.

It was over a month before we’d put up all the shelving (from Ikea, of course) and unpacked all the books. Then came the question of order. I’d always held to a pretty durable Fiction/Non-Fiction split with subdivisions (narrative non-fiction, argument/philosophy, British fiction, American fiction, poetry, drama, etc.) but this time I just couldn’t be bothered.

Like I say, this wasn’t the first time we moved our books. But by god, I’d be happy if it were the last. And there’s a feeling in the air that it might be.

Since music became available as a completely digital product it’s become ever easier to imagine the end of CDs. Just this weekend I nudged the medium a bit closer to obsolescence when I finished ripping all of my CDs into iTunes. I rated every album, checked on all the artwork and metadata. Like everyone else on the streetcar these days, my entire collection of music now resides in my iPod.

So why are there colourful Ikea shelves full of 300+ CDs next to me?

I don’t really know anymore.

decorative plate in hanger

From the moment I ripped the first disc, the shelving I’ve had for years, which though inexpensive was not cheap, changed in function — twice.

My shelves used to be attractively laminated particle-board structures that kept my music on-hand and organized in the main living space, sort of like how our glass-fronted kitchen cabinets hold the dinnerware. But when I started ripping my CDs, each shelf became a factory bin holding units awaiting processing. Now that I’m done, they’re now the media equivalent of plate hangers: useful only for displaying artifacts of personal taste.

I don’t mean to get all Fredric Jameson just now, but it seems to me that Ikea’s minimalist aesthetic nears its logical, self-defeating conclusion with the spread of wholly digital media.

Which brings me to the collossal collection of books that presently surrounds me.

I’ve been enjoying hearing my music on shuffle, queueing up songs I enjoy from albums I haven’t felt the urge to listen to in years. But in this respect books aren’t like music at all: it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll re-read any particular book of mine, even if there were a mechanism to cause it to fall open in front of me. Conceding this, I couldn’t object to wifey organizing the books by colour. Never mind that I can still find everything; the point is that we’re done with meaningful order here. I’ve seen how it’s going to be and I’m resigned to regarding shelving as a means for keeping stuff off the floor. I even let her hang a painting on the shelving — entirely blocking access to several volumes — fulfilling a design dream she’d had since she saw it done in a movie (she, unlike me, is far more realistic about the need for free access to every single book at all times — and anyway, I can still find everything).

What if you needed a bird-obstructed book?!?!

Our books haven’t quite become vestigial organs of home decor, but our array of shelving has certainly arrived at a point where any more would feel as gratuitous as a sixth finger.

Ask me what my rooms look like and I’ll say “books”, but really, they look like shelves. Lots of shelves carrying books. The sheer excess of room after room of books has always appealed to me, but as the necessity of books’ physical manifestation fades I fear we’re going to start looking like collectors of rare vinyl recordings that have seen less daylight than the pronouncing index of the Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology.

I’ve bought my last CD and though the switch to e-books remains a ways off, certainly my first e-book purchase is imminent, though who’ll get my money remains to be seen. I can see boxing up the CDs and tucking them into a corner of the basement before year’s end: between Last.fm and whatever else is on the horizon I can’t rightly say that I’m worried about losing the social aspect of music collecting. Will LibraryThing do the same for books?

There’s just no reason to keep CDs around as digital music gets easier to access. But a beautiful book is a nice thing to have at hand. Then again,what’s your relationship to books if the only ones you have around are the ones you like to look at? What’s the distance between that and Ikea’s dressing their showroom shelves with Swedish remainders? If e-books are cheaper and more convenient to collect, would it really be so bad to collect printed books only for their aesthetic appeal? What’s wrong with bibliophiles expressing their love as pure physical attraction? I think on some level my spouse has anticipated this sea-change with her bold, strictly aesthetic arrangement of our not terribly comely books, and for that I’m very grateful.

And I’m glad that for now when we throw a party our friends will still have the option of wandering through the apartment scrutinizing spines, though the day isn’t far off when we make new friends who’ll have to actually ask what we majored in instead of looking for a copy of Survival or Practical Ethics while we look for the corkscrew. In the meantime I guess I’ll be pricing tapestries.

Metadata and its Discontents

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 inspirational videos (enjoying with a feeling of smug superiority the utopian Austrian downtempo 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:

Tags really do promise an animals belonging to the emperor kinda world.

Tagging Experience

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?

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.