Author’s note: A quote or a few sen­tences about a piece make up many of my posts here. This time I’m try­ing some­thing new. Consider it an exper­i­ment in turn­ing my blog into a type of dig­i­tal mar­gin­a­lia. I’d love to hear what you think about it.

A rainy Sunday in Portland seemed like a good time to sit down and read Craig Mod’s essay Post-Artifact Books and Publishing. In a word it’s bril­liance. Craig nails it. It’s such a thought-provoking piece that I wanted to make some notes. All quotes come from the essay unless oth­er­wise noted.¹

Natively dig­i­tal

Take a set of ency­clo­pe­dias and ask, “How do I make this dig­i­tal?” You get a Microsoft Encarta CD. Take the phi­los­o­phy of encyclopedia-making and ask, “How does dig­i­tal change our engage­ment with this?” You get Wikipedia.

Great obser­va­tion. Like much of the essay the dri­ving point is that dig­i­tal becomes pow­er­ful when it is not shoe­horned into ana­log con­cep­tions of arti­facts. A book is a book (or a news­pa­per a news­pa­per) because that was what the tech­nol­ogy used to best allow for. With new tech­nol­ogy we will rede­fine our arti­facts of information.

This quote also made me think of what we call “online learn­ing” today. For the most part I think we’ve taken our idea of instruc­tion in col­lege and high school and placed that into online tools. What we’re miss­ing is the form of instruc­tion that stems from ask­ing, “How does dig­i­tal change what we can do with infor­ma­tion, instruc­tion, and learning?”

Publishing for all

We can­not know how much mag­nif­i­cent cul­ture went unpub­lished by the white men in tweed jack­ets who ran pub­lish­ing for the past cen­tury but just because they did pub­lish some great books doesn’t mean they didn’t ignore a great many more … So we’re restor­ing the, we think, the nat­ural bal­ance of things the ecosys­tem of writ­ing and reading.

That bit’s from Richard Nash of Red Lemonade. The more voices we have the better.

Reminds me of some­thing Fred Wilson has writ­ten about mul­ti­ple times: every­one deserves a print­ing press. He writes that:

If I look back at my core invest­ment the­sis over the past five years, it is this sin­gle idea, that every­one has a voice on the Internet, that is cen­tral to it.

The more pieces of infor­ma­tion we can have pub­licly avail­able in the world the better.

Shared expe­ri­ence

But — and here’s the real magic — it’s a shared telepa­thy. A telepa­thy from one to many, and in that, the many have expe­ri­en­tial over­lap. Printed mat­ter binds this expe­ri­ence to pulp. With dig­i­tal, there is the promise of net­work­ing that shared experience.

That’s a really cool point. It brings to mind the video IDEO pro­duced on the future of the book. When a text can con­nect us to oth­ers in a shared expe­ri­ence that leads to really pow­er­ful possibilities.

This is sim­i­lar to some­thing Whitman tried to do with it’s Freshman year CORE class. The goal was to cre­ate a shared back­ground of foun­da­tion texts that could serve as a com­mon frame of ref­er­ence for the 4 year expe­ri­ence. A prob­lem in that, and in other expe­ri­en­tial over­laps that are depen­dent upon printed texts, is that it requires a com­mon place and time. Digital blows that wide open. Our net­work­ing allows us to share that telepa­thy in real-time or asyn­chro­nously from wher­ever we are.

1. A note on this: writ­ing up notes on some­thing as com­plex as this essay has made me once again wish that empha­sis was by default on the web. Since it’s not com­mand + F is your friend to find these quotes.