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They are all on the same page, so to speak.
This reproductive culture has, in the last century or so, produced the greatest flowering of human achievement the world has ever seen, a magnificent golden age of creative works.
billions of ordinary people were able to come in regular contact with a great work. In Beethoven’s day, few people ever heard one of his symphonies more than once.
Day-Glo megapixel screens plastered on every surface.
sound bites, quick cuts, and half-baked ideas.
This liquidity is terribly unnerving to any civilization based on text logic. In this new world, fast-moving code—as in updated versions of computer code—is more important than law, which is fixed.
If you want to change how people act online, on the screen, you simply alter the algorithms that govern the place, which in effect polices the collective behavior or nudges people in preferred directions.
People of the Book favor solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favor technology as a solution to all problems.
The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980.
more. If we count the creation of all words on all screens, you are writing far more per week than your grandmother, no matter where you live.
This new platform is very visual and it gradually merges words with moving images.
People of the Book reasonably fear that books—and therefore classical reading and writing—will soon die as a cultural norm. If that happens, who will adhere to the linear rationality encouraged by book reading?
is a conceptual state of imagination that one might call “literature space.”
when you read you are transported, focused, immersed.
without some kind of containment, these loosely joined pieces spin away, nudging a reader’s attention outward, wandering from the central narrative or argument.
expanding the territory of where we can read.
old-timey thrill of your eye roaming across multiple columns and many juxtapositions.
A book is less an artifact and more a stream that flows into your view.
A book is more “booking” than paper or text.
continuous flow of thinking, writing, researching, editing, rewriting, sharing, socializing, cognifying, unbundling, marketing, more sharing, and screening—a flow that generates a book along the way.
newfound freedom in the Kindles and Fires.
with my permission, my highlights can be shared with other readers, and I can read the highlights of a particular friend, scholar, or critic.
larger audience access to the precious marginalia of another author’s close reading of a book
not just the titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them.
link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we’ve read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie.
We might subscribe to the marginalia feed from so...
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notes, questions,...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event.
In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected.
each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the
culture than ever before. In the new world of ebooks and etexts,
But when we can link deeply into documents at the resolution of a sentence, and have those links go two ways, we’ll have networked books.
as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books.
From the days of Sumerian clay tablets until now, humans have “published” at least 310 million books, 1.4 billion articles and essays, 180 million songs, 3.5 trillion images, 330,000 movies, 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films, and 60 trillion public web pages.
The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years. You are anonymously marking up the web, making it smarter, when you link or tag something.
We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present. Even when the central core of a
but only a story, a good argument, a well-crafted narrative is amazing, never to be forgotten. As Muriel Rukeyser said, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.”
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking.
Screens are instruments of the now.
But last year alone, five quintillion (10 to the power of 18) transistors were embedded into objects other than computers. Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this ubiquitous cognification. We will want to watch them.
A few pioneers have begun lifelogging: recording every single detail, conversation, picture, and activity. A screen both records and displays this database of activities. The result of this constant self-tracking is an impeccable “memory” of their lives and
We are screening at all scales and sizes—from the IMAX to the Apple Watch. In the near future we will never be far from a screen of some sort. Screens will be the first place we’ll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be.
My partner in India is speaking to me. She is screening me in Bangalore. She feels pretty real.
Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever.
Access is so superior to ownership in many ways that it is driving the frontiers of the economy.
In 1950 a beer can was made of tin-coated steel and it weighed 73 grams. In 1972 lighter, thinner, cleverly shaped aluminum reduced the weight to 21 grams. Further ingenious folds and curves introduced yet more reductions in the raw materials such that today the can weighs only 13 grams, or one fifth of its original weight. And the new cans don’t need a beer can opener. More benefits for just 20 percent of the material. That’s called dematerialization.
Since the 1970s, the weight of the average automobile has fallen by 25 percent.
Sometimes our products gain many new benefits without losing mass, but the general trend is toward products that use fewer atoms.
Digital technology accelerates dematerialization by hastening the migration from products to services.
The tangible is replaced by intangibles—intangibles like better design, innovative processes, smart chips, and
