Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on
the social and economic effects of Internet technologies speaks about
the future of publishing. Clay is a professor at the renowned
Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books,
most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a
Connected Age.
Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet
culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural
that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he
could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty,
able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a
“ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s
about to speak.
How is publishing changing?
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word
“publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the
incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something
public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button
that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make
things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private.
Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called
publishers because it took special professional skill to make words
and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional
skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a WordPress install.
The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category
has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions
needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need,
desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form
texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup,
where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another
class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them
together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be
bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing
apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the
PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with
newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will
print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a
physical copy.
The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it
was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears
on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical
object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where
data goes to die, as well.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the
solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming
scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all
innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is
coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.
What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?
One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all
that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features
was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in
the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which
they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a
capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the
end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with
hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can
read email.
But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something
quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital
confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it
was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being
bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored
pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like,
“That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the
morning? So are thousands of other people!”
It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was
actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap
between what you might be interested in and your current environment.
But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to
stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the
window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means
that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we
have to choose to do.
The social piece of reading is a kind of penumbra. It’s something that
forms around the text and after the fact. The feature of “highlight
this passage and immediately see how many other people have
highlighted it”? I mean, ZOMG, no. I want my own thoughts rendered as
the most recent entry in the constant, long-running popularity contest
that is the Internet – in real-time. Pick it up and do anything you
like with it. Tell me later who else liked it. Show them to me,
introduce them to me, whatever — not right now. Right now I’m reading.
When people hear “social reading,” they think that it is proximate
sociability on the device in real-time. But let’s not necessarily jam
the social bit into the experience of reading. The explosion of
conversation around those kinds of works is best done after the fact.
The phrase “social reading” often causes people to misunderstand what
it is.
So, what is it?
“Social reading,” the way I’ve always interpreted the phrase, is
reading that recognizes that you’re not just a consumer, you’re a
user. You’re going to do something with this, and that something is
going to involve a group of other people. Read a book. The very next
thing you’re going to do, if it was at all interesting, is talk to
someone about it. Book groups and discussion lists are social reading.
Because so much of our media in the 20th century was delivered in
real-time, with very little subsequent ability to share, save, shift,
store, we separated the consumption from the reproduction and use of
media. We don’t actually think of ourselves as users of media, when in
fact we are.
How are you annotating? When you are annotating, what do you do with
those clips?
Because of the Kindle Fire’s touchscreen, it’s finally easier to
annotate electronic texts than it is to annotate physical texts. Just
grabbing and dragging. And that has changed my pattern around books.
The minute it becomes something where I say, “I want to annotate this,
I want to remember my own reactions to this,” I have now come to rely
on the Kindle more because of this dragability.
You can highlight or you can do something else to add your own words,
and the fact that I don’t know what it’s called should tell you
exactly how much I use it. When you go down to a secondhand bookstore,
you’ll find books with notes in the margins. Someone will underline or
highlight a passage, and then what do they write in the margin?
“Important exclamation point!” There are these stories of books
passing from hand-to-hand with annotations in them. That sense of a
book as a repository for collective conversational wisdom is
wonderful, but I don’t actually see it reflected in annotation
patterns. It’s certainly not reflected in my own annotation patterns.
Really? So then, why annotate?
You annotate because that’s the part you want to keep. There’s the
experiential value and there’s the extractive value from books. The
experiential value of reading Bruno LaTour’s Reassembling the Social
was the character of LaTour’s thought at the particular point in his
career. Having had that, because I don’t teach classes on the
sociology of science, what I now need from that book is the extractive
bit, so if I ever teach that topic, or write about it, I can start
where I left off rather than having to take the book down from the
shelf.
Everything I do is geared toward some form of talking out loud, as a
writer, as a teacher, as a consultant, whatever. I end up doing
something active with maybe one annotation out of 20. But what I love
about Findings is that it takes the logic of Flickr — when you default
to social and give people the opportunity to withdraw, what you’re
really hashing out is, what are you doing with the 80 percent of stuff
people don’t care about one way or the other?
That is one of the potential shifts in social reading: Can I create
value for other people by saying that I found this passage by Bruno
LaTour striking — even if I never look at it again? That’s an amazing
act of what I called “frozen sharing” in my last book. Being generous
about things when you are offering it out to the public, without it
being either in a specific time frame or for a specific target.
What I’m saying is — as I was reading it I was struck by this passage.
And that sentiment is freeze-dried. Maybe no one ever defrosts it.
Maybe it just sits there as an informative piece of meta-data. Maybe
it doesn’t make any difference to anybody. But maybe, the fact that I
picked out that passage causes it to surface in someone else’s search.
Or I could see everybody that picked out that passage. Or I could do a
search where I filter for everyone who cared about that passage and
show me the other passages they agreed about to get the commonality of
the books they read. The point is, by switching to default public, the
aggregate value of that information is so much larger than anybody
believed it would be in the 1990s.
What is the potential for social reading? Where can it go from here?
Well, it can go any place reading is. There’s a quote from Robert
Frost, and I’m not going to get it exactly right, but basically, Men
work together, whether they work alone or together. That sentiment,
that understanding, is slowly penetrating society.
Social reading doesn’t create a new category. People excerpt and
annotate and share and argue and quote and remix. All these things
happen all the time. Social reading introduces the idea of text as a
usable object. The idea that I’d read it and then do something about
it — those actions were always connected, but we pretended they
weren’t because the book didn’t have those features. Social reading
goes any place where a group of people cares about a particular text.
What I’m hearing is that social reading is already happening.
Yes. And the work social reading is doing now is making text visible,
and extending the radius and the half-life of its value.
Lastly — I know that you’re very invested in collective action. How
can social reading connect to activism?
Books are historically lousy calls to action because they tend not
only to be produced slowly but consumed slowly. The role of longform
writing in collective action is much more about synchronization than
coordination. Whenever you read the book and whenever I read the book
can be years apart, but when we both show up to the same place, we
have that shared background.
You could have groups that synchronize around these texts that don’t
necessarily call themselves subcultures. The number of people who’ve
read, say, The Coming Insurrection is tiny. But it used to be
impossible for us to find each other, and now it’s easy. So — if you
go to Occupy, and if I go to Occupy, and we’ve both read David
Graeber… that sensibility suffuses the crowd, and that crowd is better
able to act than it would have been previously. And that synchronizing
effect, not so much of time but of shared awareness, that’s a big part
of the present change, and one that’s going to be amplified in the
future.
Find Clay online at his personal website, his blog, and on Twitter.
(All interviews conducted by Sonia
Saraiya.)http://blog.findings.com/post/20527246081/how-we-will-read-clay-shirky