Uncategorized

Fake Steve Jobs explains his non-thinking behind the new Apple tablet:

I started with the big questions. What is a tablet? Who will use it? And for what? If the tablet were a tree, what kind of tree would it be? And what of the word tablet itself? Ta is a Sanskrit root, for “gift.” Blet is Proto-Indo-European meaning “to be perfect while lacking usefulness.” Will you write on a tablet, or just read from it? Or will you just buy it and put it on your desk and look at it a lot and never use it at all? Or will you maybe carry it around and put on the table in restaurants to show the other humanoids in your tribe that you are more advanced and wealthy than they are, and they should fear you because you have powerful magic that they do not understand? You see what I mean? What is the anthropology here? And what about the ergonomics? Can you mount it on a wall? Will it have a shiny surface so that Macolytes can adore themselves as they use it in public? (Yes. It must.) The tablet must look and feel not like something that was made by man — it must feel otherworldly, as if God himself made it and handed it to you.

Can’t wait.

I love stories like these, from poet Robert Creeley:

In the late forties, while living in Littleton, N.H., I had tried to start a magazine with the help of a college friend, Jacob Leed. He was living in Lititz, Pennsylvania, and had an old George Washington handpress. It was on that that we proposed to print the magazine. Then, at an unhappily critical moment, he broke his arm. I came running from New Hampshire

Gabe Askew’s fan-video for “Two Weeks” by Grizzly Bear can conjure only one appropriate adjective: Sublime.

Here’s an interview about it, and here’s the thing itself:

(Towlerrific.)

Read more…

Just for the record, I totally nailed OutKast’s “B.O.B.” as song of the decade a month ago. I wrote:

OutKast’s B.O.B. is the best because it says YES to everything we are and compresses it to pure energy. It’s our Good Vibrations, our Layla.

Robin (who clean-sweeps his tweets) had a nice addition:

Jeez now I’m listening to it again, and like Harold Bloom’s Hamlet, it’s a Total Work. EVERYTHING is in here.

Here’s Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman with a more expansive explanation:

“B.O.B.” is not just the song of the decade– it is the decade. Appropriately, the contemporary hip-hop act most in tune with the Afro-Futurist philosophies of Sun Ra, George Clinton, and Afrika Bambaataa, wound up effectively crafting a fast-forwarded highlight-reel prophecy of what the next 10 years held in store. The title– aka “Bombs Over Baghdad”, a phrase that sounded oddly anachronistic in 2000, sadly ubiquitous two and a half years later– is only the start of it. In “B.O.B”‘s booty-bass blitzkrieg, we hear an obliteration of the boundaries separating hip-hop, metal, and electro, setting the stage for a decade of dance/rock crossovers. We hear a bloodthirsty gospel choir inaugurating a presidential administration of warmongering evangelicals. We hear Andr

Quick-hitting today, but here’s an important axiom from Dan Visel at if:book —

the social use of digital media is more transformative than the move to the digital itself

Visel’s responding to Eric Harvey’s “The Social History of the MP3“:

The first widespread music delivery technology to emanate from outside industry control, mp3s, flowing through peer-to-peer networks and other pathways hidden in plain sight, have performed the radical task of separating music from the music industry for the first time in a century. They have facilitated the rise of an enormous pirate infrastructure; ideologically separate from the established one, but feeding off its products, multiplying and distributing them freely, without following the century-old rules of capitalist exchange. Capitalism hasn’t gone away, of course, but mp3s have severely threatened its habits and rituals within music culture. There is nothing inherent or natural about paying for music, and the circulation of mp3s > through unsanctioned networks reaffirms music as a social process driven by passion, not market logic or copyright. Yet at the same time the Internet largely freed music from its packaged-good status and opened a realm of free-exchange, it also rendered those exciting new rituals very trackable. In the same way that Facebook visually represents “having friends,” the mp3s coursing through file-sharing networks quantify the online social life of music by charting its path.

P.S.: This observation from Harvey’s essay is a great coda to my “How the iPod Changed the Way We Read” —

This might be the most profound social shift of the mp3 era: hoarding and sharing music changed from an activity for eccentrics to the default mode of musical enjoyment for millions.

I fell in love with The Books in 2002, when I heard “Motherless Bastard” from Thought For Food. It begins with an audio sample, a conversation between a father and his daughter, where the dad playfully says, “you have no mother or father.”

“Yeah, I do!”

“No, they left…”

“Daddy…”

And then the hammer falls:

“Don’t touch me, don’t call me that in public.”

That sample was recorded live by The Books’ Nick Zammuto at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Los Angeles. The rest of the track is just an insanely sweet, melancholy, beautiful acoustic instrumental, on cello, banjo, percussion, made just slightly glitchy with some electronic effects. That’s what they do.

In a new interview with Pitchfork, Zammuto and Paul de Jong talk about their process–

NZ: There is a pulse to the material we work with that you can’t find in the mainstream. It’s this unattended documentation of culture. The productions are not made for recording any kind of history, but there’s all this cultural documentation in there anyway.

PDJ: You can’t find it anywhere else. You can’t make it up, you can’t shoot it yourself. If there’s three seconds of beauty in an hour and a half tape, the search is worth it.

— and their new album —

NZ: We’ve been really into hypnotherapy tapes. We’ve been into a lot of spoken-word religious material in the past– just these deeply ego-ed voices. But, with hypnotherapy, the ego disappears– it has this relaxing effect independent of what someone’s saying. We’re interested in that un-self-consciousness. In a bizarre way, it keeps things grounded. There’s always this element of not knowing where you stand that you can hear in almost any voice. It’s a universal quality.

And we have a vast collection of these tiny little musical fragments– like analog synth demos– that are very dated, but we never knew what to do with them. It’s really hard to use them without sounding like genres that everybody’s familiar with. But I think we finally started to crack the code and figured out how to use them in a way that satisfies us. Like, we have this incredible collection of brass sounds, so we kind of have a brass section going.

PDJ: Yeah, it seems to be developing more into the sounds from traditional pop-rock history– like, actual drum sounds. We’re starting to make sense of what to do with something that’s reached a critical mass.

So lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how color turns out to be a surprisingly important part of our experience reading printed books, and I came across this terrific website on the history of color printing, part of a special collections exhibit in the 90s from the University of Delaware’s Morris Library.

I love this stuff:

Lithography was the first fundamentally new printing technology since the invention of relief printing in the fifteenth century…. Early colored lithographs used one or two colors to tint the entire plate and create a watercolor-like tone to the image. This atmospheric effect was primarily used for landscape or topographical illustrations. For more detailed coloration, artists continued to rely on handcoloring over the lithograph. Once tinted lithographs were well established, it was only a small step to extend the range of color by the use of multiple tint blocks printed in succession. Generally, these early chromolithographs were simple prints with flat areas of color, printed side-by-side.

Increasingly ornate designs and dozens of bright, often gaudy, colors characterized chomolithography in the second half of the nineteenth century. Overprinting and the use of silver and gold inks widened the range of color and design. Still a relatively expensive process, chromolithography was used for large-scale folio works and illuminated gift books which often attempted to reproduce the handwork of manuscripts of the Middle Ages. The steam-driven printing press and the wider availability of inexpensive paper stock lowered production costs and made chromolithography more affordable. By the 1880s, the process was widely used for magazines and advertising. At the same time, however, photographic processes were being developed that would replace lithography by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Since I slid this claim in at the end of a long post with a lot of literary theory, you might have missed it:

When the media landscape changes, we actually begin to SEE things differently, even (or ESPECIALLY) things that haven’t changed at all.

This is the reason why the iPod didn’t just change the way we listen to music – and later, look at pictures or movies or play video games. It changed the way we read.

And (because I couldn’t help my ever-qualifying self):

(As did movies, television, video games, and many, many other things.)

(The big one I Ieft out in this list was mobile phones, but since the iPod and the smartphone wound up being convergent/complementary technologies, I think they’re more arguably part of the same story.)

Let me try to spell out point by point how I think the iPod – or more precisely, the evolution of the iPod – changed reading.

1. Design Matters. The iPod elevated the level of aesthetic pleasure people expected from handheld devices, as well as the premium they were willing to pay for well-made things. Looking back at the first-generation Kindle, it’s actually astonishing how much of the early commentary focused on the perceived ugliness of the device. In particular, the first Kindle didn’t just look ugly – it looked out of date. This was something we used to care about with home theater equipment and kitchen appliances – the iPod taught us to care about it on our handhelds, even when we were walking around with cheap plastic phones. If the e-reader breakthrough had happened in 1999 or 2002, even if the device had been similarly awkward-looking relative to the technology around it, I don’t think this would have been as much of a problem as it became.
2. Software Matters. I almost titled this “Design Goes All The Way Down.” It’s a truism now that Apple was able to swoop in on the digital music market because they wrote better software than the Sonys and Samsungs they were competing with on the high end. But it’s true. You’re not just creating a piece of hardware; you’re creating an interface for an experience. And in particular, if you get the experience of buying, sorting, finding, and selecting media wrong, you’ve got real problems. You have to make the software intuitive, powerful, and fun. The goal is to reduce the friction between a user’s intent and their goal – whether it’s buying music, listening to it, or flipping through album art. If there’s friction anywhere in the experience, it had better be deeply pleasurable friction. (That’s right, I said it.)

   The Kindle actually seems to understand this really, really well.

3. This is more specific: People Like Full Color. Was anyone complaining about the monochrome taupe-and-dark-taupe display of the first iPod? No. Was I when I bought my first iPod, in 2004? Not at all. Did I cry inside when they launched the first color-display, video-capable iPod about a month afterwards? Not exactly. I cried on the outside, too. Color is resource-intensive, and hard to get right on a small screen. But god – it’s beautiful. It’s also one of the things that easily gets lost in the transition from print to digital; there’s nothing like a book with full-color prints, and the only thing sadder than an image-heavy book that’s all in black-and-white is a digital version of the same book that doesn’t have images at all.
4. Images Make Reading Easier. I mean, this is one of the big lessons of the graphical interface on the desktop, right? Column after column of text is hard to look at, and it’s hard to distinguish one version from the next. Seriously – sorting through an early iPod, like my third-gen one, is one of the most intense reading experiences you’re likely to have, and I think it (along with text messages) totally softened people up for reading strings of text on small screens. But texts with icons – even generic icons that just look like little pieces of paper next to the text that identifies with them – reinforces the idea that you’re dealing with distinct objects. Add covers – like book or album covers, or preview images of pictures, and you’ve got a hieroglyphic hybrid mode of reading that is frankly more powerful and intuitive than text or images alone. Create a software interface where you can manipulate those objects, and you’ve got something that’s genuinely game-changing.
5. Media Devices Should Do More Than One Thing. It’s great that I can take my music with me, but I’d really like to listen to radio programs, too. (Podcasts.) I carry around all of these pictures in my wallet – maybe you could…? (Done.) What about TV? I like TV. And my kids like to watch movies in the car. (We can do that.)

   Was it obvious that there was a hidden affinity between pictures and music and movies? No. But once you’ve got a screen with a big hard drive, a great syncing tool, and a solid store that can deal with media companies… You follow the logic of what you can meaningfully offer and what your customers can use the device to do.

   The only thing more appealing for multiple media than a tiny screen with a big hard drive is a great big screen with a big hard drive. I can’t believe that future reading devices won’t take advantage of it.

6. Make It Easy For Me To Get My Own Stuff On The Screen. Can you imagine if Apple had ONLY let you put stuff on your iPod that you’d bought or ripped through iTunes? The iPod moment benefited tremendously from the Napster moment, which in turn was driven by the CD-ripping and cheap fast internet moment. You had all of this digital material sitting on people’s hard drives and floating around networks, and we just needed someplace to put it. There’s no stuff we want more than our own stuff. Apple smartly opened itself up to it. Well, likewise, now, we’ve decades of office documents sitting on people’s hard drives and hypertext pages floating around networks, and nowhere but our computers to put it.

   I’ll say it again: There’s No Stuff We Want More Than Our Own Stuff. If Amazon, or Google, or anybody, could find a way for me to get MY print library on a portable screen, I would both love and pay them dearly for the chance to do so.

7. Devices Should Talk To Each Other. My DVD player is an idiot. It has nothing to say to anyone except maybe my TV and some speakers. Now, I just leave it in a drawer. My TV is a little better, because it listens really well, but not by much. From the beginning, the iPod could both talk and listen to your computer. Now, because of its wireless connect, the iPhone can talk to almost anything.

   The Kindle’s networking ability, still limited as it is, stands on the shoulders of those devices. (And your computer, too, does a much better job of talking to small, post-PC devices than it used to, from video game consoles to mobile phones.)

8. This last point is from Gavin Craig, and it includes the iPod, and the Kindle, but also is more general: “It should be possible to make the device useful in ways that the designer may not have intended.” I call this half-jokingly “Media Existentialism.” (Existence precedes essence; we come to terms with our determined place in the universe, and only afterwards do we define who we are and what we’re for.)

   The point is that users, not designers, ultimately determine what an object is for; and any attempt to engineer-through that process in a closed-ended way restricts value rather than creating it.

This is a short list of the expectations we have for reading machines now that we largely didn’t have a decade ago. None of them came from devices that were designed (except largely accidentally) to read anything.

But this list only barely begin to speak to the expectations we’ll have for an electronic reader decades from now.

What might those expectations be? Where will they come from? How might they change everything else?

I love the actor/magician Ricky Jay, not least for his terrific supporting turn in the first season of Deadwood (understated on a show where nobody was understated). I resisted reading an old New Yorker profile of Jay when John Gruber at Daring Fireball linked to it earlier in the week, even after linking to an interview Jay gave Errol Morris about deception and talking up Jay’s history of magicians and irregular stage entertainers Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (JG: “simply one of the best books I

The iPod wasn’t the first digital music player, but that doesn’t really matter; when it was introduced in 2001, it was the first digital music player that made ordinary tech-inclined (but not necessarily tech-savvy) consumers pay attention.

I graduated from college that year, so I remember that time very well. Let’s review; Napster had been shut down. I didn’t own a DVD player. In fact, I didn’t even have my own computer. (I bought both that December.) I didn’t have a cellular phone, but some of my friends did. (In fact, I didn’t get one until 2005.) I had never used wireless internet, ever. I had bought an APS camera two years before, on study abroad. (Digital cameras cost about a kajillion dollars.) Instead of writing a blog, I kept email lists of everyone I knew and periodically quasi-spammed them with prose poems, Nietzsche quotes, outlines for essays on Bulworth (“The key to understanding Bulworth is that it’s not very good”), and news about my life. Oh, and I used telnet for email.

The time hardly seemed propitious to launch a device that would effectively break wide open handheld digital media. But that’s what happened.

It’s worth remembering this, because we’ve now had eight years of the iPod, iTunes, and the Apple Store, during which we’ve had to clear all of these technical and commercial and psychological and social hurdles to get to the devices that most of us carry around (in one version or another) every day.

What does this year’s model of the iPhone (already almost three years removed from the announcement of the first version) have in common with the first iPod? It fits in your pocket; and maybe – maybe – you still put stuff on it from your computer – to update the firmware, if nothing else.

That’s eight years of the iPod. I’m glad I saw it, because 21-year-old me wouldn’t have believed it. All the more so because none of what happened is in retrospect at all ridiculous.

Now let’s imagine twelve years of the Kindle.

Now the Kindle in 2020 might not even be the Kindle anymore. Maybe Sony or Apple or Google or Microsoft or someone we don’t even expect might shoulder Amazon aside and take center stage, or readers will be more like the smartphone market right now, with a handful of solid competitors egging each other on.

But the Kindle now, like the iPod eight years ago, is the first electronic reader that most of us tech-inclined but not tech-savvy users have paid much attention to. It’s already gotten better, it’s already spurred competition, and the chances are good that we’re going to see some significant advances in these devices before the end of the year.

In twelve years, we know electronic readers will do more, store more, work faster, look cooler, and offer more things to look at then it does now.

But what don’t we know about the Kindle 2020 yet?

Robin, Matt, and I – yes, all three of us – have proposed a presentation for South by Southwest Interactive where we — and some other supremely smart people — are going to try to figure out just that.

Here are some basic questions:

• What kind of devices will we use to read?
• What formats will be used to deliver documents?
• What kinds of documents will be “read” – text, image, video, audio, hybrids?
• How will documents be written and produced?
• How will documents be bought, sold, and otherwise supported?
• How will contributors be compensated?
• How will reading work in different industries?

And here, I think, are – for me, at least, some more interesting ones:

• What could turn an electronic reader into a totally NECESSARY device – like a mobile phone, or iPod?
• What features will the reader of 2020 have that nobody’s even talking about yet?
• What are we going to use it to do that nobody uses anything to do now?
• What’s going to be your favorite thing to read on it?
• Forget your favorite thing – what are you going to use it to do over and over again, whether you like it or not?
• How are you going to write with it?
• Who’s going to have one? How are they going to pay for it?
• How do we share what we read?
• What will we still want but not get?
• Here’s the big one: how might it change the entire FIELD of media consumption, handheld devices, computing, reading, etc… Will everything restructure itself around the reader? Or will it be a fun, handy curiosity, plotting its own logic while everything else goes along unchanged?

Beginning today, you can vote to help get this panel accepted to South By Southwest. I am way excited. First, I am a nerd for all things related to the written word. Second, Robin and Matt are the most talented futuronomists I know.

Finally, in addition to being awesome, Austin is (oddly enough) geographically centered for the three of us. If you look at our locations (Philadelphia, Minneapolis, San Francisco), Austin is the country’s fourth column, which (I think) bestows it with Penumbra-like magical powers.

Between books, papers, and screens, I think we might just have this covered. But see, this is where we start to worry about our own blind spots or idiosyncratic enthusiasms, not because we want to lose them, but because we need to put them in context.

So we don’t just need your vote. We need to know what you know. And we’re willing to use the patented Snarkmarket figure-four leg-lock — by which I mean, your comments in the thread below — to get the conversation started.

They say that hindsight is 20/20, but that’s not really true; some people remember the past better than others. The future, however, really is 20/20 (especially in 2020). Right now, we all know just as much about the future of reading as everyone else.

The only difference is that we — you and I — are focused.

What do you see?