File under “weird congruences”: the market for English professors collapsed with the investment banks. Two secondary markets staffed by Ivy League liberal arts high-achievers whose accomplishments looked great on paper but didn’t necessarily really know how to make anything. (NB: I don’t necessarily believe this, but let’s entertain it as an idea.)

Here’s Caleb Crain:

Every historical period has its predominant economic metaphors, and they seep into its culture. Not long ago, I had coffee with an undergraduate who reported that he had just read Derrida and Lacan on Poe and was excited by the idea that criticism might be the new literature. Twenty years ago, when I read Derrida and Lacan on Poe, my professors teased me the same exciting possibility. It occurs to me now that the idea is about as old as, and has certain structural parallels to, the notion that finance is the new manufacturing. Like criticism over literature, finance traditionally supervised manufacturing yet was thought to be parasitic upon it and less “creative” than it. And then at some moment, often specified on Michael Lewis’s authority as the 1980s, finance began to have the reputation of requiring more intellectual acumen than manufacturing and to attract the brighter and more modish talents. Similarly (though hard numbers are very hard to come by), academic criticism started to pay better than the creation of literature—certainly it offered more stability and social prestige. For a young American to ignore the economic signaling and go into manufacturing or literature rather than finance or criticism, he would have to be either idealist or dunderheaded.

And here’s Ezra Klein, interviewing a friend from Harvard:

What did you study at Harvard?

I focused on history and government and political philosophy.

And why did Goldman Sachs think that would be good training for investment banking?

Why Goldman thought I’d be good for investment banking is a very fair question. There are a lot of Harvard people at Goldman and they’ve put a lot of effort into recruiting from the school. They really try to attract liberal arts backgrounds. They say this stuff isn’t so complicated, that you’ll pick it up as you go along, that it’s all about teamwork, that they have training programs. That being said, it would be very hard to get a full-time job there without a previous summer internship.

How did you end up going to Goldman, though? Presumably, as a social sciences major, you hadn’t meant to head into the financial sector.

Investment banking was never something I thought I wanted to do. But the recruiting culture at Harvard is extremely powerful. In the midst of anxiety and trying to find a job at the end of college, the recruiters are really in your face, and they make it very easy. One thing is the internship program. It’s your junior year, it’s January or February, and you interview for internships. If all goes well, it’s sort of a summer-long interview. And if that goes well, you have an offer by September of your senior year, and that’s very appealing. It makes your senior year more relaxed, you can focus on your thesis, you can drink more. You just don’t have to worry about getting a job.

And separate from that, I think it’s about squelching anxiety in general. It checks the job box. And it’s a low-risk opportunity. It’s a two-year program with a great salary and the promise to get these skills that should be able to transfer to a variety of other areas. The idea is that once you pass the test at Goldman, you can do anything. You learn Excel, you learn valuation, you learn how to survive intense hours and a high-pressure environment. So it seems like a good way to launch your career. That’s very appealing for those of us at Harvard who were not in pre-professional majors.

It all torques the whole what-are-you-going-to-do-with-your-degree question in a new, more sinister direction. Let’s say you’re an Ivy League English major. Ten-to-twenty years ago, you would have gone to work in academia, publishing, or I-banking. (Maybe, maybe, the nonprofit sector — as Klein’s interviewee points out, Teach for America recruiters play on Ivy Leaguers’ anxieties in much the same way the Goldman recruiters did.)

Crain adds a weird allegory about islanders trading shells, which is too complex to summarize here, but comes off weirdly like a story about student-loan debt. Or maybe that’s just me.

Here’s more material on rethinking reading and attention.

James Bridle looks at Allen Lane’s 20th-century innovations with Penguin paperbacks and intuits a new axiom:

The book — by which I mean long-form text, in any format — is not a physical thing, but a temporal one.

Its primary definition, its signal quality, is the time we take to read it, and the time before it and the time after it that are also intrinsic parts of the experience: the reading of reviews and the discussions with our friends, the paths that lead us to it and away from it (to other books) and around it.

Publishers know very little about the habits and practices of their readers, and they impinge on this time very little, leaving much of the work to the retailers and distributors.

Amazon and Apple understand experience design, and they know more about our customers than we do; readers’ experience with our product is mediated and controlled by forces beyond ours.

Okay — this is a place to start. But there’s one problematic conclusion that Bridle pretty quickly draws from this. I wouldn’t toss it out, but I’d want to heavily qualify it. It’s the transformation from time as a condition of experience to something that determines value.

For example: Bridle says that readers don’t value what publishers do because all of the time involved in editing, formatting, marketing, etc., is invisible to the reader when they encounter the final product. Maybe. But making that time/labor visible CAN’T just mean brusquely insisting that publishers really are important and that they really do do valuable work. It needs to mean something like finding new ways for readers to engage with that work, and making that time meaningful as THEIR time.

In short, it means that writers and producers of reading material probably ought to consider taking themselves a little less seriously and readers and reading a little more seriously. Let’s actually BUILD that body of knowledge about readers and their practices — let’s even start by looking at TIME as a key determinant, especially as we move from print to digital reading — and try to offer a better, more tailored yet more variable range of experiences accordingly.

In that spirit, Alain Pierrot starts by thinking about this problem of how much of our time we give different texts, and offers a concrete idea for gathering and incorporating that data. (He’s building off an Information Architects post about an iPad project that incorporates Average Reading Time, or ART, into its interface! Brilliant!)

Can I read the next chapter of this essay, study or novel before I’m called to board the plane, before my train comes to the station, or should I pick a shorter magazine article or a short story from Ether Books, etc.?

On a more professional field, can I spare the time to read the full version of the report, or should I restrain to the executive summary, plus the most relevant divisions of the report before the meeting?

Or in academic situations, what amount of reading time should I plan to spend on the textbook, on the recommended readings and extra relevant titles before I sit term/final examinations?…

Wouldn’t it be a good idea to leverage all the occasions where digital texts are chunked in relevant spans to store their ART into metadata, made available to apps that would sort timewise what I’m proposed to read? Social media and relevant storage solutions might host measured ARTs at convenience.

XML structured editing affords many solutions for identifying the relevant sections of texts, and storing their length, timewise. I would love to see the feature embedded into a next version of ePub, or at least recommended as best practice.

Would that make sense for Google Books, Amazon, iBooks, publishers, librarians?

And this definitely dovetails with Amazon offering readers its most-highlighted passages. What do people pay attention to? And how long do they pay attention to it?

Reading Bridle — which is very smart, but seems to fall back on an assumption that publishers already know everything they need to know, they just aren’t doing what they need to do — and then reading the IA post — which is quite deliberately playing around with a bunch of different ideas, treating the digital text as a wide-open idea — even though they’re both about trying to pull off this very difficult move from space to time — illustrates how much is changing right now.

If I had to guess, I’d say, bet on the software guys to figure this out first. Even if publishers and booksellers have a better brick-and-mortar position, software is just plain faster. From space, to time.

I’m at the 11th annual International Symposium on Online Journalism this weekend, a series of panels led by luminaries in the online journalism industry and the academic world. Since y’all haven’t seen me ’round these parts since the last time I was in Austin, I figured I’d sheepishly show my face and resume the liveblogging. Apologies for whatever journo-wonkiness seeps in here. I look forward to your participation!

Jason Kottke praises one, where you think you might not find it:

Pampers Swaddlers Size N ($14). One of the biggest surprises about having kids was how well-engineered some of this stuff is. The size N diapers from Pampers are a marvel, one of the best-engineered “gadgets” I’ve ever run across…they rival the unibody MacBook Pro in this regard. The Swaddlers are thin, comfortable, fit snugly around the legs, oh-so-soft, and can hold what seems like 18 gallons of liquid.

I’m telling you — the evolution of underwear. I’m telling you.

See, we’ve got this problem.

We’ve got a bunch of conventions about the ways we read and write which don’t have as much to do with how we read and write as we thought they did.

We’ve got books and newspapers and magazines, and articles and stories, and bookstores and newsstands, and yes, blogs and databases and wikis and lifestreams, and they all start with the mechanisms of delivery rather than the mechanisms of attention.

Or at least anything like the fundamental mechanisms of attention.

If there are any. Because maybe there are and maybe there aren’t.

At any rate, it seems to be the case that these conventions are dependent upon context, so that they don’t necessarily translate if they get taken out of that context. Change the format or screen size, change how we encounter them in space, change our routines of how we pay (and get paid) for them or how we incorporate them into our day, and the whole game could change.

New media, new expectations.

Now, those expectations don’t come out of nowhere. They’re… a mix of different things, old and new.

(So if we’re reading a newspaper on a computer, a big part of our expectations will be our expectations of how we read and have read newspapers, and a big part will be our expectations of all the other things we do and have done on that computer. And those things vary by context, by generations, by culture, by idiosyncratic stuff that we can’t really account for.)

So maybe it isn’t fair to call them new expectations at all. They’re not brand-new. There’s still an inertial weight to them.

They’re remixed. Recycled. Restructured.

Here’s an analogy that comes up often. It’s said that iTunes helped shift the basic unit of commerce of music away from the single album (especially the compact disc) and towards the single track.

But, of course, the music single doesn’t come out of nowhere. CDs were always divided into tracks. So were cassettes and LPs (even though they didn’t really have any reason to be). Radio always played single tracks. So did music videos. And record companies still sold singles — not as many as in the 50s or 60s, but they did sell them and fans did collect them.

And when people started listening to music on their computers, making mix CDs and swapping tracks online, putting their virtual jukebox on shuffle, the single track was the unit of attention. This was a long time before people decided to try to sell them.

So it’s a restructuring of expectations rather than a wholesale reinvention of them.

Do reading and writing have similar inertial moments? Are there latent conventions, or combinations of conventions, borrowed either from reading and writing’s past, or how we’ve come to use these machines, or some combination of the two, that will emerge?

I think that’s what we have to try to figure out.

Ezra Klein tries to figure out why The Economist and NPR are doing so well while so many other traditional news organizations are doing so poorly:

The first is that they both situate themselves firmly between news and opinion, in that netherworld I think of as analysis. This is a hobbyhorse for me, but my grand theory of the media right now is that the rise of online media made newsgathering an extremely crowded and quick marketplace. That’s left a lot of publications that either aren’t used to the competition (think newspapers) or aren’t suited to the pace (think newsweeklies) a bit confused about their identity.

Some of them have responded by embracing opinion. That’s also a bad move. The opinion marketplace is, if anything, more crowded than the news marketplace, and it’s hard to really break through in it unless you’re willing to travel pretty far along the partisan continuum. But because news stories move so much faster and opinion is so much louder, there’s actually more demand for media that explains what those fast-moving stories are actually about. This is a need that is going largely unmet. Both the Economist and NPR are imperfect products, but that’s fundamentally what they’re doing. It’s not quite newsgathering, and it’s not straight opinion, though there’s occasionally opinion in there. It’s analysis. It’s how to understand the stuff that other people are reporting and opining.

Meanwhile, both brands have morphed into statements. For better or worse, carrying the Economist is sort of like wearing a shirt that says “I’m smart and worldly and interested in knowing things about Ghana.” But unlike a shirt saying all that, it actually works to convey that impression. An NPR bag, for its part, is a signal of a particular brand of non-confrontational, college-educated, sightly-crunchy liberalism. Is that a stereotype? Sure. But it’s working for the station’s merchandise department.

This makes me think about the early history of newspapers — how big metropolitan dailies (and radio/television) eventually displaced extras and evening editions, minority and ethnic papers, more sharply political papers, and other variations that were more suited to either a faster pace of news reporting or a closer tie to readers’ identities. What emerged, especially at the national level, was something that was both denser (in terms of information) and looser (in terms of identity).

There’s a semi-viral video that’s been kicking around for a couple of weeks titled “The Future of Publishing.” The schtick is that the same column of text, about preferences of younger readers gets read two ways — descend and you get a sharply pessimistic, anti-book message, but if you roll the text back and read it on the ascent (get it?), it turns out that the kids love traditional books after all.

It’s the sort of thing I’d usually link to here, but I was embarassed for two reasons:

1. It’s the sort of thing most of you (being who you are) had probably already seen elsewhere;
2. I thought it was pretty silly. The contrast between the two POVs (let’s call them the young devil and the young angel) is so overbearing, it’s like a fight between two straw robots. Not every young person wishes books would die, and some young people still like books. Okay — and… It’s trivially true, without being truthful.

I’m finally linking to it, because Bob Stein has helped me name what it is: “a dream piece constructed to reassure middle-aged intellectuals that the seismic shifts which are upending life as we know it are not really happening.” PaidContent.org calls it “The viral video the publishing industry wants to believe.” It’s a feel-good fantasy cooked up for a sales conference, and you can’t even say that “the truth of the future of book reading is somewhere in between,” because there’s almost nothing that resembes the future of reading in the first take, and nothing that resembles the future of books in the second.

They’re two different versions of the bookservative fantasy: a dystopia and utopia that need each other to know what the other one looks like. And say what you will about the dystopian point-of-view (and I could and have said a lot), at least it is a version of the future. The utopia winds up being no future at all. It’s just a nowhere.

Cross-posted at Bookfuturism.