Bob Stein, founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book, talks about working for Alan Kay, starting the Criterion Collection and Voyager on laserdisc, Hypercard e-books, and interactive CD-ROMs — essentially, the whole prehistory of where we are now with just about all digital media:

The book was always fundamental to me. One of the things I really liked was that the original logo for Criterion, which we designed in 1984, was a book turning into a disc. It was central. When I was writing the paper for Britannica, I felt like I had to relate the idea of interactive media to books, and I was really wrestling with the question “What is a book?” What’s essential about a book? What happens when you move that essence into some other medium? And I just woke up one day and realized that if I thought about a book not in terms of its physical properties—ink on paper—but in terms of the way it’s used, that a book was the one medium where the user was in control of the sequence and the pace at which they accessed the material. I started calling books “user-driven media,” in contrast to movies, television, and radio, which were producer-driven. You were in control of a book, but with these other media you weren’t; you just sat in a chair and they happened to you. I realized that once microprocessors got into the mix, what we considered producer-driven was going to be transformed into something user-driven. And that, of course, is what you have today, whether it’s TiVo or the DVD.

And how did DVDs get commentary tracks? Let Bob tell you:

You have to understand how much of this stuff is accidental. I knew the guy who was the curator of films at the LA County Museum of Art, and I brought him to New York to oversee color correction. He’s telling us all these amazing stories, particularly about King Kong, because it’s his favorite film. Someone said, “Gee, we’ve got this extra sound track on the LaserDisc, why don’t you tell these stories?” He was horrified at the idea, but we promised we’d get him superstoned if he did, and he gave this amazing discussion about the making of King Kong, which we released as the second sound track…

We had people driving to our home, where our offices were, by the second day, and begging for copies. It was Los Angeles, it was the film industry—and finally someone had done something serious with film. Film was suddenly being treated in a published form, like literature. But this still wasn’t mainstream. Citizen Kane was three discs and cost $125. It cost us $40 to manufacture. The most LaserDiscs we ever sold was about twenty thousand copies of Blade Runner.

I don’t usually squee with delight, but: Squeee!

There are many invented scenes, places, characters, and events I love in my friend and colleague’s novella Annabel Scheme, but my favorite invention is probably the fictional MMORPG “World of Jesus.” An online VR game set in Palestine at the time of Christ.

Here’s why I’m writing about it. Read Write Web has a short write-up of virtual ancient worlds, mostly created by libraries, museums, and universities:

When the first immersive 3D games came out, I asked a programmer if he knew of anyone who had used that technology to create a Virtual Ancient Rome or Virtual Ancient Athens. I loved the idea of walking around in a place whose current face was changed out of all recognition from its golden age. He shook his head. Creating virtual worlds was way too time consuming and required too much specialist knowledge and so was too expensive. A virtual Rome wouldn’t create the profit that Doom did.

Fast forward a decade and the programming necessary becomes easier to do and the number of people who know how to do it have increased substantially. The costs involved in creating a virtual world have decreased at the same time that academic and scholarly institutions have become much more willing to invest in it.

There are terrific settings here: Rome, Athens, Tenochtitlan, and Beijing’s Forbidden City. But — and I think this is surprising — no Jerusalem. No World of Jesus.

For those who haven’t read the book, on its face, the game’s name sounds like a clever zinger, like something that would be the punchline to a joke on Futurama or at a relatively hip Bible Camp. But what I think Annabel Scheme does particularly well is pushing past surface details and cute references to dwell within its two worlds, the technological and the spiritual, taking both of them seriously.

I can’t think of any better manifestation of that than “World of Jesus.” The character who plays the game believes in this world and his place in it: his religious faith and his technological faith are one and the same, turning a mechanical ritual into treasures in heaven.

And so we believe in it, because it’s a reflexive, self-allegorizing move too: for the reader, the fictional San Francisco of Scheme and Hu is just as much a virtual world, with its own enticements, traps, rules and ways to break them, as “World of Jesus” is for them. Dreams within dreams, virtualized virtuality.

It helps that Robin brings some of his most evocative and affecting writing in this chapter, too, as his AI narrator Hu becomes “embodied” for the first time in the world of the game:

The first thing I noticed was the light.

My eyes opened in a small, simple house with wooden shutters, and the light was peeking in through the cracks, picking up motes of dust in the air. I’d never seen anything like it. Are there motes in the real world? Scheme’s earrings didn’t show motes.

In World of Jesus, you could choose between looking over your character’s shoulder or through its eyes. I saw myself from behind, then spun around: I’d chosen the girl in silk.

Then I switched to see through my own eyes. All I ever did was look over Scheme’s shoulder. I wanted a new perspective.

The door opened automatically. Outside, the sun beamed in blue-gold through a scrim of tall cedars and fell in wide bars on a dusty, stone-paved street. Everything looked… mildly medieval. I had a feeling that this Jerusalem was not historically accurate.

I lifted my eyes to the sky, and it felt like my heart was going to jump out of my chest. It was probably just my eight processors all seizing up at once; I wasn’t built for this. Grail servers are optimized to process gobs of text, not 3D graphics, so the carefully-crafted World of Jesus was a new exertion.

I didn’t care. That sky. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. White curls and wisps dotted the glowing blue bowl. I couldn’t do anything except stand and stare.

A voice crackled: “Hu, is that you?”

I turned. It was a woman in a simple gray tunic, with red hair just like Scheme’s.

“Yes, it’s me,” I said—and realized that I spoke like everyone else.

This is what literature is: taking a machine (our own literacy) built for processing text and making it render images instead. Characters, actions, an entire world — a virtual gamespace, by way of the alphabet.

Let me tell you something: I think that if a game company were to make it, and do it well, “World of Jesus” would be a smash hit. If you wanted to get your Warcraft on, you could play as a centurion and slash-and-hack Persian armies and crucify dissidents. Or you could be a Jewish rebel fighting to overthrow the Romans. Maybe you’re a female disciple, fighting to retain women’s leadership roles after Christ’s death. Or you’re a regular person: a tax collector, a fisherman, a falafel merchant. An online RPG that doesn’t necessarily have to be about how many people you can kill. (See: “A four-year-old plays Grand Theft Auto.”)

Many faiths, many ages, many games within games. Or if you wanted to play in story mode: what a story!

So, last night, I finally met my illustrious co-blogger Matt Thompson for dinner at a DC restaurant. We didn’t get a picture — I had to limp/run out of the restaurant to catch a late-night train — but 1) Robin wasn’t there and 2) we weren’t wearing our black paisley vests either, so maybe it’s for the best.

Taking Robin’s place as our guest/facilitator/cultural psychoanalyst was longtime friend of the Snark Rachel Leow, whose blog a historian’s craft you should know. Here are some of the things we collectively figured out:

• The Wire is awesome. In particular, it shows several crash-only institutions at work, albeit at their most dysfunctional. Seriously, a drug gang is the crash-only institution writ large, but politics and police don’t fare much better. This also lets David Simon hammer away at how prioritizing short-term over long-term thinking nearly always results in tragedy. (In these dysfunctional institutions, if good things happen to good people, it’s because someone has made a terrible mistake.)
• Brussels sprouts cooked really well are fantastic, if salty. I think these had bacon or some kind of other salted pork product too, so they were really going for it.
• There are plenty of American pathologies that our Malaysian-by-way-of-Cambridge friend drew out of us for discussion, but here’s one I hadn’t thought very much about. American class ideology, where 99% of people see themselves as middle-class, prospering through their own hard work, without any real inherited privilege, has a pessimistic corollary: at any moment, someone could take it all away. Which, if you think about it, makes a perverse kind of sense: if privilege and status are completely elastic, you could just as easily fall down as well as up. 90% of all public political discourse follows from this.
• Yeah, the American academic/scholarship system is pretty screwed up, reinforcing privilege and throwing up self-destructive barriers to entry and access. So much smartness there, though — so much possibility.

In a post yesterday, I offhandedly referred to “giving up TV.” But like giving up Facebook, very few of us have actually given up TV. What’s happened instead is that (like with Facebook), TV has become a problem.

Sure — historically, TV has probably lost whatever monopoly it had on our total cognitive-surplus, staring-at-screen time. It also may have lost a fair degree of its cognitive priority. For instance, when I recently needed to cut some money from my monthly household budget, I dropped my cable TV, switched the internet to DSL, and kept my phone’s data plan — not the decision I would have made three years ago.

But I probably watch more TV than ever now. It’s just coming in the form of DVDs, video games and Netflix streaming on my Wii, and catching up via Hulu, The Daily Show, etc. on my computer. But — wait. See what I just did there? I just ran together everything I do on the big, stationary screen that sits in my living room (called a television) and the short-to-medium form video originally broadcast for that screen, but which I can’t watch there (called television). And both big, stationary screens that we watch from 6-10 feet away and short-to-medium form broadcast video seem to have a pretty firm lock on our psyches and social practice. They’re powerful, versatile, and fun.

One of the things I loved from the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates joint appearance at D5 a few years ago — a really illuminating talk that I periodically return to, that holds up well and has new resonances now — is how they analyze the natural form factors for digital media. And it sort of divides pretty cleanly, with Jobs (big hit then: iPhone) focusing more on smaller forms and Gates (big hit then: XBox) on bigger ones. Gates, I think, doesn’t get enough credit for his vision here:

Walt: What’s your device in five years that you rely on the most?

Bill: I don’t think you’ll have one device. I think you’ll have a full-screen device that you can carry around and you’ll do dramatically more reading off of that.

Kara: Light.

Bill: Yeah. I mean, I believe in the tablet form factor. I think you’ll have voice. I think you’ll have ink. You’ll have some way of having a hardware keyboard and some settings for that. And then you’ll have the device that fits in your pocket, which the whole notion of how much function should you combine in there, you know, there’s navigation computers, there’s media, there’s phone. Technology is letting us put more things in there, but then again, you really want to tune it so people know what they expect. So there’s quite a bit of experimentation in that pocket-size device. But I think those are natural form factors and that we’ll have the evolution of the portable machine. And the evolution of the phone will both be extremely high volume, complementary–that is, if you own one, you’re more likely to own the other.

Kara: And then at home, you’d have a setup that they all plug into?

Bill: Well, home, you’ll have your living room, which is your 10-foot experience, and that’s connected up to the Internet and there you’ll have gaming and entertainment and there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of what content looks like in that world. And then in your den, you’ll have something a lot like you have at your desk at work. You know, the view is that every horizontal and vertical surface will have a projector so you can put information, you know, your desk can be a surface that you can sit and manipulate things.

That idea of “the 10-foot experience” is really powerful to me — even though my living room and TV set are clearly a lot smaller than Bill Gates’s. And the whole point of it is that it’s heterogeneous and versatile — not just in terms of the kinds of machines and platforms that run on them, but in terms of the use of the space itself.

And here’s Jobs, equally visionary, if not more so. (Apologies again for the long blockquote, I like the banter.)

Walt: So what’s your five-year outlook at the devices you’ll carry?

Steve: You know, it’s interesting. The PC has proved to be very resilient because, as Bill said earlier, I mean, the death of the PC has been predicted every few years.

Walt: And here when you’re saying PC, you mean personal computer in general, not just Windows PCs?

Steve: I mean, personal computer in general.

Walt: Yeah, OK.

Steve: And, you know, there was the age of productivity, if you will, you know, the spreadsheets and word processors and that kind of got the whole industry moving. And it kind of plateaued for a while and was getting a little stale and then the Internet came along and everybody needed more powerful computers to get on the Internet, browsers came along, and it was this whole Internet age that came along, access to the Internet. And then some number of years ago, you could start to see that the PC that was taken for granted, things had kind of plateaued a little bit, innovation-wise, at least. And then I think this whole notion of the PC–we called it the digital hub, but you can call it anything you want, sort of the multimedia center of the house, started to take off with digital cameras and digital camcorders and sharing things over the Internet and kind of needing a repository for all that stuff and it was reborn again as sort of the hub of your digital life.

And you can sort of see that there’s something starting again. It’s not clear exactly what it is, but it will be the PC maybe used a little more tightly coupled with some back-end Internet services and some things like that. And, of course, PCs are going mobile in an ever greater degree.

So I think the PC is going to continue. This general purpose device is going to continue to be with us and morph with us, whether it’s a tablet or a notebook or, you know, a big curved desktop that you have at your house or whatever it might be. So I think that’ll be something that most people have, at least in this society. In others, maybe not, but certainly in this one.

But then there’s an explosion that’s starting to happen in what you call post-PC devices, right? You can call the iPod one of them. There’s a lot of things that are not…

Walt: You can get into trouble for using that term. I want you to know that.

Steve: What?

Walt: I’m kidding. Post-PC devices.

Steve: Why?

Walt: People write letters to the editor, they complain about it. Anyway, go ahead.

Steve: Okay. Well, anyway, I think there’s just a category of devices that aren’t as general purpose, that are really more focused on specific functions, whether they’re phones or iPods or Zunes or what have you. And I think that category of devices is going to continue to be very innovative and we’re going to see lots of them.

Kara: Give me an example of what that would be.

Steve: Well, an iPod as a post-PC…

Kara: Well, yeah.

Steve: A phone as a post-PC device.

Walt: Is the iPhone and some of these other smart phones–and I know you believe that the iPhone is much better than these other smart phones at the moment, but are these things–aren’t they really just computers in a different form factor? I mean, when we use the word phone, it sounds like…

Steve: We’re getting to the point where everything’s a computer in a different form factor. So what, right? So what if it’s built with a computer inside it? It doesn’t matter. It’s, what is it? How do you use it? You know, how does the consumer approach it? And so who cares what’s inside it anymore?

And that sort of seems to be where we stand right now when it comes to TV: caught between all of the different services and hardware devices competing for that 10-foot experience and the emergent category of these post-PC, video-capable handheld devices — tablets, phones, game consoles, plus the screen of your laptop/desktop PC in the middle.

There are a couple of things from Jobs’s appearance at this year’s conference, D8, that follow up on this exchange. The first, which was better publicized, was Jobs’s comparison of post-PCs like the iPhone and iPad and traditional laptop and desktop PCs to cars and trucks, respectively. The analogy being — just as in the early 1900s, most cars were initially trucks, then smaller cars emerged that were better tailored for urban and suburban living, smaller, post-PC devices like the iPad weren’t going to eliminate traditional PCs, but would gradually replace them as the dominant form of consumer computing. It’s a powerful, provocative idea; 2007 Jobs was clearly more skeptical towards it, more inclined to think that the PC was going to morph into something else.

The other is Jobs’s discussion of the balkanization of the television business — that is, the business of getting content to those screens, not the content providers as such: the multiplicity of settop boxes and lack of genuinely national providers or international standards that prevented any company, from Apple to Google to TiVo, however technologically sophisticated, from rolling out a clear go-to-market strategy. This, I think, does seem to explain why, despite all of the local innovations in DVRs, net-connected game consoles, streaming content, and so forth, TV still seems to be forever putting the pieces together.

Last, finally, is the whole consumption/production imbroglio that similarly washed over the iPad. Is the TV space “merely” a space for consumption? Is that a bad thing? Or could there be new/emergent ways to create/contribute/share/connect there, too?

What do you think? What’s next for TV?

These two blockquotes, curated by Andrew Simone and Alan Jacobs respectively, arrived in my RSS reader within moments of each other. I liked Jacobs’s adjective, which applies to Simone’s selection, too: “Kierkegaardian.”

The first is from Jim Rossignol’s This Gaming Life, riffing on Lars Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Boredom:

Fernando Pessoa… identifies boredom as “the feeling that there’s nothing worth doing.” The bored are those people for whom no activity seems satisfactory. The problem is often not that there is a lack of things to do in general but, rather, that there is a lack of things that are worthwhile. Boredom can arise in all kinds of situations, but it usually makes itself known when we cannot do what we want to do or when we must do something we do not wish to do or something we cannot find a satisfactory reason for. “Boredom is not a question of idleness,” suggests Svendsen, “but of meaning.” Boredom does not, however, equate to the kind of meaninglessness found in depression. The bored are not necessarily unhappy with life; they are simply unfulfilled by circumstances, activities, and the things around them.

The second is from Walker Percy’s “Bourbon, Neat”:

Not only should connoisseurs of bourbon not read this article, neither should persons preoccupied with the perils of alcoholism, cirrhosis, esophageal hemorrhage, cancer of the palate, and so forth — all real dangers. I, too, deplore these afflictions. But, as between these evils and the aesthetic of bourbon drinking, that is, the use of bourbon to warm the heart, to reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons, I choose the aesthetic. What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five-thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there’s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: “Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?”

Is this one reason why we’re giving up on TV as our primary mode of consuming cognitive surplus? Creating something, even if it’s just a Wikipedia article about Thundercats, seems more meaningful? Or (alternative hypothesis) are people ROFLing at LOLCats mostly drunk?

Joshua Glenn buried this nugget in a comment at HiLobrow:

Anyone who has ever spent time in a conference room equipped with an overhead projector is familiar with the basic Venn diagram — three overlapping circles whose eight regions represent every possible intersection of three given sets, the eighth region being the space around the diagram. Although it resembled the intertwined rings already familiar in Christian (and later Led Zeppelin) iconography, when Venn devised the diagram in 1880, it was hailed as a conceptually innovative way to represent complex logical problems in two dimensions.

There was just one problem with it, according to British statistician, geneticist, and Venn diagram expert A.W.F. Edwards, author of the entertaining book “Cogwheels of the Mind” (Johns Hopkins): It didn’t scale up. With four sets, it turns out, circles are no use — they don’t have enough possible combinations of overlaps. Ovals work for four sets, Venn found, but after that one winds up drawing spaghetti-like messes — and, as he put it, “the visual aid for which mainly such diagrams exist is soon lost.” What to do?

A rival lecturer in mathematics at Oxford by the name of Charles Dodgson — Lewis Carroll — tried to come up with a better logical diagram by using rectangles instead of circles, but failed (though not before producing an 1887 board game based on his “triliteral” design). In fact, it wasn’t until a century later that the problem of drawing visually appealing Venn diagrams for arbitrary numbers of sets was solved — by Edwards, it turns out. In 1988 Edwards came up with a six-set diagram that was nicknamed the “Edwards-Venn cogwheel.”

The original post, which extends Glenn’s ongoing remapping of generational lines past the mid-nineteenth century — Decadents! Pragmatists! Industrial Tyrants! Mark Twain AND Henry James! — is pretty sweet too. (For what it’s worth, one big thing Decadents and Pragmatists had in common was that they were both obsessed with generational changes.)

Now we just need a generational map that’s ALSO an Edwards-Venn cogwheel!

The other day, for reasons whose names I do not wish to recall, I was looking in Snarkmarket’s archives from 2007. There were chains I’d remembered, great ideas I’d forgotten, funny anachronisms, and prescient observations.

Generally, though, I was struck by how much shorter the posts were. I’m sure this is equally because in 2007, my many paragraphs were safely in the comments and because Twitter now carries most of the content that went into one-to-three-sentence “hey, look at this!” links. (Plus, migrating the archives to WordPress truncated some of the longer posts that used to have “jumps” built-in.)

Five selected links, just from July 2007:

• Probably the first instance of Robin’s combinatorial textbot going off: “Errol Morris, New York Times, Blog.”
• Matt goes old school.
• OMG, Radio Lab.
• I definitely think we should bring back the phrase “visual public sphere.”
• In the comments, I unload on Robin about his Wes Anderson preferences. In Robin’s defense, The Fantastic Mr Fox was waaaaayy better than The Darjeeling Limited, as he predicted.

Maybe I’ll try to do this once a month.

Here’s an idea related to “even your coffee has an author-function“: food auteurism, a phrase which seems very natural and yet before today didn’t have any hits on Google.

For most of the 20th century, after the industrialization of the food and agriculture industry, food was mostly anonymous. Traditionally, your farmer, grocer, butcher, rabbi vouched for the quality of your food, but that gave way to government inspections, certification, and standardization, plus branding.

Now, though, that industrial anonymity is troubling, and we increasingly want our food to be sourced. This is partly driven by nutrition, partly by social concerns, and partly by a need to differentiate our identity through what we eat. And it’s achieved partly through a return to a quasi-preindustrial model (farmers’ markets and local gardens), partly through a shift in brand identification (let me drink 15th Avenue Coffee instead of Starbucks), and partly through a new rise in authority of food writers and experts: Alice Waters, Michael Pollan, Mark Bittman.

It’s a new way to generate and focus cultural attention, and to help us make sense of the explosion of information and misinformation about food. Food as an information network.

There are many, many noteworthy things in this interview with Clay Shirky, but this caught my attention (bold-emphasis is mine):

[W]hat we’re dealing with now, I think, is the ramification of having long-form writing not necessarily meaning physical objects, not necessarily meaning commissioning editors and publishers in the manner of making those physical objects, and not meaning any of the sales channels or the preexisting ways of producing cultural focus. This is really clear to me as someone who writes and publishes both on a weblog and books. There are certain channels of conversation in this society that you can only get into if you have written a book. Terry Gross has never met anyone in her life who has not JUST published a book. Right?

The way our culture works, depending on what field you’re operating in, certain kinds of objects (or in some cases, events) generate more cultural focus than others. Shirky gives an example from painting: “Anyone can be a painter, but the question is then, ‘Have you ever had a show; have you ever had a solo show?’ People are always looking for these high-cost signals from other people that this is worthwhile.” In music, maybe it used to be an album; in comedy, it might be an hour-long album or TV special; I’m sure you can think of others in different media. It’s a high-cost object that broadcasts its significance. It’s not a thing; it’s a work.

But, this is important: it’s even more fine-grained than that. It’s not like you can just say, “in writing, books are the most important things.” It depends on what genre of writing you’re in. If you’re a medical or scientific researcher, for instance, you don’t have to publish a book to get cultural attention; an article, if it’s in a sufficiently prestigious journal, will do the trick. And the news stories won’t even start with your name, if they get around to it at all; instead, a voice on the radio will say, “according to a new study published in Nature, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania…” The authority accrues to the institution: the university, the journal, and ultimately Science itself.

The French historian/generally-revered-writer-of-theory Michel Foucault used this difference to come up with an idea: In different cultures, different kinds of writers are accorded a different status that depends on how much authority accrues to their writing. In the ancient world, for instance, stories/fables used to circulate without much, if any, attribution of authorship; medical texts, on the other hand, needed an auctoritas like Galen or Avicenna to back them up. It didn’t make any sense to talk about “authorship” as if that term had a universal, timeless meaning. Not every writer was an author, not every writing an act of authorship. (Foucault uses a thought-experiment about Nietzsche scribbling aphorisms on one side of a sheet of paper, a laundry or shopping list on the other.)

At the same time, you can’t just ignore authorship. Even if it’s contingent, made-up, it’s still a real thing. It’s built on social conventions and serves a social function. There are rules. Depending on context, it can be construed broadly or narrowly. And it can change — and these changes can reveal things that might otherwise be hidden. For instance, from the early days of print until the 20th century, publishers in England shared some of the author-function of a book because they could be punished for what it said. At some point in the 20th century, audiences became much more interested in who the director of a film was. (In some cases, the star or producer or studio, maybe even the screenwriter still share some of that author-function.) And these social ripples — who made it, who foots the bill, who’s an authority, who gets punished? — those are all profound ways of producing “cultural focus.”

Foucault focused on authorship — the subjective side of that cultural focus — because he was super-focused on things like authority and punishment. But it’s clear that there’s an objective side of this story, too, the story of the work — and that the two trajectories, work and author, work together. You become an “author” and get to be interviewed by Terry Gross because you’ve written a book. And you get to write a book (and have someone with a suitable amount of authority publish it) because you accrue a certain amount and kind of demonstrable authority and skill (in a genre where writing a book is the appropriate kind of work).

It’s no surprise, then, that the Big Digital Shake-Up in the way cultural objects are produced, consumed, sold, disseminated, re-disseminated, etc. is shifting our concepts of both authorship and the work in many genres and media. What are the new significant objects in the fields that interest you? Pomplamoose makes music videos; Robin wrote a novella, but at least part of that “work” included the blog and community created by it; and Andrew Sullivan somehow manages to be the “author” of both the book The Conservative Soul and the blog The Daily Dish, even when it switches from Time to The Atlantic, even when someone else is guest-writing it. And while it takes writing a book to get on Fresh Air, to really get people on blogs talking about your book, it helps to have a few blog posts, reviews, and interviews about it, so there’s something besides the Amazon page to link to.

Maybe being the author of a blog is a new version of being an author of a book. I started (although I’m not the only author of) Bookfuturism because I started stringing together a bunch of work that seemed to be about the future of reading; through that, my writing here, and some of the things I wrote elsewhere, I became a kind of authority on the subject (only on the internet, but still, I like who links to me); and maybe I’ll write a book, or maybe I’ll start a blog with a different title when it’s time to write about something else. I don’t know.

It’s all being reconfigured, as we’re changing our assumptions about what and who we pay attention to.

Chimerical post-script: Not completely sure where it fits in, but I think it does: Robin and José Afonso Furtado pointed me to this post by Mike Shatzkin about the future of bookselling, arguing (I’m paraphrasing) that with online retailers like Amazon obliterating physical bookstores, we need a new kind of intermediary that helps curate and consolidate books for the consumer, “powered” by Amazon. It’s not far off from Robin’s old post about a “Starbucks API.” See? Even your coffee has an author-function.

Anyways, new authors, new publishers, new media, new works, new devices, new stores, new curators, new audiences — everything with a scrap of auctoritas is up for grabs.

I love this. Matt Jones at BERG shares a list of totally uncool technologies. Mice! Kiosks! CDs! Landline phones! 512MB flash drives!

Matt argues that these technologies all live in the Trough of Disillusionment (which is where you fall after cresting the heights of hype), and that recombining or recontextualizing these technologies…

…can expose a previously unexploited affordance or feature of the technology – that was not brought to the fore by the original manufacturers or hype that surrounded it. By creating a chimera, you can indulge in some material exploration.

The rest of the post is really interesting, and you should check it out. But I want to dwell on the word “chimera” for a second.

We obviously love hybrids and interdisciplinary thinking here at Snarkmarket. But you know, I think we might love chimeras even more.

Hybrids are smooth and neat. Interdisciplinary thinking is diplomatic; it thrives in a bucolic university setting. Chimeras, though? Man, chimeras are weird. They’re just a bunch of different things bolted together. They’re abrupt. They’re discontinuous. They’re impolitic. They’re not plausible; you look at a chimera and you go, “yeah right.” And I like that! Chimeras are on the very edge of the recombinatory possible. Actually—they’re over the edge.

Tim’s last post feels chimeric to me.

I was going for something chimeric with this post, I think.

Chimeric thinking. It’s a thing.