Douglas Rushkoff
Applying the concept of “present shock” from his book (http://www.rushkoff.com/present) to
publishing.
Present shock is the human reaction to our current reality
which is always connected, in real time, and highly aware of the present
moment. What is it like when you are catching up with your twitter feed and it
is catching up with you. Present shock is about presentism; the moment we
stopped leaning towards the future to being in the future now. Instead of
looking at your portfolio and thinking “what will it be worth” we started
thinking “what is it worth right now”.
The Mayan culture got it right, we are at the end of time,
but that’s not the “end time” it’s the end of the concept of time. Before we
had the written word we didn’t have history, because oral tradition could be
changed. The first written things were contracts because the written word was
durable.
The printing press moved us from scrolls to pages. The
breaks changed. The codex begins in the industrial age. The book is the
industrial age package.
The digital book is as different from the physical book as
it was to the scrolls before it.
The wrong medium for the amount of compression we put in. We
shouldn’t spend six months on composing a tweet. A few years of time on a print
book was how we worked before.
Reading today is about the moment, not about the ark or the
whole thing – it’s about the gist of it.
(Advances went away because book scan allowed publishers to
find out the truth.)
In the industrial age the purpose of money is to store value
over a long period over time. In the digital age it is about the tranactions.
Corpoarations (just piles of money) bought publishers
thinking they were a growth business, but it is really a sustainable business.
The corporations said make more money, but what could the publishers do? There
isn’t ability to grow at the rate of the debt structure of their parent
company. Publishers are left to buy other publishers to give the illusion of growth
to their parent companies.
The buying and selling of books has become more like
spotify. People don’t want to spend 40000 on education, they want to spend a
few dollars and grab what courses they need off coursera.
People are going to want to subscribe to books. They want
all choice all the time. The problem with this is that people want to read in
order to feel entitled to dismiss. They want to be able to assume they
understand the material enough to ignore all of it. That’s not a great thing.
Instead of reading to dismiss, reading should be an extended
experience of non-agency. We surrender our authority to that of the author’s.
We need to show people that it is entertaining and valuable.
Medium - The Obvious
Corporation – Evan Williams
Evan wants to lower the barrier to get more voices into the
discussion. Medium wants to enable lots of voices but have an emphasis on
quality and collaboration.
Posts on their site are bundled into collections. Within a
collection posts are not ordered with the newest at the top, but instead on
people’s reactions to the content (less emphasis on the new, more on investing
in the topics). Posts can spawn new ideas.
The content editor for Medium is not completely plain text,
but offers the minimum of formatting. Mainly WYSIWYG and no text boxes, but
some greyed instructions in the boxes.
If you want to try Medium email your twitter username to yourfriends@medium.com
Discussion – Douglas Rushkoff
& Evan Williams
Rushkof: Corporate capitalism at this time is a nightmare
Williams: The jobs act enabled crowd sourced funding and
people use that, but not all ventures need funding. Bloggers didn’t threaten
good journalists; it threatened poor journalists
R: 18 – 22 year olds are really bad at distinguish credible
information.
W: The things I work on are trying to make the internet
capable of more, of more reliable information. We’re trying to create an
efficient and general system that has an economic system built in since that’s
more important for some content more than others.
R: You would love
someday for people to be able to enable a paywall on their own?
W: There’s a company called Matter which is looking into it.
R: When I saw the name called Medium I was thinking of
length of time.
W: That is the original idea. We looked at micro blogging
and tweets and I thought of medium.
R: I was told I was using my blog wrong, not what it was
intended for.
W: That’s what this is all about. You can’t tweet wrong –
that’s what the unfollow button is for.
R:
W: It’s great to think that a feature you never got around
to was a good design choice (even if that wasn’t the choice). Searching the
archive is tremendously valuable.
R: Posts on Medium look good.
W: That’s part of the idea. It feels preserved. It’s a place
with context for your content and the whole is greater than the sum of the
parts. It’s not about creating a platform right now.
R: The concern at TOC is for the industry and not building a
platform. Do you see where the revenue model for publishing is going.
W: Digital doesn’t just lower distribution costs. It makes
the content richer and gets it into people’s hands faster. We can increase the
surface area of the idea (allow more routes for people to discover the
content). This doesn’t mean necessarily free, but the tools can increase
efficiency and surface area. It’s not just change print to digital.
R: I’m almost old enough to stick with traditional
publishing to the end.
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