elearnspace

I have periodic moments – whether delusional or not is too soon to tell – where I’m struck by the enormous potential that many of our most foundational frameworks of society will unravel in the next several decades. TV has fragmented in the form of YouTube. Newspapers are similarly reduced to single articles read via Google News. And why would someone write a book these days (as I’m in the process of doing)? Do you ever get the sense that the framework that we now call a book – a cohesive structure of hopefully coherent thought – can be duplicated in a distributed manner online? For example, how is the act of writing a book different from blogging for a few years? All the content of a book is in the experience – but it’s not as coherent as a book and it’s filled with more clutter and tangents. But a book-like framework can be seen to exist. A unified field theory of publishing in the networked era advocates a similar view: “The emergence of the web turned this vision of the book of the future as a solid, albeit multimedia object completely upside down and inside out. Multimedia is engaging, especially in a format that encourages reflection, but locating discourse inside of a dynamic network promises even more profound changes”