POST BY PADDY JOHNSON
Pete Wells pens a great piece in the Times Magazine reflecting on collecting, indexing, the material and immaterial. The article reminded me of the most notable visual search difference between print (novels in particular) and text based material on the web: shape and form. In print, you may not remember the exact page of a passage you’re looking for but its rough contour and physical placement. Memory on the internet works a lot differently; mostly I remember effective search terms and the urls of bookmarking devices I use. The language of an object is completely irrelevant to textual search. By choice, I read almost everything digitally now, but every once and a while I do miss that.
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“There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.” That’s the money quote for me. I just said something similar re. Tom Moody’s Google Similar Images link the other day. I need that serendipity. Everything on the web is trying to only give you what you asked for. There isn’t the accidental discovery you get from leafing through an encyclopedia, for example.
“There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.” That’s the money quote for me. I just said something similar re. Tom Moody’s Google Similar Images link the other day. I need that serendipity. Everything on the web is trying to only give you what you asked for. There isn’t the accidental discovery you get from leafing through an encyclopedia, for example.
“There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.” That’s the money quote for me. I just said something similar re. Tom Moody’s Google Similar Images link the other day. I need that serendipity. Everything on the web is trying to only give you what you asked for. There isn’t the accidental discovery you get from leafing through an encyclopedia, for example.
“There’s never been anything like the Internet for helping us find what we want. But when it comes to finding what we didn’t know we wanted, print is magic.” That’s the money quote for me. I just said something similar re. Tom Moody’s Google Similar Images link the other day. I need that serendipity. Everything on the web is trying to only give you what you asked for. There isn’t the accidental discovery you get from leafing through an encyclopedia, for example.
Yeah, I feel like that sentiment’s been floating around for the last year and a half — christopher Weingarten talked a lot about it in his rant last year at the twitter conference.
Part of what I think surf clubs are doing, is bringing that print search sensibility to the web — at least to the degree that finding what you didn’t know you wanted is part of the goal.
Yeah, I feel like that sentiment’s been floating around for the last year and a half — christopher Weingarten talked a lot about it in his rant last year at the twitter conference.
Part of what I think surf clubs are doing, is bringing that print search sensibility to the web — at least to the degree that finding what you didn’t know you wanted is part of the goal.
This issue goes much further back. Socrates decried the death of philosophy when his pupil Phaedrus used written notes to help him remember a speech. The problem though really comes from Socrates believing that writing was merely a bad copy of oratory/speaking.
Like Socrates we now find ourselves comparing digital text with written, material text. The real leap will come when the digital formats (perhaps like Kindles and iPads) attempt to push text (or communication in general) somewhere it has never been before.
Yes, reading my book on an iPad completely obliterates the spacial sense I have of paragaphs on pages, turning in the weight of my hand. But in time, surely the ‘space’ of the internet, of the archive, can be made more malleable – more sensuous – even than the books it now tries to imitate.
I think sensuous is where Apple want to take digital text right now. The problem comes when we mistake the sex appeal of the screen, for the sex appeal of the content it mediates for us.
This issue goes much further back. Socrates decried the death of philosophy when his pupil Phaedrus used written notes to help him remember a speech. The problem though really comes from Socrates believing that writing was merely a bad copy of oratory/speaking.
Like Socrates we now find ourselves comparing digital text with written, material text. The real leap will come when the digital formats (perhaps like Kindles and iPads) attempt to push text (or communication in general) somewhere it has never been before.
Yes, reading my book on an iPad completely obliterates the spacial sense I have of paragaphs on pages, turning in the weight of my hand. But in time, surely the ‘space’ of the internet, of the archive, can be made more malleable – more sensuous – even than the books it now tries to imitate.
I think sensuous is where Apple want to take digital text right now. The problem comes when we mistake the sex appeal of the screen, for the sex appeal of the content it mediates for us.
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