Is there some way that the Kindle user interface could give me the same sense of urgency and being alive that Twitter does? Asking for a friend.
Conversation
This is a fun prompt—to lean into the fray of urgent, "hot" media; to make reading "compete" with Fortnite. Framed that way, I wonder about the inverse: "cooling" my relationship to Twitter so that timeless books naturally outcompete. i.e. Where should "home field advantage" be?
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i.e. imagine that on my coffee table, there is:
– a few books
– a stack of papers
– a bound volume of 500 algorithmically-selected tweets from the last week
This is a very different type of interaction!
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what did attention allocation to this "junk content" look like pre internet/TV? I've never read a national newspaper from cover to cover, what's the "playthrough time" of all the news that's fit to print?
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The problem, of course, is that if we treated Twitter like newsprint, we wouldn’t be having this very conversation.
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This observation is really the sense in which ’s prompt most resonates. Conversation is a source of real meaning. Reading is often abstract or dutiful, disconnected from intrinsically-meaningful purposes. Very excited about connecting books to social sources of meaning.
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That is: I suspect it's possible to connect to meaningful social interaction without the frenetic urgency, the tiny grain size, the context switching, etc.
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(incidentally, here’s one incomplete sketch along those lines… notes.andymatuschak.org/z3PkZ6TRKEML86)
do you think e-readers/e-ink tablets are worth experimenting on? several run Android/Linux, though we're probably still years away from fluid e-ink experiences
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I’m very excited about e-ink for the way it enables working outside. But the hardware is fraught enough that I suspect iterating with mass-market devices will produce faster progress. Not sure!
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Yes! I once tried to convince a friend at a major publication that they could make their archives more valuable if they included ongoing twitter conversations that linked to the article and used that to repromote pieces.
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For example, I was reading a 1966 New Yorker Buckminster Fuller profile as part of a conversation with . The New Yorker already has my subscription money but they don’t get a chance to resurface or promote this attention. Btw, you should read it! newyorker.com/magazine/1966/
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I would think a collective annotation tool like could start to introduce a conversational element. Seeing what your friend annotated in a book, what they’re reading, wanting to read the same pages as someone you follow, etc.
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Almost like a real-time, ad hoc book club. You can do this on twitter by posting quotes or having discussions, but I can imagine those conversations would be richer in the context of the book or original quote.
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maps to this really well 🙂 ('s how I found this discussion 😉)
with links to specific part of the text you can even do like annotations over this:
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