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This deep digitization. Shallow digitization turns a paper phone book into a digital one. Deep digitization makes it part of the phone app, where the actual number disappears behind a UI as one among many addressing protocols.
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Shallow digitization puts maps online in nicely vectorized form (remember the bitmapped mapquest ones that google disrupted?) Deep digitization willl eventually put them several navigation gestures behind an AR directions UI. 2d bird’s eye view projection will be mostly useless.
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You get the idea. The first things to get deep digitized were things that had a naturally structured, instrumental data DNA and made sense as a feature of some products. But it won’t stop there. *Everything* we think of as having a “natural” printed form factor will transform.
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All printed matter is just uninvented technology. This is why when I look at books now, it feels like I’m looking at doomed tech history. With deep digitization, almost none of them will make sense as “books” at all. Each is the ancestor of an unborn future digital beast.
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Books on your shelves are of 3 types. First: Those that have obvious instrumental non-book future forms like atlases. This is the easy case we just discussed. Low hanging fruit on the Gutenberg tree. These are really books specifying future products we can already imagine.
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Second: “Classics” that will retain a sentimental form embedded in a tech “shell” (Shakespeare behind a sentiments-and-tropes analytics UI?) Already, we access classics like data mines. Recently, I searched a classic on Kindle for occurances of a phrase to support an argument.
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Third: Non-classics. These are perhaps the most interesting. Stuff that humanity is not collectively sentimental enough to deep-digitize via the kind of mummification we’re doing to Shakespeare’s works. We’ll just re-implement their utilitarian *functions* in updated form.
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Plenty of examples already. Most textbooks should be sets of interactive apps a la Papert. Most data-driven empirical analysis should be in wolframesque computational essay form. Tons of opportunity here. Every piece of shallow-digitized printed matter is a future invention.
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My own writing, I’m happy to admit, is not “classic”. Much of it should be something else, like games, web apps, datasets with exploration UIs, ‘pedia entries etc. Text was just the minimum viable form factor because words are the cheapest prototyping medium for any idea.
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