In the second generation, boundaries of printed matter disappear, and the Gutenberg legacy gets unbundled, and atomized. Every worthwhile line and image becomes an independent addressable, linkable meme. The rest sinks into obscurity. “2nd gen native” content is *born* atomized.
Conversation
These generation labels are for convenience btw, it’s all happening messily sort of parallel.
Third generation. New rebundled forms emerge. Early chaotic mashup and collage pidgins give way to true deep-digital creoles. Threads on twitter are a good example. Instagram stories...
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Finally, the *meanings* of dead “content” start to come alive. This is deep digitization. The “semantic web” failed because we thought meaning was something dead and inherent, to be modeled. Now it seems it is a potentiality to be expressed and enacted contextually, like genes.
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Even our best visioning attempts, like the Diamond Age “primer” tech, seem impoverished and reactionary with respect to what is *already* happening. The idea of an advanced game world “book” for one little girl, with humans turking at the other end, seems dated.
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If this sounds all head-in-the-clouds visioning, you haven’t been keeping up with tech (including ironically cloud tech). Much of this has already happened in patchy ways. Every year blogging becomes a little less like writing, and a little more like “idea engineering”.
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All this frankly makes me ambivalent about writing in traditional forms like books or essays. It’s increasingly clear that these are a kind of Industrial Age larping.
The thing that keeps me in traditional forms is mostly lack of skills/tools to go beyond, not sentiment 🙂
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I thought I could digitize the content in Radical Candor. I realized after three tries and a million dollars that story telling was still the best way to get the ideas across. The book and the talks and the workshops (for two way story telling, better yet) worked. The app didn't.
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:) the thing is this. the point of the book is put your damn phone in your pocket, look a person in the eye and TALK. any app is a value subtracting round trip.
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And looking at a book is different from looking at a phone how?
Perhaps an assistant app to help use the method was a bad idea, but what about a learning game that takes less time to playthrough than reading a book?
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Your particular app strategy didn’t work out, but that doesn’t prove “book” is the optimal form factor even for the storytelling part
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I hope the book isn't. I just haven't found a better way yet. Haven't given up. and I think about it every day.
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agreed. it's just the book worked the apps didn't. no doubt we'll figure it out eventually.
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