Richard Eoin Nash

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Notes On Clay Shirky, Part the Third

This isn’t actually Clay Shirky on News but rather Clay moderating (after a fashion) a much-discussed panel discussion at SXSW Interactive yesterday evening. A conventional discursive blog post fails to do it justice so I’m offering embedded Youtube, the 250 tweets delivered mostly live, and a few after the fact . And link to three superb post-panel reflections, from Kassia Krozer and Kirk Biglione and William Aicher (this last dude is the questioner at the beginning of the YouTube clip)

All in all, it gets me itching to want to get started building the new infrastructure that can begin to offer writers and readers real opportunity.

Richard Eoin Nash, Mar 16, 2009

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Yes, please build it. Indie writers like myself are doing our best, but mostly I want to spend my time writing, not networking or coddling fans. (Still, my YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost gets a decent 50-100 downloads per day, the podcasts far more.)

– Lee (03/17 06:48 PM)

Richard,
The future is now, yes. With the Seattle Post-Intel stopping its print edition today and going only digital, we can see the death of print newspapers and magazines and books approaching. Good or bad, who knows. I prefer paper reading, but online screen reading seems to be the future for next generations after us.

Did you know TO KINDLE is already a verb? People who own Kindles are already saying things like “I am kindling now, call you back in 30 minites” to their friends. See the urbandictionary.com, they already list KINDLE as a verb meaning TO READ ONLINE ON A KINDLE.

I told this to the creator of the KINDLE name, Michael Cronan in SF, and he said WOW, SO FAST! Actually, his first press release two years ago used KINDLE as a verb. He was there first, yes, he created the word. For reading on a KINDLE. Will the verb stick? Who knows?

Also, i coined a new word from my cave here in Taiwan for reading online, reading anything on a computer screen or a PDA screen or a KINDLE screen, and I coined it as “SCREENING” to mean reading text on a screen or through a screen, as opposed to reading paper product on a paper surface text.

Do you think we will all be screening in the future, and reading will become a thing of the past? Who knows? I don’t.

Danny

Screening is defined as: “To read text on a computer screen, cellphone
screen, Kindle screen or PDA screen or BlackBerry screen; replaces the
term “reading” which now only refers to reading print text on paper.”

Example: “I hate reading print newspapers now. I do all my screening online.”

The word is so new, not everyone has seen it yet. And many do not
agree with its coinage.
Amit Gilboa, an Israeli writer living in Singapore, told me:
“No, it’s still reading. Whether in a book, a print newspaper,
chalkboard, whiteboard, it’s still reading words made up of letters.
Screening is still reading.”

However, Hidetoshi Abe in Tokyo, Japan, told this reporter he likes
the new term and agrees it fits our new Internet age. “I think
‘screening’ makes perfect sense to represent the way we now take in
information via computer screens. It’s a whole new ballgame.”

– danny bloom (03/17 11:40 PM)

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I ran Soft Skull Press from 2001 to 2007 when we sold it to Counterpoint for whom I continued to run it until early 2009. I founded Cursor and am publisher of Red Lemonade. I now run content and community for the new cultural discoverer Small Demons. After the jump is my bio, since I know some folks come to this site looking for it, and I thwart them by not having a proper one. read more »