Anne Trubek at GOOD Magazine has Good Magazine us that computers needs books too, at least in order to provide the metaphors human’s needed in order to apprehend how to use them:
As my “spot the metaphor” game intends to show, we understand computers through the imprimatur of books. When those first Dells and Apples started rolling off the assembly line, us early adopters needed some help understanding them. We needed something familiar with which to navigate, conceptualize, and just plain figure out these then-revolutionary devices. So we drew upon books to structure our gradual accommodation to computers (bookstores, too: why do you think we “browse” a website?”). After all, it took centuries for people to get comfortable enough with the the codex to finally give up (almost) on the scroll.
But now that we are as familiar with screens as we are with rectos, what next?
Trubek acknowledges she doesn’t have the definitive answer, but she’s already made a useful point–reading arches maybe a little higher over human activity than is often acknowledged.
On the old Soft Skull blog I had a category called The Future is Now. And, for me, that is now true. I’m leaving Soft Skull, as described in this press release.
Thanks for everyone out there for making Soft Skull what it is, above all the readers and writers whom we exist to serve and connect, along with my colleagues, paid and unpaid (!), who’ve put in vast amounts of hours, creativity, and intensity in order to bring those writers and readers together to create this thing we call culture.
When I explained to my colleagues yesterday that I would be consulting and freelancing, some were concerned this was a euphemism for leaving publishing. It is anything but. For me, my departure is actually about my passionate belief in the future of publishing, in the future of community built around long-form edited narrative texts, in the future of connecting writers and readers, in a Web 3.0 that’s about the filters. I’m going to take this opportunity to go even deeper into publishing, to double-down, to go all in…
So bookmark/follow/RSS me. Comment all over me. Books are a conversation, always have been, we’re just a little closer to understanding how, thanks to this social activity called the web. So let’s keep talking.