Clay Shirky – How We Will Read | Genius
▻https://genius.com/Clay-shirky-how-we-will-read-annotated
Un article ancien, mais toujours de référence par Clay Shirky
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.
The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine.
But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion.
“Social reading,” the way I’ve always interpreted the phrase, is reading that recognizes that you’re not just a consumer, you’re a user. You’re going to do something with this, and that something is going to involve a group of other people. Read a book. The very next thing you’re going to do, if it was at all interesting, is talk to someone about it.
Really? So then, why annotate?
You annotate because that’s the part you want to keep. There’s the experiential value and there’s the extractive value from books. The experiential value of reading Bruno LaTour’s Reassembling the Social was the character of LaTour’s thought at the particular point in his career. Having had that, because I don’t teach classes on the sociology of science, what I now need from that book is the extractive bit, so if I ever teach that topic, or write about it, I can start where I left off rather than having to take the book down from the shelf.
Lastly — I know that you’re very invested in collective action. How can social reading connect to activism?
Books are historically lousy calls to action because they tend not only to be produced slowly but consumed slowly. The role of longform writing in collective action is much more about synchronization than coordination. Whenever you read the book and whenever I read the book can be years apart, but when we both show up to the same place, we have that shared background.
