![Header image for A pointable we [2/3]](/essays/images/pointable_02/pointable-title.png)
A pointable we [2/3]
The power of URLs and publishing
#Other entries in this series:
We’ve built up a habit of pointing — effortlessly — through links, tweets, reblogs, and likes. And this is really efficient. Super easy. We all do it all the time. Pointing is embedded all over our digital surfaces. It’s an incredible vector for spreading ideas and pushing or pulling attention towards or away from things.
Most importantly though, is that digital pointing is nearly frictionless. Not only is the energy between seeing a pointer and clicking it almost zero, but so too is the energy required to create that pointer.1 The less friction, the easier it is to form a habit.
#Public Highlights
Connected to this, and more explicitly to do with reading, is the now exhaustively discussed idea of the digital public commonplace book.2
Findings provides tools for commonplace capturing across all of the web. Amazon has created an actual commonplace-book-social-network (although still a minimum viable product). They both give public addresses to our little nut collections.3
Traditional links allow us to point at whole documents or collections of documents.
These services let us point into documents.
Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they’re votes. You’re voting on interestingness within a particular text. There’s a feeling that this is valuable data.4
Because of this, as you’re highlighting your book, there’s an unmistakable and growing sense of social usefulness to the act. The highlight is doing some work (or will be doing some work), not just sitting there to (hopefully) help you remember something later.5
In a recent interview, Clive Thompson, writer for Wired, mentions one tangible digital→physical example of leveraging his corpus of digital annotations:
I annotate aggressively. If I’m reading a piece of really long fiction, I often find that there are these fabulous things I want to remember. I want to take notes on it, so I highlight it, and if I have a thought about it, I’ll type it out quickly. Then I dump all these clippings into a format that I can look at later. In the case of War and Peace, I actually had 16,000 words worth of notes and clippings at the end of it. So I printed it out as a print-on-demand book. In short, I have a physical copy of all of my favorite parts of War and Peace that I can flip through, with my notes, but I don’t actually own a physical copy of War and Peace. 6
The generalized takeaway is that we’re evolving a set of habits and language (once active and now increasingly ambient and passive)7 around capturing “real world” stuff — not just book or reading related — in digital space.
Some core differences between a captured or uncaptured — networked (in the context of open platforms) or unnetworked — action is:
- A networked action is sticky (Google never forgets)
- Being networked undoes the Galapagos nature of an unnetworked something (everyone can see and search)
- The action is codified and aligned with similar data (in a database)
The culmination of these qualities is a networked action (“I read”, “I visited”, “I saw”, etc) on an open platform is persistent in a way totally different from its physical or closed or unnetworked counterpart. Each time we add an action to our public corpus, we perform a little act of faith …
In part 3, we’ll tie this back into “Monkey Business” and publishing platforms.
#Other entries in this series:
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Google constructed a business and illuminated a zeitgeist around our excessive pointing. We’ve entered an age of terminal information velocity (baring perfect search) — where the discovery > production > sharing loops are the tightest they’ve ever been in human history. If you want perspective on how these sharing loops have evolved — how information transmission and consumption has sped from a trickle to the current torrential fire hose of today — check out James Gelik’s The Information (or at least the first half of it). And to get a sense of how that firehose is affecting the very topology of our minds, push on through Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows. ↩︎
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Here’s my Kindle collection: kindle.amazon.com/profile/Craig-Mod/, and here’s my Findings collection: findings.com/craigmod ↩︎
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This applies not only to text but with all the data we’re adding to the corpus. The checkins, food photos, tweets — we’re assembling a granular, meta-data filled set of human mundanity (and by extension, extraordinarity). ↩︎
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What, precisely, that “work” is is still to be seen. Like much of the varied data we add to the public corpus, the value of this information has yet to be fully realized. Our collective acts of creation have embedded within them a certain faith in a future usefulness. Perhaps it’s naieve to believe our checkins at Starbucks will have any future value to us (… they most certainly will and already do have value to advertisers). But consciously or not, there’s over a billion of us wholeheartedly subscribed to the church of data capture. ↩︎
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Active: linking, liking, checking in; Passive: auto-checkins, who I passed nearby during the day (Highlight), % of book read, number of pages read, amount of time spent on an article, and so on. ↩︎
This essay, published April 2012. Thoughts? Email me@craigmod.com.
Craig Mod is a writer and photographer based in Japan. He's the author of the books Things Become Other Things and Kissa by Kissa and is a MacDowell, Ragdale, and VCCA writing fellow. His essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, Eater, The Atlantic, California Sunday Magazine, Wired, Aeon, New Scientist, Virginia Quarterly Review, The New Yorker, The Morning News, Codex: Journal of Typography, and elsewhere.
He writes newsletters, oh yes, newsletters: Roden & Ridgeline.
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