The New York Times Magazine of May 14th features an article by Kevin Kelly that explains key ideas and situations related to the iCommons. The article can be read here at no cost for the next few days. After that it will go into the subscription archives of the NY Times, effectively removing it from the interactivity of the iCommons in which the old media Times does not fully participate.
Kelly's article, which is headlined 'Scan This Book!', begins with a overview of major projects for scanning of books that are now underway. He then describes the background, mechanisms and effects of the connecting phenomena that will emerge from the massive open digital content. He shows us how remixing and mashing book articles and snippets will lead to what he calls a liquid version of knowledge which was once confined between the covers of individual books. Here is some of the flavor of what he says:
"At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or "playlists," as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual "bookshelves" ' a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information."
After Kelly masterfully sketches what will happen once the era begins when all books are digitized, he describes the mind-boggling complications that are bogging down progress. His conclusion, though is that change is certain. As he writes in the final paragraph:
"The fact is, entire industries and the fortunes of those working in them are threatened with demise. Newspapers and magazines, Hollywood, record labels, broadcasters and many hard-working and wonderful creative people in those fields have to change the model of how they earn money. Not all will make it."
tags: united states education remixing books knowledge libraries bookshelves digitised
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