Bob Stein on the Future of Reading and Writing in the Networked Era

On Monday, Bob Stein presented his thoughts on the future of books, reading, and authorship here at the OII. [It was recorded, so should be available on the OII webcasts page soon.] Bob is founder and co-director of the Institute for the Future of the Book and has been publishing interactive media, (including the first movies to include the audio commentary and extras that we all now expect on DVDs) as well as interactive educational CD-Roms for many years.

It was a real treat to have someone looking at big issues like “authorship” and “reading” that we tend to take for granted as such an integral part of our culture and to try and discern what is really new today now that networked technologies are in the mix. As he pointed out, carrying on dialogues in the margins of books is not new–Stein used the example of Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus as chronicled by Owen Gingerich, but I often think of the long history of commentaries in Islamic manuscripts. But as he pointed out, what is new is the instantaneous nature of the exchange and the number of people that can participate.

He reminded us that the notion of authorship that we have today–as “owner” of ideas–is quite contemporary. He postulates that the authors of the future will be something more like seminar leaders, driving and shaping a conversation. This, he says, signifies a dramatic shift from the topic as the center of writing (or a book). Authors will no longer simply write about a topic, but engaging with readers within the context of a topic. The conversation itself becomes the whole point of the endeavour.

Stein also had some interesting thoughts on how we might tackle some of the big questions of the “information age.” As he sketched out his “Unified Field Theory of Publishing,” he suggested that perhaps in the future we will have professional readers–those whose job it is to read things and tag them and this will be one means of dealing with information overload… this will be one of the means by which we decide what is important.

One of the most (r)evolutionary of his thoughts was how to deal with version control. If books evolve into discussions and are therefore essentially never finished, how do we decide which is the authoritative version? In short, he said, we don’t. Authority just won’t matter any more in the future. Much in the same way our lives evolve and never stop changing, so will these discourses and we will deal with documenting them the same way — with snapshots. This will be a hard sell for librarians, who aren’t used to making decisions about when to “snapshot” something, but with the right tools, could be the next logical iteration. Perhaps someone will even print these snapshots up, sew them together and put them in protective cover. Et voilá, we’re right back where we began.