[BookCamp] Why Everything On The Internet Is The Opposite Of How It Is In Print

The next session's title, Why Everything On The Internet Is The Opposite Of How It Is In Print, intrigued me, and prompted some great discussion. Session leader, Mary Harrington, outlined what she thinks are the five qualities of books:

- physicality
- fixity
- boundedness
- authority
- universality

The physical shape of books is underlined by the cost of production and thinking in units — how many you can fit into a shipping box or bookshelf. Books as physical objects are bought and sold by unit, so making money from copyright is logical, but if you are selling content on the web which is not confined by physical shape, you need to find new business models.

There was a pretty interesting discussion generated from this, with some useful input from Cory Doctorow who provided legally recognised definitions when we were struggling to define ideas, but sadly had to leave halfway through to do his share of looking after the baby (which was disappointing for the session, but also lovely for his wife, I think). I was taking part in the discussion quite a lot myself, so my notes from this point don't make a lot of sense, but here are some of Mary's ideas I wrote down:

Web-based stuff "almost needs redundancy" to make it believable. There is always something more interesting to look at on the internet, which incurs the need for short, tactical posts to grab the attention. Printed matter conveys authority; even vanity publishing conveys more authority than online writing if the printed word is considered more valid than non-print. An interesting example of publishers who confer status is science publisher Nature who don't even pay their authors, because getting published by them confers so much status that writers don't mind (which could actually be the biggest scam around, if you stop to think about it!)

Instead of fixity on the web, there's version control, but even (for example) the Wayback Machine is an unreliable record of what went before. "People don't publish for posterity; they publish to share" so it doesn't seem to matter to them that it disappears after a while. There has to be a space for people to engage with the work or it's not going to work.

This stuff makes sense to me, but there were some ideas that I didn't agree with because they oversimplified into an either/or scenario that was a bit didactic. For example, the idea that "the web is searchable which makes knowledge ambiguous" seemed specious, as libraries are searchable, too; full of physical books that can be referred to on every subject). The idea that, online, "you have to write as a character" is another one I have to take issue with, as there are no hard and fast rules about writing online; you don't have to do anything, and in any case most print-based writing is often done with a specific tone or "voice" that represents the character of the author, so it's not just limited to web-based writing.

There was also a brief look at the interesting development of formerly analogue material that has been digitised and then turned back into analogue material, with the amazing BibliOdyssey blog cited as an example, which amused me, considering the way people had been venerating the written word over imagery, as it's very image-heavy, basically an art gallery of a blog. Curated by the mysterious peacay, who hunts through online archives to find interesting illustrations and posts them on the blog, a selection of which have now been collected in a lovely hardcover book published by FUEL (I was lusting after it just before Christmas, and almost bought it for my mum just so that I could have access to it myself!).

This was another great session inspiring me to think about lots of good stuff, although I am sad that attending it meant that I missed some interesting presentations upstairs at PaperCamp, especially Sawa Tanaka's incredible illustration work with edible paper, glow-in-the-dark ink and thermochromatic ink, which sounds amazing.