Participation Literacy

The licentiate thesis is divided into four main parts and two appendixes. The four parts constitute this foreword, a reading guide, a conceptual and empirical introductory discussion to the Web 2.0 concept; finally a series of constructions based on the Web 2.0 concept and the cyborg figure. Appendix I is a short article called Technologically Navigating Cyborgs, presented at the EASST conference 2004 in Paris. Appendix II is a very short piece of fiction, written in Swedish. These appendixes might be read as a background to my interest in the Web 2.0 and the Cyborg concept.

The following story is about me and my way to the concept Web 2.0. In this story there is a thread you could call the history of Social Software. The thread begins in the 1940’s and ends in the Web 2.0 concept. It is not my goal to give an exhaustive and neutral history.

In his article Tracing the Evolution of Social Software, Christopher Allen traces the start of the evolution of social software with Vannevar Bush’s vision of the memex machine (2004). Bush wrote: “A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” (Bush, 1945). Bush’s words sounds like my own effort to store all media in my computer. In 1945 though, media was mostly books, since the music and film industry were just in its infancy and computer games, audiobooks and the Internet-era’s mountain of documents were still far away. It is interesting to note that the hardest thing to store is in fact books. One reason is difficulties in finding an acceptable DRM-model for e-books; another has to do with our endemic habits related to our long love for the book as a thing and not only a channel for information and knowledge. Few of us can imagine curling up in the sofa by the fire with a computer and some sort of a reading device, instead of the good old idea of a book we love so much. Still, media is a very important factor in social software, as much of the socialising is about communicating navigational structures to different kind of media. Books are still the black sheep of digital media. All efforts so far have failed to integrate books - in a large commercial scale - in the family of digital media.

But now – in the beginning of 2006 – we might be on the verge of a paradigm shift in the distribution and reading of books. The success of the Ipod concept has inspired Sony to do something similar in the world of books (Helm, 2005). The reason I have for my belief is due to several different, but cooperating phenomena. In a technical perspective there is an emerging technique called E-ink, which promises great things for the printing industry. The E-Ink technique creates text by electronically arranging thousands of tiny black and white capsules, creating an experience remarkably similar to reading a printed page. The only time it drains power from the battery is in turning pages, which means a battery will last for a very long time – Helm says 15 books. In a social perspective we have a generation with new, digital habits. For them, the e-book is probably going to be a natural step in the evolution of digital media. The rest of us will also cave in to the digital alternative, since computers and other communication technologies have grown to be a big part of our lives, compared to just five years ago. Lastly, we have the Ipod marketing experience fresh in mind. The Ipod – Itunes distribution chain has succeeded in a great task in convincing buyers that their new digital product has ‘invisible’ benefits to the old analogue one, despite some seemingly convincible advantages for the analogue product – you can rip it to your computer and have a digital copy free of any restrictions. The price though is a heavy argument here. In Sweden, January 2006, a digital cd costs approximately 50% of the price for a cd in one of the cheaper Internet shops. This price depends on the competition to Itunes raised in the digital music industry around the shift of 2005/2006. Helm says e-books in the Sony project are going to cost like a mass market pocket book, and the reading device will be at the same price level as the Ipod. Only time will tell if this project is going to find the key to unlock the consumers’ good old reading habits. We could talk about a new era when the digital book sale surpasses the sale of the more than 500 year old Gutenberg book, though it is not impossible that the role of the text has already passed and that the future belongs to other narrative forms. In twenty years or so, a thesis might not consist of a single letter. Perhaps new academic forms will develop with images and voices as point of departure.

Books and other traditional text formats have always played a big role in the evolution of social software. Books are the blueprint of storing information and communication. Sending letters is the blueprint for long distance communication. Books and reading experiences, along with music, film and games, have always been an important subject in the messages of social software. I have dealt with e-book’s since the end of the 1990’s.

Tags: augmentation, collaborative filtering, CSCW, cyborg, DRM, E ink, ebook, groupware, haraway, hci, memex, situated knowledge, social navigation, transdiciplinary, web 2.0

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