October 2, 2005
The day the metaphor flipped.
For years, I've been accustomed to the idea that websites have "pages" and blogs are "journals," and all the various manifestations of the metaphor of website as book. Yesterday, in the bookstore, I had the overwhelming sense that the books felt like websites. All those book covers were like the entry pages of websites, designed to get you to stop, hoping to draw you in and get you to spend some time inside. Were we really to buy these things and proceed through them front-to-back? Or do we pick them up and flip (click) around, with the most successful ones being sticky enough to get us to stay for an hour or so, and most of them, holding us for only a few seconds before we scan about for the next thing to give a instant's chance?
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5 comments:
Check your breakfast tea. Unbeknownst to you, a mischievous mouse may have slipped LSD in it while you slept.
And where the hell are the links?? That's what bugs me when I read books these days. Or when I write in a journal. Why can't I link? My mind is doing it!
On a similar note - I find myself killer frustrated when I can't just use the remote to click to a particular scene on a videocassette tape. (likewise with audiocassettes vs CDs. Interestingly enough, not the same with vinyl.)
Books will always have the advantage of requiring no infrastructure beyond a good light source (and an added plus their software will never be indanger of becoming obsolete, and when properly stored they will last centuries in legible condition)
However the advantages to digital texts are multitude and why more Colleges haven't encouraged a greater reliance on laptops and the elimination of the tonnage of books students are forced to buy at exorbitant prices strikes me as mostly being tied to those exobritant prices more than practicality or consideration for their students.
(As an aside, Prof. Althouse, have you considered going textbook-less for any of your classes, and instead relying solely on available on-line works? Seems like the legal field is one of the disciplines well suited towards purely digital instruction.)
XWL: The problem is that the judges are too verbose. Also students like hard copy to mark up.
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