While it has the lofty pretentions (and near constant references) of great dystopian novels like 1984 or Fahrenheit 451, The Book ultimately falls flat. For starters, the premise of the story is ridiculous: in this future society, all paper books have been destroyed in the "Great Recycling" and replaced with e-readers that the government controls and feeds content to. This radically pro-environmentalist society is somehow founded on the belief that paper (a renewable resource that is easily recycled) is more dangerous to the environment than e-readers (made from all manner of non-renewable metals that are extremely damaging to the environment to extract, not to mention the environmental cost of the electricity needed to power them). Really? This highly implausible future seems to be fueled by the author’s own anti-environmental ideology, something that I honestly wouldn’t have a problem with had it been handled with a little more energy and conviction (think Robert A. Heinlein). The two main protagonists bond over the fact that they don’t care about the environment – but why? This seems like a fairly key element to understanding their motivation for rebelling against their society, but it’s just glossed over.



The feeling of "glossing over" is a by-product of the author’s writing style. The author spends an inordinate amount of time describing things rather than showing them to the reader. Almost nothing we learn about the protagonist (Holden) comes through his actions or his interactions with other characters – all of his background comes in dull expository dumps. We learn, for instance, that Holden grows in confidence as he moves along in his journey, ultimately becoming the leader of his little group. But rather than show us this growth to interpret for ourselves, the author just tells us this and moves along.



As for the plot itself, it’s not nearly as terrible. Holden learns of the shenanigans of the Book and the how the government uses it to observe and control its population. He rebels, finds allies, and gets punished by said government. With such uninteresting characters, it’s hard to really care at all what happens to them, but the various twists and turns at least provided some engagement in this dull book.



My biggest problem, however, is that The Book espouses the simpleminded idea that the trustworthiness of a work is determined by its medium of delivery – simply because a printed work is less easily changed, it cannot be controlled or manipulated. I’m guessing the author has never walked into a paper bookstore and seen a "revised and updated" edition, because paper can be changed as well! If anything, technology in publishing (from the printing press to the PC) has nearly always been a source of democratization.



Whether you prefer a printed book or a digital one is ultimately an issue of personal preference, not an issue of validity.



View all my reviews

Making Future Magic, a project by Dentsu London. Pretty great.

Also, I’ve really gotten into reading every single thing that Cory Doctorow has ever written. Eventually, I’m certain to mine some of the wonderfully weird and amazing things that he brings up in his books for this blog.

Getting really annoyed, however, always seems to inspire something for this blog, and it’s no different this Sunday morning. My employer recently distributed some really nice coffeemugs to everyone in the company. Normally, “really nice” is not a word combination I’d use to describe a coffeemug, but this one earns it due to its extra big handle that affords room for 4 of my fingers as I hold it.

The only problem is, I can’t train myself to actually use all 4 fingers. Since 99% of all the coffeemugs I have ever used have been designed for only 3 of my fingers, I instinctively grab this one in the same way. It’s uncomfortable as hell, and I am made aware of this mug’s (supposedly) accomodating design everytime I reach for it.

Even though the designer of this coffeemug has intended a comfortable, (dare I say) luxurious beverage experience for thier end user, it fails miserably because the user has developed an adaptation for living without it that simply cannot be unlearned.

Maybe when human evolution has gifted us a sixth finger, I’ll be okay. For now I’ll just have to use this mug for a pen holder.

Tool vendors will also be under increasing pressure, and some will suffer for their inability to adapt to changing demands. Most notable is the shift of high-cost applications to the Web/cloud. In most cases, this will involve substitution of tools: photo, video, and audio editing, for example. Most of the new editing tools are not yet as powerful as their desktop counterparts, but they are “good enough” for many purposes.

Hey, we even picked (some of) the same words. But in my defense, I didn’t read it until today. This “good enough” trend is something I think that will be ongoing. Paul Thurrott keeps talking about how Microsoft’s version of Office in the cloud will somehow blow away what Google Docs can do in terms of UI and features and such. I think this type of thinking is a bit backward – software is no longer going to be judged purely on how long the feature list is. The real questions are going to be about reliability, access, and portability. Can I be certain that my data is secure? Can I take my data and plug it in somewhere else? Can I share that data with someone else and collaborate on it?

Moore’s Law still a law: electronics get cheaper, faster, smaller, etc. Was it really a surprise that this age-old law pretty much kept pace? There were a couple pundits on the most recent episode of TWiT who brought up how Moore’s Law has managed to continue. I suppose it is personally mindblowing that I can buy a 1 TB drive for about $100, or that broadband internet has finally reached a price that I can afford (at the start of this decade I was still slumming it in 56K). But I really hate it when people start saying stuff like, “back in my day sodas cost just a nickel.” Just because people do it with tech doesn’t really make it interesting. So I’ll leave this one alone.

The power of “good enough”: I suppose this is not as surprising, given the shambles our economy has been in, but it’s interesting how it has changed the computer industry. Nearly all non-Mac computers sold in the past year falls in the super low-priced and small-sized netbook category, from which we can probably infer a couple things: 1) When it comes to computers, people (aside from gamers and the one or two graphic designers who haven’t had their jobs outsourced) don’t really need much power. 2) The web/cloud has taken over much of what we do on our computers. I won’t go so far as to say application-based computing has been completely replaced by the cloud (I doubt it ever will be), but it’s likely that the more interesting things that come out of the next decade will be cloud-based.

It’s also interesting what this will mean for the education space. Historically, the drive is towards bigger, better, faster, but I think this move towards “good enough” may drive down the desire for more complex, immersive learning spaces. Whenever there is talk about the future of learning, it almost always ends with some discussion of virtual reality, Second Life, etc. (I know I have been guilty of writing some papers that end like this). It’s not surprising, since I think we all yearn in our hearts for that super-cool holodeck experience that science fiction has taught us to hope for (we all yearned for the flying car, and look how that turned out). But reality is a bit more complex. Second Life is not exactly the most intuitive system – both for the end-user and the developer – and it demands a computer with some power behind it. The few Second Life classes I have been in have been in were so wracked with technical difficulties, I barely got anything out of it. I think by the end of the next decade, we’ll drop the hype surrounding immersive learning and realize that it’s only worth the hassle for a few specific applications.

Of course, this doesn’t apply if you happen to be a student athlete at USF, where they give away computers for nothing.

The ubiquity of mobile devices: This is probably the single biggest change that we’ve experienced in terms of technology. Cell phones were already pretty common back in 2000, but now they’re everywhere (case in point: I now have one), and they do far more than just make phone calls. For this, we can probably thank the iPhone for making simple and user-friendly what was previously complex. Browsing the web with Mobile Safari is nearly identical to browsing on the computer, and it is a far cry from the clunky, tiny, text-based mobile sites that you would have to access on a dumbphone. Additionally, the growth of low-cost applications for the iPhone platform has transformed the phone into what is essentially a handheld computer. There’s some interesting movement in the education space with this aspect, as some medical schools are using iPhone apps to provide instruction and Stanford is using iPhones to make music.

In terms of cost of access, however, the cost of a mobile data plan is still to high for the likes of me. This is probably the reason that, despite its impact on technology as a whole, the use of mobile devices in an educational context is still fairly limited. There’s been a lot of hype about podcasts, mobile applications, etc. in this space, but it hasn’t amounted to any significant change. A lot of podcast in education research found that even though students can listen to them practically anywhere on their mobile phones or media players, most of them still listened to them at home, on their computers. In order to take advantage of the mobile nature of these education technologies, the context still has to be right – if you’re just listening to a lecture, you’re probably going to get more out of it while listening in a quiet room than anywhere else. With some of the more advanced GPS capabilities on Android phones, I’ll be intrigued to see if educators will take advantage of these technologies for more location-based instruction.

Case in point, this excerpt from an article by Susan G. Strother in the November 2, 1997 edition of the Orlando Sentinel:

With a click of the mouse, William Chinda caused images to flicker across the computer screen.

He saw a shopping mall, a man in Mickey Mouse ears, the same man laughing hysterically and waving his arms. The frenetic scenes, titled ”Inertia: An Examination of the Narcoleptic Cyborg,” lasted for several minutes until William moved on.

”This is pretty cool,” said the Cypress Creek High School junior. ”But it’s a little weird.”

Welcome to cyber-culture, where the computer is as much a part of art as traditional paints and canvas. The Orlando Museum of Art this weekend is home to more than 50 pieces of computer-driven artwork – composed by people who call themselves ”digital artists” – in Art & Technology ’97: Beyond the Virtual Edge.

Really? I have the opportunity to make a statement that will somehow encapsulate the importance of technology on the future of creative endeavors and the best I could come up with was THAT?

When I was 16, I desperately wanted to do something with my life that would involve art and computers, and I remember really looking forward to that exhibition. Unfortunately, what I found was fairly uninteresting, and the Sentinel reporter caught me completely off guard.

—

Of course, when I did know exactly what to say, the results were not much better. This is a letter to the editor, published on February 3, 1999, in the Sentinel:

FOR NEARLY 10 years, I have lived in the suburban wasteland midway between downtown Orlando and Disney World. What I see every day driving these neighborhoods is disturbing: traffic jams, lack of trees and a general feeling of artificiality. It reminds me very much of Los Angeles – a city full of people who found the American dream in nice cars and suburban houses but lost touch with the city.

Light rail won’t guarantee that Orlando won’t become New Los Angeles, but it may just slow the process by stopping the dreaded sprawl monster that is responsible for the decline of American cities. William Chinda, ORLANDO

That was off the charts on the pretentiousness scale. It actually reads more like an artist’s statement (I’m pretty sure it was adapted from one) than anything else.

At the time, I remember reading nothing but architecture magazines and articles about new urbanism. I also spent my days slogging through traffic to get to school, dreaming of the day when I could get out of Orlando. To me, the city felt like a backwater that would be left even further behind without any serious reconsideration of its transit scheme, which was being vehemently debated at the time. A decade later, things still seem contentious and unclear.

—

Before the Internet, I remember going to the library and being amazed by the vast number of drawers that held nothing but microfiche of newspaper articles. The machinery was so damn complicated, I never quite figured out how to work it, having to bug the librarians for help anytime I wanted to look for something.

But now I can find any article I want, “with a click of the mouse.”

Unfortunately for me, I won’t be able to write a blog 10 years from now complaining how my terribly pretentious and nonsensical writing from now is still on Google.

That’s a video from Penn State professor Christopher Long (via Cole Camplese). Nothing new, but it efficiently sums up everything there is to know about the use of blogging as a teaching tool.

I’ve read multitudes of blogs for years, but the motivation for doing one myself came out of a Distance Learning course I took several years ago. If nothing else, I’m grateful to have learned that the web is a powerful medium for not only consumption, but also creation.

The best resource I’ve found so far is Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave, which I’ve slowly been making my way through.

More to come on this.