You May Be Able to Get There From Here

First Monday is a peer-reviewed journal of the Internet, which always contains interesting findings about the Internet and cyber culture.  A new issue of First Monday hit the streets this month:

• Motivations of cybervolunteers in an applied distributed computing environment
• In search of prosumption: Youth and the new media in Hong Kong
• The dangers of Webcrawled datasets
• Sociological implications of scientific publishing: Open access, science, society, democracy and the digital divide
• Electronic portfolio use in Thailand

Title: 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form
Author: Dom Sagolla
Publisher: Wiley
Pages:  208

I was dubious of 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form after reading the author’s description of a book that “demonstrates the effect of hypertext on literature by redefining the concept of ‘the book’ using Twitter and iPhone to start”. Reading the book’s opening chapters, I realized it was nothing of the sort. It’s pointless to hold the book to this standard, or what its publisher, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., says is a Strunk and White for those of us who use social media. The author too liked the comparison to The Elements of Style. In an interview, Sagolla says, “I have that book,” and he wants his book to be a “compliment, not a replacement— it’s an update.” To this, let Strunk and White respond,

“When you overstate, the reader will be instantly on guard, and everything that has preceded your overstatement as well as everything that follows it will be suspect in his mind because he has lost confidence in your judgement or your poise.”

The Elements of Style, Part Five

To be fair, these overstatements of 140 Characters value are drawn from marketing statements, so I’ll return to the book where Sagolla will “place Twitter within a lager context of the modern short form of composition.” This is an overstatement, yet his definition of style is rather modest and squishy, “Who is anyone to teach you about style? Style is the sound your words make in the mind. It is the tone taken when you are read aloud by someone else. Style is the ineffable, immeasurable spark of life in the text. Style is a mystery.”

What is the book really about?

Like the Elements of Style, 140 Characters is separated into five parts. The first two parts of the book, on the surface, are about style. The first part of the book discusses how to make your tweets more interesting and descriptive. The second part explains how to make your Twitter style unique, how to expand your Twitter audience, how to repost (retweet) other tweets, how to use hyperlinks on Twitter, and how you can invent your own words and style on Twitter.

The latter three parts, are less about style and writing. Part three, Master, is about how to be successful at Twitter. Part four is hard to summarize: it discusses programming, imitating other Twitter users, and a chapter about iterative writing, which is a confusing topic.¹ The final part is about creating series of tweets, the value of using words and fragments instead of sentences, and how Sagolla created an iPhone framework for books, including 140 Characters.

Much of this book is about how be an interesting person to follow on Twitter, or how not to be annoying. There are etiquette suggestions: Would you send it in a letter? Does anyone really care what your eating? Most of these suggestions can be reduced to considering how what you write will be received by your followers, before you write it. Beyond suggestions for tweeting, the book gives advice on how to measure your relevance on Twitter, which is gathered from how many people follow you, repost your tweets, and other statistics. Some of the tools discussed, such as TweetEffect, which shows when people have followed or un-followed you on a tweet-by-tweet basis, are quite interesting.

What makes the book interesting?

It’s worth mentioning that Sagolla sold the idea for this book after writing and article about the early history of Twitter, How Twitter Was Born, which is reworked as the introduction to the book. It’s this history and Sagolla’s thoughts about Twitter that I found to be the most interesting part of the book, but this content is also the most audacious. For example, here’s why there needs to be a style book for Twitter:

We stand at a frontier in writing. This wilderness grows wilder and less civilized as more writers create ever more content. We must establish a form to this frontier, and develop 140 characters as a standard worthy of the word literature.

Or, what does Twitter mean for other forms of writing?

Short messaging services, and the rich media applications that magnify them, are augmenting society one layer at a time. Superfluous, outmoded forms of communication and consumption are rapidly being replaced with new models. This is happening so rapidly that the old guard barely has time to report on the fact of its own demise.

I’m guessing, since it’s not clarified, that the old guard is newspapers and printed forms of communication, which actually spend quite a bit of time reporting on their own demise. But, those who are losing their jobs at newspapers need not worry; They can become Twitter journalists:

You think you want to be a Twitter journalist? You’ll need to check your facts, provide a truly unique perspective, and most of all lead with action. Do this with fairness, accuracy, and freedom from bias, and you will always have a job.

Finally, how will short form communication make us more free?

Democracy travels in wee packets of ideas, words shaped for speed and accuracy, arriving in moments of need. Now is the best time for free speech; it is blooming all around us. Letters packed into the crannies of text messaging programs, traded between friends and lovers, are the seeds of hope for a more literate generation.

Why the book is difficult to read

If I wanted to argue that Twitter and related forms of communication are bad news for the future of reading and writing, I would use 140 Characters as a example. This is hardly my contention, nor do I believe this book will influence how people compose words outside of Twitter input boxes. Still, if Sagolla’s method of writing were widely imitated or if his writing instructions were taken seriously, this would be really troubling. Sagolla’s advice for people who have too much to Twitter about is to make their tweets into a book. That’s what he did,

Once you have a phrase, simply adding action to that phrase (or a subject) will provide sentence structure. Review The Elements of Style and pick your sentence apart. Perhaps your phrases merit separate sentences. Soon you’ll discover a paragraph has grown around your word.

This entire book was written using a similar system derived from the short form: Fragment. Then there is a sentence. Sentences become paragraphs. Inch by inch, a book is written.

Indeed, the author’s style reads like a collection of fragments. While the author done more than copy a bunch of tweets together, the organization of phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters is sloppy and disjointed. There are many sentences like this, “Plant words like seeds. Increase is not about excess, but about proliferation.” As in this example, the book’s advice is rarely expressed with concrete English. The sound this language make is your mind is that of marketing catchphrases and self-help maxims: “Speak like a leader. Your aren’t merely describing something, you are commanding it to be so. Write yourself out of a stuck situation. Write your conscience.” Moreover, I would guess that there are more fragments- or words-as-sentences than there are sentences in the book. As Jeremy Schultz writes, there are not many complete thoughts in Sagolla’s writing,

“I found 140 Characters to be ultimately a disappointment, a difficult book to read—too many random thoughts, not enough organization, and difficult to digest. I felt like I was reading a collection of quotations or sentences, each one making sense and seeming to be a valuable bit of insight, but not gelling together into a well-structured book.”

The overall organization of the book is just as scattered as it’s paragraphs. The sections and chapters seem like arbitrary markers and, as the book goes on, the sections get shorter and less cohesive. As mentioned in a summary of part five, the final “bonus” chapter does not sum up the various decisions the careful writer of short form must make; rather, it becomes a advertisement for Sagolla’s new business, Dollar Apps.

For as much as the writer may lack lucid style, my inkling was to a greater fault: a writer who wants to be taken seriously, but does not take the time to seriously write.

Does the book redefine the concept of the book?

Again, holding the author to the claim that 140 Characters would mean something new for electronic books, the 140 Characters hypertext edition iPhone application has some nice features, but it’s not novel or great. It has copy and paste, hypertext, web browsing, multimedia features. However, It’s lacking features that are commonplace in most electronic book applications, like a search feature. And, it’s also missing technology that most dusty, old books have, i.e. a bibliography, a notes section, or an index.

There are a few extra features. There’s a recommendation page that recommends the author’s favorite iPhone applications. Two books are listed, but these too are applications, not books!) There are links to three videos and about 30 pictures. The twitter feed for the book, @thebook, is included in application, but, unlike any other Twitter application I’ve used, the messages are truncated (see photo).

The use of hypertext in the book is bland. Many things in the body text that should be linked, such as twitter usernames, are not. When navigating from the text to the web and back, your place in the text is often not anchored correctly, so you return to an earlier part of the text. The links in the table of contents don’t link to chapters in the book, which is really annoying. Most of the links are to tweets and other links are often to uninteresting places on the web, like Wikipedia articles, or to the author’s website and businesses.

1. Sagolla explains how software programs are improved in small iterations, which are tracked and versioned, not unlike the track changes feature in a word processing application. This notion can apply to writing, but is more helpful with long form writing that is produced by several writers and editors. This metaphor is dropped after being introduced, and the rest of the chapter is about experimenting with other short form writing and playing with words, which is confusing. [↩]

Paul Auster, novelist and poet, talks about why the novel, and the book, will persist in the digital age.

The complete interview with Auster is available at Big Think. Auster was responding to Phil Roth’s gloomy prediction of the novel’s future:

The full interview with Roth is on the Daily Beast’s Vimeo page.

Polaroid by Marion, http://www.flickr.com/people/mironabside/

Sam Jordison in the Guardian Books Blogs looks back on Douglas Coupland’s novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture. Jordison points out that much of Coupland’s novel may be lost on reader’s now:

Nor can Coupland be held responsible for the passing of time. The fact that the book is so tied-in to its era is also a mark of how well he was able to situate it. Even so, reading Generation X almost 20 years after it was written is a strange experience. So much of it has become engrained that it’s surprising to be reminded that it was once new – that one person coined all those ideas and terms. But it’s also unsettling because so much now seems distant. In the middle of a recession, it’s hard to feel sympathy for Coupland’s clever-clever characters, Andy, Claire and Dag, as they sit around the pool in Palm Springs and affect depression because their jobs aren’t fulfilling enough. They seem fortunate, innocent and irritating.

Yet, despite the aging of Generation X and the aging the words Coupland used and invented to describe this generation¹, it is still worth reading:

Gradually, however, to my surprise, I found myself warming to the book. Taken together, the stories began to offer a pleasingly skewed, whimsical view of the world. The adjectival excesses became forgivable when so much of the writing was also lovely (”Starved for affection, terrified of abandonment, I began to wonder if sex was really just an excuse to look deeply into another human being’s eyes”). The lead narrator Andy’s moaning also began to seem less superficial and more universally applicable. We might now think him lucky to have a job, but his deeper concerns still touch us all. Coupland teases these out with such gentle skill that I wanted to put my arm around the poor guy by the time he was saying things like: “I’m just jealous of how unafraid Tyler [his younger brother]’s friends are of the future. Scared and envious.

So what initially seems like a selfish complaint about graduate life at the fag-end of Reganism starts to take on wider significance. It’s a quiet meditation on transience, futility, forging a personal morality. It’s also an entertainingly raucous look at how to have fun in the face of such concerns: at the pleasures and pains of family life and at friendship.

Related Readings:

• James Miller of The Observer reviews Generation A.
• Generation X: The Slackers Who Changed the World

1. Did Coupland coin the term, McJob? [↩]

I recently discovered a profile of Piotr Wozniak and his creation, SuperMemo, written by Gary Wolf last year in Wired. SuperMemo is a database and program that, using an algorithm, provides a person with repetitive, timed review of facts and other memorized items— its computational flash cards, not unlike what we all used in grade school, and biology students continued to use in college.

“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?”

“Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains.”

Photo: Patrick Voigt

The eccentricities of Wozniak seem easy to point out. For instance, “One of his most heartfelt wishes is that the world have one language and one currency so this could all be handled more efficiently. He’s appalled that Poland is still not in the Eurozone. He’s baffled that Americans do not use the metric system. For two years he kept a diary in Esperanto.” But Wolf takes care in the article to consider how the  idiosyncrasies of Wozniak the person are revealed in his program. Despite some early and sustained commercial success, SuperMemo has never changed how computer users remember things. (Indead, the current trend (e.g. Remember the Milk and other ‘Getting Things Done’ applications, too numerous to list as examples) is toward rapid capturing information and systematically storing it.) Yet, as Wolf observes, this is probably not why SuperMemo faulterd as a product:

“… Wozniak has ridden SuperMemo into uncharted regions of self-experimentation. In 1999, he started making a detailed record of his hours of sleep, and now he’s working to correlate that data with his daily performance on study repetitions. Psychologists have long believed there’s a correlation between sleep and memory, but no mathematical law has been discovered. Wozniak has also invented a way to apply his learning system to his intake of unstructured information from books and articles, winnowing written material down to the type of discrete chunks that can be memorized, and then scheduling them for efficient learning.”

More over,

“… one of Wozniak’s friends who worked as a manager at the company during its infancy, thinks that Wozniak’s focus on his own learning has  tunted the development of his invention. “Piotr writes this software for himself,” says Murakowski, now a professor of electrical engineeringat the University of Delaware. “The interface is just impossible.”

There are several ancestors to SuperMemo, I’ll list the applications that are maintained and free.:

• The Mnemonsyne Project, a cross-platform research and study application.
• Genius, a memorization program for OSX
• Anki, which is an application I’ll be trying out to refresh my Spanish vocabulary and commit some math principles to memory
• spicyelephant.com/, is a web-based implementation of the concept

Writers and thinker Bruce Sterling, and his alias Argento Bruno*  have hypothesized about our current century.

• The True 21st Century Begins, Argento Bruno
• 2009 Will Be a Year of Panic, Bruce Sterling

In Argento’s reading of history, there was a gap between the last century and the current one:

Eight years late, the 20th century has finally departed us this year. It will never return.

The “true” 20th century — the Communist century — began in 1914 and ended in 1989. We are now in the true 21st century.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where “history ended.” Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Argento considers differences in American and European sentiment: How a shared political and economic history, foremost the wars of the 20th century, give members of the two continents very different answers to political and cultural challenges of the future and the economic turmoil that will surely overshadow the next decade. He is, nonetheless, optimistic:

The year to come is best approached as a learning opportunity. It offers a golden chance to bury our dead prejudices and learn how to properly feed the living. Once we stop shaking all over and scolding Americans, we will recognize the tremendous potential this new century offers the people of the world. The sun still shines, the grass still grows, we are still human. If we stopped pretending to be puppets of an invisible hand, we would not fret over the loss of the 20th century’s strings. We might see that life is sweet

* It’s classic, but 21st century use of a pseudonym— Bruce Sterling is Bruno Argento.

From a recent lecture, The Brief and Glorious Life of Web 2.0, and what comes next:

Okay, “webs” are not “platforms.” I know you’re used to that idea after five years, but consider taking the word “web” out, and using the newer sexy term, “cloud.” “The cloud as platform.” That is insanely great. Right? You can’t build a “platform” on a “cloud!” That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!

Technology writer, Steven  Levy, says that everyday, virtual reality has arrived, and he sites three popular products that achieve VR:

When we shred on a plastic Les Paul or Explorer in Guitar Hero (or Stratocaster in its competitor, Rock Band), break a back sweat on the Wii balance board, or pinch and stretch a Google Map on the iPhone, we may not know it, but we’re fulfilling a promise. Almost two decades ago, the tech world was obsessed with virtual reality. Computer scientists, geeky journalists, venturesome academics, and heat seekers in general elbowed their way into places like the NASA Ames Research Center to indulge in VR. They donned awkward helmets with tiny screens and speakers that immersed them in the equivalent of a computer-generated Habitrail.