- posted on
- June 3, 2008
- by Liz Danzico
Everything New is Old Again
For as far as we’ve come, are we just evolving back to where we started? As part a panel for The HappyCorp’s publishing workshop for New York’s Design Week recently, I helped field questions from an audience of online publishers. Their primary questions were about “RSS,” focused on ways they can improve the reading experience of their content through feed readers.
As I listened to my co-panelists answer, I heard them describing not new ways to design for reading in social environments, not new strategies for user engagement, but something pretty pedestrian: how to improve the isolated reading experience.
Designers are becoming more masterful at creating social experiences, yet reading with most feed readers is still much like reading a magazine or a book: isolated but portable, modular yet somewhat sequential. While that timing and sequence is controlled by the reader, it is still a solo experience.
A Good Return to Isolation?
Despite all our social tools, feed readers themselves are really pretty isolating, unsocial experiences. This now-well-quoted passage from Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You reveals just how unsocial the reading experience can be by imagining video games were invented before books:
“Books are tragically isolating. While [video] games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children.”
Feed readers are isolating too, encouraging readers away from where pre-meditated interaction can take place — comments, ratings, reviews, purchases. But at least feed readers aren’t sequential. Because users can control the complexity themselves, they do inspire some of the engaged action that is missing from a sequential reading experience.
The Right Retreat
Retreating into one’s reader might on the surface seem like a disengagement rather than a continued engagement — just like books to Johnson seem like a step back compared to video games. Books require quiet isolation to read; likewise feed readers require a step away from the original source of the content.
But while the experience of feed-reading may be isolating, it’s more akin to reading your magazine on a New York subway than it is like reading that same magazine in quiet isolation. You’re alone, but your people are never very far away.
Even still, I wonder: with all due respect to solitary reading time and reflection, are our behaviors in danger of returning to the isolated experience of reading?
Good food for thought. I’m curious to hear your take on the ‘involuntary effects’ of people reading content published via RSS vs. cracking open a book? For example, if I burn a blogs RSS feed and 10,000 other people burn that same feed how is that intrinsically different from a blog that only has 5 RSS subscribers, or better yet a book that’s been checked out of the library 10,000 times by different people? I’m not trying to be deep, just curious that’s all.
I use Google Reader for my RSS feads. Just recently they added the “share with a note” functionality. You used to be able to share something that came in your feeds, and it would show up in your contacts feeds. With the note, however, you can direct your contacts to s specific part of the article or point out the reason for sharing it in the first place. Google Reader also allows you to email the article directly from your feed list.
These are a few ways to break out of the isolation reading feeds can bring that I have found helpful.
I don’t see why the new social media wants to make everything a shared experience. Some things, reading may be one of them, is one of those things that I get great enjoyment out of on my own… whether or not 1,000 others are reading the same thing at the same time is probably irrelevant.
In the end there are functional communication differences between books and multimedia. Apples and oranges. Between a book and a movie, for example. Between a magazine article and a blog post.
The main thing to get their head around is until we have a computer screen that you can roll up, swat flies with and take to the toilet, and that feels like old dead trees, we’re going to have to treat them differently. Reading an e-book is difficult. Long blog posts, difficult.
Also, Clay Shirky’s statement comes to mind - the world before the printing press was a different world than the one that came before it. And the world with computers is a completely different world than a world without the internet. From a communication perspective it changed society.
So what can online publishers do? Mmm obviously use the multimedia to its strengths and stop trying to be a book.
And, maybe we’re waiting for a new RSS killer app that rethinks our expectations on this one. Lets start with the question - what exactly doesn’t the current solution give us?
Then build it and see if we get rich :)
sorry… typo - the world before the printing press was a different world than the one that came after it…
The printing press and the Internet are not just technology changes, Shirky points out, but social changes. The world is different.
cheers. Interesting post.
Andy: If there are any involuntary effects, I suspect they’re not totally dissimilar from the ones that cause different people to check a book out of the library 10,000 times. The same kinds of things may be true — popularity, impact, beauty, relevance — but their speed and momentum may be different.
Able: I hadn’t looked at Google Reader in a while. The “share” functionality is interesting and perhaps matches what Google has heard people say they want. But I don’t know. Somehow, I don’t buy it. If I retreat into a reader, even Google reader, do I want to share? I’m still not sure.