Comments on: Will Form Follow Function?

By: half a week’s worth of link posts « Aging Hipster Quarterly

half a week’s worth of link posts « Aging Hipster Quarterly — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:20:28 +0000

[...] http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/30/will-form-follow-function/ [...]

By: thorn

thorn — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 18:05:04 +0000

i agree w/ mr. esposito, above. pamphlets are great to read, and entirely annoying to keep track of — and find again — if they are discrete objects made of pieces of paper. the electronic format is completely ideal for reading – and re-finding and re-reading — any short-form text, be it a literary work or a technical article.

but. e-texts still have a beginning, a middle and an end; just like printed texts. e-versions can be absolutely any length — hugely long, or iiiiittty bitty. there is no real need for them to be linear; but verbal communication is linear, and written texts — be they e- or print — in their most common forms are still analogues of speech. this seems to obtain even in cases in which footnotes are present. maaaaybe this will change..

but i don’t know. yeah, we now have music as infinite ‘singles’ rather than having it all canned into ‘album’ form. but will a piece of music ever integrate hyperlinks into other bits of sound? will it become interactive, or will our experience of a piece still be artist-driven? really not sure.

might humans’ essentially linear experience of time’s flow ultimately prove to be the limiting factor of any digital undertaking? hm.

By: Joseph J. Esposito

Joseph J. Esposito — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:19:35 +0000

Ebooks enable the reemergence of the pamphlet as a literary form. I look forward to this, as many nonfiction books seem to me to exhaust themselves after fifty pages. But how does one call attention to such works? A trade book calls attention to itself by sitting on a table at Barnes & Noble. The marketing of a pamphlet in digital form poses large problems; even well-written work may fail to find a readership. Where are the uber-bloggers who will arise as the tastemakers for the proliferating digital pamphlets?