Screening will change everything else

04-Screening (1:03) (49 views)

"Het scherm gaat over 'vloeibaarheid' en vluchtige creativiteit"

Vroeger ...
In ancient times culture revolved (draaide) around the spoken word. (85)

Maar vandaag ... People of the Screen
But today more than 5 billion (miljard) screens illuminate (verlichten) our lives. Digital display manufacturers (beeldschermproducenten) will crank out (uitspuwen) 3,8 billion new additional screens per year. That’s nearly one new screen each year for every human on earth We will start putting watchable screens on any flat surface (oppervlak). Words have migrated from wood pulp to pixels on computers, phones, laptops, game consoles, televisions, billboards, and tablets. Letters are no longer fixed in black ink on paper, but flitter (fladderen) on a glass surface in a rainbow of colors as fast as our eyes can blink. Screens fill our pockets, briefcases, dashboards, living room walls, and the sides of buildings. They sit in front of us when we work - regardless (los van) of what we do. We are now People of the Screen. (p. 86)

People of the Book
This has set up the current (huidige) culture class between people of the Book and People of the Screen. The People of the Book today are the good hardworking people who make newspapers, magazines, the doctrines of law, the offices of regulation, and the rules of finance. They live by the book, by the authority derived from others. The foundation of this culture is ultimately housed in texts. They are all on the same page, so to speak. (p. 86-87)

Overal schermen

But today most of us have become People of the Screen. People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence (eerbied) for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. They gravitate toward movie screens, TV screens, computer screens, iPhone screens, VR goggle screens, tablet screens, and in the near future massive Day-Glo megapixel screens plastered on every surface. Screen culture is a world of constant flux, endless sound bites, quick cuts, and floating first impressions. Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to everything else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audiences themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth. Fixed copies don’t matter as much as floating access. Screen culture is fast, like a 30-second movie trailer, and as liquid and open-ended as a Wikipedia page. (p. 87-88)

Twee 'zielen'
People of the Book favor solutions by law, while People of the Screen favor technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures of books and screens occurs within us as individuals as well. If you are an educated modern person, you are conflicted by these two modes. This tension is the new norm. (p. 88)

We lezen meer dan ooit!
Educators, intellectuals, politicians, and parents in the last half of the last century worried deeply that the TV generation would be unable to write. Screens were blamed for an amazing list of societal ills (maatschappelijke kwalen). But of course we all kept watching. And for a while it did seem as if nobody wrote, or could write, and reading scores trended down for decades. But to everybody’s surprise, the cool, interconnected, ultrathin screens on monitors, the new TVs, and tablets at the beginning of the 21st century launched an epidemic of writing that continues to swell (aanzwellen). The amount of time people spend reading has almost tripled since 1980. By 2015 more than 60 trillion pages have been added to the World Wide Web, and that total grows by several billions a day. Each of these pages was written by somebody. Right now ordinary citizens compose 80 million blog posts per day. Using their thumbs instead of pens, young people around the world collectively write 500 million quips per day from their phones. (p. 89)

Kijken is het nieuwe lezen
This new activity has new characteristics. Screens are always on; we never stop glaring at them, unlike with books. This new platform is very visual and it gradually merges (mengt) words with moving images. On the screen words zip around and float over images, serving as footnotes or annotations, linking to other words of images. You might think of this new medium as books we watch or television we read. (p. 89-90)

Screening zal ALLES veranderen
The fate of books is worth investigating in detail because books are simply the first of many media that screening will transform. First screening will change books, then it will alter libraries of books, then it will modify music and video, then it will disrupt games and education, and finally screening will change everything else. (p. 90)

Boek wordt 'boeken' (werkwoord)
The liquidity is just as true for the creation of books as for consumption. Think of a book in all its stages as process rather than artifact (‘een ding’). Not a noun (zelfstandig naamwoord), but a verb (een werkwoord). A book is more “booking” than paper or text. It is a becoming. It is a continuous flow of thinking, writing, researching, editing, rewriting, sharing, socializing, cognifying (slimmeren), unbundling, marketing, more sharing, and screening - a flow that generates a book along the way. Books, especially ebooks, are by-products of the booking process. Displayed on a screen, a book becomes a web of relationships generated by booking words and ideas. It connects readers, authors, characters, ideas, facts, notions, and stories. These relationships are amplified (versterkt), enhanced (verbeterd), widened, leveraged (‘versterkt’), and redefined by new ways of screening. (p. 93)

Aan teksten zullen we 'van alles' gaan toevoegen
We will find out that books never really wanted to be printed telephone directories, or hardware catalogs on paper, or paperback how-to books. These are jobs that screens and bits are much superior at - all that updating and searching - tasks that neither paper nor narratives are suited for. What those kinds of books have always wanted was to be annotated, marked up, underlined, bookmarked, summarized, crossreferenced, hyperlinked, shared, and talked to. Being digital allows them to do all that and more. (p. 93-94)

Monument voor De toren van Babel (Jorge Luis Borges)Lezen wordt een sociaal iets
Reading becomes social. With screens we can share not just titles of books we are reading, but our reactions and notes as we read them. Today, we can highlight a passage. Tomorow, we will be able to link passages. We can add a link from a phrase in the book we are reading to a contrasting phrase in another book we’ve read, from a word in a passage to an obscure dictionary, from a scene in a book to a similar scene in a movie. (p. 94)

Op weg naar een universele bibliotheek
Indeed, dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. The conventional vision of the book’s future assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on the shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to enliven (opvrolijken) it with his or her imagination. In this conventional vision, the main advantage (voordeel) of the coming digital library is portability (draagbaarheid) - the nifty (handige) translation of a book’s full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: In the universal library, no book will be an island. It’s all connected. (p. 95)

De echte magie
Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is crosslinked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of ebooks and etexts, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages. (p. 95)

Wikipedia als voorbeeld
You can get a sense of what this might be like by visiting Wikipedia. Think of Wikipedia as one very large book - a single encyclopedia - which of course it is. Most of its 34 million pages are crammed ('volgestort') with words underlined in blue, indicating those words are hyperlinked to concepts elsewhere in the encyclopedia. This tangle (wirwar) of relationships is precisely what gives Wikipedia - and the web - its immense force. Wikipedia is the first networked book. In the goodness of time, as all books become fully digital, every one of them will accumulate (opstapelen) the equivalent of blue underlined passages as each literary reference is networked within that book out to all other books. Each page in a book will discover other pages and other books. Thus books will seep (sijpelen) out of their bindings and weave themselves together into one large metabook, the universal library. The resulting collective intelligence of this synaptically connected library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single isolated book. (p. 95-96)

Binnen handbereik
Brewster Kahle, an archivist who is backing up the entire internet, says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he chants. “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world. It will be an achievement remembered for all time, like putting a man on the moon.” And unlike the libraries of old, which are restricted to the elite, this library would be truly democratic, offering every book in every language to every person alive on the planet. (p. 96-97)

Heden én verleden
Ideally, in such a complete library we should be able to read any article ever written in any newspaper, or journal. The universal library should also include a copy of every painting, photograph, film, and piece of music produced by all artists, present and past. Still more, it should include all radio and television broadcasts. Commercial too. Of course, the grand library naturally needs a copy of the billions of dead web pages no longer online and the tens of millions of blog posts now gone - the ephemeral (kortstondige) literature of our time. In short, the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time. (p. 97)

This is a very big library.
() All this material is currently contained in all the libraries and archives of the world. When fully digitized, the whole lot could be compressed (at current technological rates) onto 50-petabyte hard disks. Ten years ago you needed a building about the size of a small-town library to house 50 petabytes. Today the universal library would fill your bedroom. With tomorrow’s technology, it will all fit onto your phone. When that happens, the library of all libraries will ride in your purse or wallet - if it doesn’t plug directly into your brain with thin white cords. Some people alive today are surely hoping that they die before such things happen, and others, mostly the young, want to know what’s taking so long. (p. 97)

Professionals én amateurs (fans)
Over the next three decades, scholars and fans, aided by computational algorithms, will knit (breien) together the books of the world into a single networked literature. A reader will be able to generate a social graph of an idea, or a timeline of a concept, or a networked map of influence for any notion in the library. We’ll come to understand that no work, no idea stands alone, but that all good, true, and beautiful things are ecosystems of intertwined parts and related entities, past and present. (p. 99)

Playlists van 'boeken'
At the same time, once digitized, books can be unraveled (onrafeld) into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets (snippers) of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered (herschikte) books and virtual bookshelves (boekenplanken). Just as the music audience now juggles (goochelt) and reorders songs into new albums or playlists, the universal networked library will encourage the creation of virtual “bookshelves” - a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books - that form a library shelf’s worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these “bookshelves” or playlists for books will be published and swapped in the public commons. (p. 100)

Schermen stellen ons in staat 'alles' te 'lezen'
As portable screens become more powerful, lighter, and larger, they will be used to view more of this inner world. Hold an electronic tablet up as you walk along a street - or wear a pair of magic spectacles or contact lenses - and it will show you an annotated overlay of the real street ahead: where the clean restrooms (schone wc’s) are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 30 years semitransparent glasses will apply an informational layer to reality. If you pick up an object while peering through these spectacles, the object’s (or place’s) essential information will appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to “read” everything, not just text. (p. 105)

We are screening at all scales and sizes - from the IMAX to the Apple Watch. In the near future we will never be far from a screen of some sort. Screens will be the first place we’ll look for answers, for friends, for news, for meaning, for our sense of who we are and who we can be. (p. 106)

Twaalf technologische krachten die onze toekomst zullen vormen
01. Becoming (worden) - 02. Cognifying (slimmeren) - 03. Flowing (stromen) - 05. Accessing (toegangen) - 06. Sharing (delen) - 07. Filtering (filteren) - 08. Remixing (remixen) - 09. Interacting (interacteren) - 10. Tracking (tracken) - 11. Questioning (vragen) - 12. Beginning (beginnen)  

(donderdag 4 augustus 2016)
Hans van Duijnhoven

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