In an e-mail exchange, Antonio Goncalves, one of the organizers of Devoxx France, pondered the following:
Data written in books a 1,000 years ago are still readable. What about the data we are creating now? Will it be accessible in 20 years time? 1,000 years time? If so, how will we create it? How will we consume it?
These are the questions we’re going to contemplate here today.
Thomas Jefferson famously declared, “I cannot live without books.” This was more than just a personal sentiment. Jefferson understood the power that information and language has. When his family home in Shadwell burned in 1770, Jefferson most lamented the loss of his books, the loss of information. What this incident taught him was the value of copying information in order to preserve and share it. Imagine if a library burned today? Would it even phase us? Consider why.
The preservation and transfer of information is arguably the most important topic to civilization.
To the computer, text is an abstract entity – a stream of 0s and 1s. As a writer, of course, the meaning is everything. The information we want to represent is intimately linked to how it is stored.
That’s where we come in.
Information is the “I” in IT. We could very well be its stewards, so it’s vital that we call attention to it and treat it responsibly.
What’s relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they’re cooperating, not how clever the individuals are.
Does our choice of communication method enhance or deteriorate our ability and effectiveness to communite? In 20 years, will we all be communicating in Mandarin, English or Emoji? Will plain text formats be king or will we still be wrestling with WYSIWYG editors?
In order to understand how to predict the future, we must understand our past and how we’re connected to it.
It’s right here in France that we’re connected by information to some of our earliest ancestors. The oldest and most well-preserved figurative cave painting are found in Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave, dating to around 30,000 BP (in other words, the last ice age).
The people who resided in Chauvet Cave have long since perished and hardly (if any) any remains of their bodies remain. What does remain is the information they captured and shared. We can see their world not through their eyes, but through their media and the information it portrays. They recorded this information (we assume) to share what they saw. Information serves as a liaison between their lives and ours.
In fact, we don’t really know that we understand them. We only assume they were motivated to share accurate information and that what we’re reading truly represents the lives that they lived. Maybe it doesn’t. That’s how critical information is, how it is captured and how it is read. The information is the arbiter of its own validity.
What’s so important about these paintings is that they share information in a format that is instantly recognizable to use, pictures. No binary, proprietary or elaborate formats. Then again, it was locked in a cave for 30,000 years, so we were ignorant of their lives and experiences until it was discovered.
There is something deeply moving about the hand because we truly sense the life behind it…reaching out to us. Information has life. Our goal with technology is to give that voice a medium, to amplify it, to make it more interactive, to connect the reader with the author and vice versa. Let’s start thinking about that more.
But 20 years is a far cry from 30,000. To get a sense of how far out to look, let’s think back a shorter 20 years.
While I wrote most of my papers on the computer, to share them, I printed them out, double spaced. We didn’t share the electronic form; that form only resided on that computer. The printer was our share button.
We were using the computer as a more sophisticated typewriter.
We enjoy the benefits of the typewriter without any of its limitations.
As Jefferson once said, “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” So let’s dream.
What’s different now is the web. We share over the internet, a lot.
The costs of web publishing have declined to almost zero.
GitHub Pages, and services like it, make it possible for anyone to be a publisher without even worrying about hosting. Push to publish.
Matthew Butterick, author of Practical Typography, proposes the idea that the web is all we need for publishing.
Printed books are on their way out. What will replace them? We get to choose. We get to vote with our time, our wallets, and our attention. We can choose a world of digital books controlled by a handful of technology behemoths, who determine what gets sold, how you get to read it, and what you pay for it. Or we can choose the web, where writers get to publish what they want, readers get to read what they want, and they can work out together how to pay for it.
Karen McGrane reminds us that the days of the single channel (read as "device") for delivering content (spanning news to documentation) have passed. Information must be responsive. And separating content from presentation, and weaving meaning into that content with metadata, is more essential than ever before. You can either write and design for a single device (e.g., print, desktop web, mobile) and watch your content get chopped up, recycled and watered down to fit other devices, or you can invest a little extra time up front to write semantic, chunked content that isn’t coupled to the presentation and watch your content flourish. Content needs to be independent, travel to new places, not bound to a spine.
Readers will not settle for less than what they can get on the web, and likely more. And we should be able to give that to them.
This image from Matt Ridley’s TED talk “When ideas have sex” practically speaks for itself. At the end of the day, you have to remember that we are us. The same people from Chauvet Cave.
The web may be all we need for publishing. But what about PDF? If we’re discussing reading and writing, we have to address PDF.
PDF is fundamentally a digital simulation of paper. It removes functionality and imposes design constraints. It’s a backward-looking format that wants to impose yesterday’s constraints on today’s projects.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
We’ve come a long way from computer as typewriter (aka word processor) as we now share the documents electronically. In fact, just about everything we’ve grown up viewing in futuristic novels, movies, and television shows has become, is becoming or fell short of todays reality. But the computer into which we are inputing the long-form content is still stuck on the desk (or in our laps). Let’s lift it off the desk as we look into the future and imagine where it will end up. Writing on a tablet? Writing on a phone? Our wrist? A tv? A spacial operating environment? Holographic displays? Dictating? Maybe in 20 years we don’t type as much as we talk to the computer. Nicholas Negroponte predicted in a TED talk last year that in 30 years we would ingest knowledge instead of reading it. Swallow a pill and learn Shakespeake. I sure wish I could have done that to learn French.
We are also still typing documents alone. Maybe the future holds a way of reading and writing that is more collaborative.
The last 10% of changes usually require a disproportionate amount of time and are the least fun.
When readers find typos, I can fix them instantly. When I want to add or update pages, I can. As an author, I have an incentive to be steadily revisiting and revising the material. The book is a living thing.
Will we blur the lines of writing a personal document that is shared to something more like wikipedia where we edit a shared document? Will there (finally) be a GitHub for Writers? What if authors had writing tools as powerful as those used by coders?
The key to a better reading experience is a better writing experience. We need to empower the writer. Writers should be able to use higher level abstractions—writing components—that produce richer and more interactive output. Imagine an IDE for writers. This is the audience that needs to recognize and solve this technology problem.
Here’s a glimpse of Emoji Dick, an actual published translation of Moby Dick resident in the Library of Congress. Is Emoji the future of writing? We can’t deny that it’s influencing our writing. While we may not be shifting to a pictorial language, we’re certainly integrating it into our writing.
I probably spend too much time trying to find the right emoji. Any content strategists want to solve this problem with me? #emojitaxonomy
But it’s not all roses and smiles in the land of unicode.
We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (💩), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.
It’s tempting to argue that historical characters have no place in a character set intended for computers. On the contrary, rendering historical texts accurately is [vital] to ensuring their survival in the transition to the age of digital media. Omitting them literally ensures that existing materials will not be universally accessible.
Language…is the gateway to accessing life and society itself.
John McWhorter recently suggested in an article in the Wall Street Journal that by 2115, less than 600 languages would be left on the planet (down an order of magnitude from today). Don’t worry, French will make the cut ;)
Whatever path we take, it’s imperative that the writing system of the 21st century be driven by the needs of the people using it.
Regardless of what reading and writing will be in 20 years (or even 1000), we know one thing for sure. We’re going to play a vital role in its evolution and thus future.
If we treat limitations as something to obey—not overcome—we’ll just become indentured to whoever controls that technology.
Think broadly. Think openly.