I have been reading John Borthwick on The Rise of Social Distribution, which I picked up via Jyri Engestrom’s stream. This is an interesting read for lots of reasons. He touches on content distribution models, noting that it used to be the case that one made money by controlling distribution channels (think broadcast TV).
Borthwick goes on to write \”In the initial design of the web reading and writing (editing) were given equal consideration–yet for fifteen years the primary metaphor of the web has been pagesand reading. The metaphors we used to circumscribe this possibilityset were mostly drawn from books and architecture (pages, browser,sites etc.). Most of these metaphors were static and one way. The steam metaphor is fundamentally different. Its dynamic, it doesntlive very well within a page and still very much evolving.”
Borthwick then spends a bit of time speculating about what the move from page to stream means for reading. And this is also worth thinking about. But there is no attention to writing. The social web–streams–are dependent on user generated content and lots of it (which Borthwick notes). This much is obvious and not particularly interesting.
What is more interesting to me, at least, are the issues of time and space. A stream, a real-time web, moves too fast to get a handle on. This is OK. We see and read what we see and read when we dip our big toe into the stream. With respect to writing, this deepens the challenge of making content that is more “sticky.” But the most interesting issue is perhaps the sorts of demands it makes on writing tools and processes. This is a significant opportunity for a task like “review,” which depends on an active stream to be useful. This makes me happy because we have a review service. Not clear what this will continue to mean for other sorts of writing tools except that it might mean the continued “breaking up” of writing tools into more or less independent services.
The most compelling issues of all are for rhetorical theory. This is where we need Jim Ridolfo to chime in on rhetorical velocity and Stewart Whittemore on the implicatons for memory.