It is not always easy to discern digital and analog experiences. A lot of seemingly analog devices have digital technology built in without us realizing it (tape decks, ovens, cars), and, as you might have noticed, more and more digital devices try to look and feel like analog tools.

But once you enter the digital realm, analogies with our body break down. Instead, digital tools are analogies of analogies. Text editors are an analogy of type writers, type writers are an analogy of writing with pen and paper, writing with pen and paper is, initially, a substitute for our memory. In general the computer now works as an extension for our head controlling those tools.

Blind abstraction, a lack of real-world analogies, the feeling that the workings are a black box, and the experience of multiple fast-paced, fragmented processes — this is more or less what we mean when we use the words “digital” to describe a device.

Documents, images, videos, and audio tracks on the web are not more or less real than in any other medium. But they feel unreal and less credible on a computer, because digital media snippets reach us like fragments of a dream: unprepared, out of context, and lacking orientation, causality and continuity.

If you compare the overall information architecture of a website to a book, you will notice that the difficulty in reading a digital text is not just a matter of all the synchronous processes, or the typographic design of digital text. Think about the number of frames of reference that you need to enter, the number of levels that you need to climb down — and the mindset that this climbing requires — until you reach a digital text. How much more complexity do you need once you reach the ultimate text layer? Why is it that once we reach the text, we hardly stay there for more than a couple of minutes?

In books the transitions between the different levels or frames are clearly separated with empty pages. They act like airlocks. You know when you enter a new level, and when you leave it.

It is astonishing that, with all the high pitched projects around reading in the last few years, nobody has developed an alternative navigational model for reading digital text. The main interaction models for digital reading are still flipping or scrolling. Both have their advantages and disadvantages, and both kind of suck on a tablet.

Whether we call something “digital” or “analog” depends more on the way we perceive, understand and use a device than the ghost in its shell.

David Markson left all the books he owned to New York's Strand bookshop; now, they are likely further spread. This blog collects annotations and commentary that people have found in books previously belonging to Markson. Brilliant.

“You are right in demanding that an artist should take an intelligent attitude to his work, but you confuse two things: solving a problem, and stating a problem correctly. It is only the second that is obligatory for the artist.”

But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.

Publishers also believe that Salinger-like reclusiveness, which once created an aura of intrigue around an author, is not a viable option in the age of interconnectivity. “Particularly now with social media, authors are constantly in contact with their fans in a way that they never were before,” said Liate Stehlik, the publisher of William Morrow, Avon and Voyager, imprints of HarperCollins. “Now it seems to make more sense to have your author out in the media consciousness as much as you can.”

It's seen by many as the front of the site, the focal point where people arrive and choose what they want to do. But according to Cohn, only 13 percent of visits to TheAtlantic.com start on the homepage, which "suggests the homepage is overvalued as a mechanism for generating visits to interior pages".

So although it sounds counterintuitive, featuring something on your front page is only one way - and not always the most effective - to boost traffic and get your content in front of the right people.

Today's required reading.

Why is it that ideas for creating new narrative forms around print media inevitably involve adding sound and video to it? It’s like print is some kind of backward child who needs remedial education, or a bicyclist who should instead be driving a race car.

How does the Storycuts series – an overarching brand to sell short stories and as singles out of their collections – fit into this theory? Well, adhering like it does to the iTunes sales model of songs versus whole albums, I think the digital short story can (and should) be the pop music of literature.
That’s not to say that it’s an inferior form compared to the paper novel – many would argue a three minute Beatles song matches anything Brahms composed. A story, like a great pop song, creates a rich interior world within its own parameters. What’s exciting for me is that the impulse to spend 99p or so on a short story (or bundle of stories) to download might open up a new market for stories, much like iTunes and song downloads opened up albums to a more casual listener.

The STORYCUTS series launches with over 250 digital short stories from across the Random House Group.

The series takes stories out of their parent collections and makes them available as singles or small bundles, along with a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find stories.

Taking a range of our best writers, across multiple genres, it’s an exciting new digital brand and a new era for the short story form.

I actually put my interest in the alphabet down to that early history. I also think I was just fascinated by the visual forms. I’ve always loved the visual shape of the letters. When I taught at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet. They thought that was so amazing because they’d never thought about the alphabet as a visual form. So, my interest in the letters really comes from this experience of them as a visual form and as a set of, again, codes that seemed to me to be just inexhaustible. So how could it be so limited? That’s how I got into it.

There are really two parallel histories. What’s interesting to me is how in the twentieth century those two histories have separated. More and more we have specialists who look at the history of the alphabet within the origins of writing systems in the ancient Middle East and in that place between the Egyptian and ancient Sumerian cultures. Those are extremely specialized scholars and archeologists. But, more and more we’ve lost the other history, which is the history of ideas about the alphabet. We tend, in the late twentieth and early twenty first century, to bracket out the idea that letters have a magical power or a mystical power. I think that’s a mistake, because I think it’s exactly at the intersection of these two things that the alphabet functions most effectively.

Speaking of a thousand things: As of last week, it grieves me to say, our book collection has finally broken a thousand. The tally as of this writing is one thousand and three. Some are hers, some are mine, some are ours. Regarding the mine-and-ours: Don’t ask me how many of them I’ve read or will read or will even ever crack open and flip through in search of something, I beg you. Don’t ask me how well I remember or understand the ones I have read. Just don’t go there. The answers will reflect poorly on all involved. The shame of the high books-bought-to-books-read ratio is of course comfortingly widespread among us of the book-nerd persuasion. Let’s just round down and say I haven’t read any of them. I don’t want to read them. I just want them around. I require them in my home. And I must have more.

I also have a paper (still) under review which shows –using the best dataset available—that Internet users fared better than non-Internet users during this period of increasing isolation. In other words, yes, we have less close friends than before, but Internet users are doing better at bucking this trend. I have a good deal of empirical probing of why this is so—I’ll try to write about it later. In short, I think this is because we are shifting from “ascribed ties” –people you inherit as close ties such as your family and your neighbors—to “achieved ties” –people you connect based on shared affinities and with whom you interact using multiple means of communication. It’s clear why Internet plays into this and fights off isolation. People who can use the Internet better to find and/or keep in touch with people with whom they share affinities with are more likely to be able to compensate for losing the neighborhood/family ties.

What data I’ve seen makes a strong case that social isolation is increased by factors like suburbanization, long-commutes, long work hours, decline of community and civic institutions, etc—not online sociality.

Cyberasociality is the inability or unwillingness of some people to relate toothers via social media as they do when physically-present.

Just like we convert text (visual) into language in our head (which is all oral in the brain), we need to convert mediated-interaction to that visceral kind of sociality in our brain. And not everyone can do this equally well. And people who are cyberasocial are driving this discussion.

It’s simply not that the young are cybersocial and the old are not. It’s that different people are differently cybersocial. And for those who are cyberasocial, trying to describe online social interaction as “real” is like trying to describe colors on a oil-painting to someone who is color-blind indoors-and then to claim that there is a connection between the colors on the palette to colors of a sunny day.

Whatever causes dyslexia, it would not have been detectable in a pre-literate population as among such people, words are always and only just sounds. In fact, linguists often caution against our tendency to equate words with letters and remind us that language is primarily aural and the transition to visual language is a late development. (Ong, 2004). Dyslexia emerges as a disadvantage only as a society incorporates the ease of use of the written word into the expected competencies into its portfolio, similarly, the increasing incorporation of online-sociality may expose a segment of the population that is similarly disadvantaged from being able to use these technologies as effectively as others.

But wading through all the tech blogs wasn't worth my time. I could know all those things without reading them. And I figure that ed-tech's what matters most to me, not the tiny details of the tech industry at large. And I have my own ways of keeping up with ed-tech that don't involve reading news about it in the "mainstream" (or Silicon Valley) tech blogs. I use Twitter extensively. I still read specifically ed-tech focused publications. I read educators' blogs. I have multiple Google Alerts.
And so over the past month, what have I missed?
In a nutshell: nothing.
I haven't missed anything important. I haven't missed the tech blogs at all.

Most importantly though, is that digital pointing is nearly frictionless. Not only is the energy between seeing a pointer and clicking it almost zero, but so too is the energy required to create that pointer.[1] The less friction, the easier it is to form a habit.

Our notes and highlights get special powers as data in the public corpus. Search, of course. And increased accessibility. But also, they're votes. You're voting on interestingness within a particular text. There's a feeling that this is valuable data.

I've always thought there ought to be more books about the real experience of programming. Not "how do you do it," but "what does it feel like." I'm not a very good programmer, but I've ventured far enough to sense with certainty that there is real literary density there.

And sometimes it's almost more irritation than stimulation. It's an itch. So it's like, great, now we're bored and we're itchy.

Really, the opposite of boredom isn't stimulation, but deep engagement: full brain, full body, full whatever. That's what we get from books, movies, video games. (Maybe tap essays, too?) And of course we can get it from non-digital things, like cooking or playing or just wandering around and watching the world outside.

When in doubt, drop your phone in a drawer and take a walk.

Amazon, with their public/private highlights/notes from Kindle readers is creating a knowledge/interests ecosystem that will aggregate what the world is interested in, and what the world finds important...and what the world wants to buy more of. And, of course, they are making it social, by connecting to many of those they will eventually replace (mentioned above).

We will connect to each other based on our similarities and profit from our differences... and so will Amazon!

We are all nodes in the Amazon network/jungle.