Collective Wisdom and the Digital Book
Sitting at my desk, my attention drifted to the books sitting in a pile to my right. Reading their spines, I noticed that read together, they form a sort of collective wisdom:
- You are what you choose and the rest is noise
- The presentation of self in everyday life ways of seeing
- Digital ground frame analysis
- How kindergarten came to America musicophilia
(Admittedly that last one might be stretching a bit.)
It struck me that when I read, what I want is to see connections among texts, draw similarities, and here, very literally, the spines were doing it in a way I’d never attended to.
Source: Collective Wisdom by Liz Danzico
By combining different bits of knowledge you create something more than the sum of its parts. What Danzico describes is combining book titles, but what if we were able to combine the actual content of books? Of course this is already being done with footnotes and the like, but it’s not a pleasant reading experience having to switch between books every page, so it hasn’t become a mainstream use.
However, with the revolution of the digital book this experience will become just as fluid as jumping between different websites on the web and thus allowing us to combine content from different books in new meaningful ways. This will enrich every book with a broader context and different perspectives.
I’m interested to hear what the community has to say about this, because it will be one of the important elements in the *openmargin platform we’re creating. So share your perspective. What consequences do you think this will have?
