Read all about it right here…..an interesting article by Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal (made all the more interesting if you’re at all interested in the use of iPads in schools, but more on this issue a little later).
Here’s a book some folks may be interested in (if you liked Future Minds or Alone Together you may like this…). The Tyranny of Email: The Four Thousand Year Journey to Your Inbox by John Freeman
BTW, just been thinking about a new presentation, possibly segmenting it along the lines of things we know for sure, things we think we know and things we haven’t got a clue about. The only problem is that once you move beyond some basic laws of science there seems to be very little we’re 100% sure about. For example, population trends are usually fairly accurate, even decades into the future, but even the UN recently had to admit that they misjudged fertility rates in Africa and may have got their projections out to 2050 and beyond serious wrong.
So, dear reader…
1. What do we know for sure?
2. What are we fairly confident about looking forward 10-20 years?
3. What remains highly uncertain in the medium to longer term?
Answers on a postcard please…
A quote and a book all on the same day. This is surely a first. The reason for this is that I’m wading through piles of cuttings and printouts for the next issue of What’s Next (#30) and I’m facing an embarrassment of riches.
So here’s the quote:
“In times of crisis, only imagination is more important than knowledge” – Albert Einstein. Old quote right? But note that this is different to the usual quotation, the one that simply states: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” Quite a different meaning I think you’ll agree.
The book? How about The Revolution will be Digitalised: Dispatches from the Information War by William Heinemann. I haven’t read this yet but it looks interesting, if only for the bit on Julian Assange (I won’t say a word).
You may say that I’m a dreamer, but it appears I’m not the only one. Kevin Duncan has written an interesting book about dealing with the digital deluge. His book is Revolution: Tame Your Technology …Get Your Life Back is worth a look.
Here are a few of his top tips
1. Turn everything off once in a while to create thinking time
2. Walk away from your machines and go somewhere quiet
3. Try creating some online thinking time
4. Use simple technology like pen and paper to note good thoughts
5. Link time and tools to the problem or issue at hand
6. Your approach to technology should be influenced by your location
7. Remove alerts on all computers and devices
8. Always turn your phone off when you need to think
9. Design time slots to look at or use your devices.
10. Making thinking time part of your routine
More here.
BTW, if you are thinking about a book for Christmas – possibly something future orientated – here are some further thoughts from my bookshelf.
– Rough Guide to the Future by Jon Turney
– What’s Next Edited by Max Brockman
– The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain
– Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku
– The World in 2050 by Laurence C. Smith
– An Optimists Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson
– 2030: Technology That Will Change the World by Rutger Vsan Sabten, Djan Khoe & Bram Vermeer.
And don’t forget my books of course!
According to Slate.com, the creation, production and disposal (or recycling) of a paper book creates 7.5KG of CO2 emissions. In contrast an iPad creates CO2 emissions of 130 Kg while a Kindle creates 168KG. So, after reading about 17 books on an iPad or around 22 Kindle books, digital devices start to make carbon savings. If only things were that simple.
What we need to know here, of course, is what the carbon costs of operating these devices is (not included in these figures). One of these days I’ll try to figure this out.
What we do know is that a one-off (single) Google search taking about a second creates about 0.2KG of CO2. Multiple searches that last a few minutes are likely to generate something in the region of 7KG of CO2. This is according to Alex Wissner-Gross, a physicist from Harvard who has studied the environmental impact of computing.
Obviously reading an e-book will not create CO2 emissions anything like this, but I suspect that emissions will still be substantial. Bottom line is that if you borrow paper books from your local library (walking or cycling to get there if possible) you are likely to be saving both the paper book industry as well as the planet.
BTW, for my older post about carbon emissions associated with email click here.
Are you reading enough books?
Lovely thought by Philip Hensher in the Independent newspaper recently. The UK government is aiming to get school kids to read 50 books a year. It is also, you may recall, asking people to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables per day to promote a healthy body. So why not merge the two ideas and extend to adults?
If a doctor is faced with a patient that’s depressed or aimless, why not ask “Are you reading enough good books?” and then recommend a reading list. 12 books a year might be a good start for a healthy mind. What should be on the book list I wonder?
Public libraries, are you reading this? Why are you not promoting the mental health benefits of good reading and why do you not tap in to the popular obsession with lists and produce individual lists of books for local readers (not 100 books to read before you die but 100 books to prevent you from dying!).
My list of 10 fiction and 10 non-fiction tittles is posted in comments. Feel free to add your own suggestions (almost impossible, I know).
I’m just reading a copy of an old book that I picked up in a junk shop a few years ago trying to find some inspiration for a TED talk I’m doing in Munich in a few days. The book is called Originality and dates from 1917. Here’s a rather choice passage.
“We have had a surfeit of archeology and of the study of modern conditions: we want more prophesy. Here is a question in the immeasurable: how much more imagination has been spent in reconstructing the life of Rome and Athens than in forecasting the future of London?” Love it.
BTW, I’ve just done an update to the extinction timeline I devised with Ross Dawson many years ago. Thanks for Wayde and the guys at Principals in Sydney for helping with the visualization. The plan was to create a second axis showing the ‘social impact’ of each extinction, but this proved almost impossible. I’ll create a link and stick it under ‘trend maps’ and nowandnext.com when I get a chance.
I had an interesting conversation with one of my publishers last week about the general state of book retail in the UK. I’m always interested in this subject, but I’m especially interested at the moment because I’m taking part in a show on Australian television about the future of the book and I need some thought starters.
Anyway, the upshot of the conversation was the thought that in the UK the future is to some extent the past. What do I mean by this? Partly that big bookshop chains will more or less disappear and we will be left with WH Smith. This is somewhat ironic given what a mess this company (I can’t quite use the word bookseller) seems to be in, but WH Smith has been in a mess positioning-wise for as long as I can remember.
They’ll be Amazon, of course, and probably Apple too. And then there will be the independents and a handful of small local or specialist chains. Most independents will go to the wall, but a few will prosper, either because they have a strong niche or because they are firmly embedded in a local community, which is probably urban and/or academic.
Anything else? I suspect we’ll see some kind of hybrid retail with bookshops selling coffee and cakes as merely the beginning. Think of bookshops in libraries, bookshops in schools (partly to replace the school library, R.I.P) and book kiosks in hospitals, hotels and pubs.
Book vending and instant book printing machines? Nope. Why would you bother when you can instantly download an e-book to a Kindle or an iPad in a couple of minutes?
I also think that book retail will polarise. Part of it (the larger part I’d imagine) will be increasingly price and promotions driven. Very large retailers (i.e supermarkets) will pick up a bit of this business but most will be online. At the other extreme, the impulse/browsing end of the market will stay in bookshops and it will be the overall experience that people buy, not just the book.
This sounds very gloomy but strangely enough far from standing on the wrong side of history, many writers, readers (and publishers) will actually benefit from all this disruption First, the very bad news. Books will become just another commodity. People will consume books like they consume baked beans, which is without much thought. Indeed most people won’t read books or, if they do, they will read what everyone else is reading. This is happening already. 40% of Americans read one book or less in 2009 and 1 in every 17 books sold in the US since 2006 has been written by the crime novelist James Patterson. Over in Britain it’s a similar story. In 2009, 133,000 books were published (the highest number on record) but just 500 authors (1%) were responsible for 30% of total sales. So, in the future, we should expect further consolidation, both in terms of what people read and where they buy.
We should also expect the concept of the books to change. For example, novels will become collaborative (user-generated), which is to say that novels will be ‘written’ with help from their readers with assistance from one or more ‘authors’ (i.e. often they won’t really be written by the person named on the cover but their name will be used much in the same way that celebrity chefs run restaurants or write cookbooks). They will also be personalised. If you wish to appear in a novel you will be able to write yourself in. Equally, if you want to change the overall mood or require a specific ending these will be available too. However, this shrinking of context will mean two things. First it will be an accelerant for narcissistic tendencies and second it will narrow peoples’ worldview. We will simply use books to reflect the world as we already know it.
Now the good news. People will eventually work out that something significant happens when words that once appeared on paper appear on a screen. Books transform the act of reading. A book is a static work authored by a single individual that requires time to create and to read. With screens, the situation is different.
Screens are connected to something much larger (the Internet), which contains other items fighting for the readers’ attention. Moreover, language and ideas do not have the same depth on screen as they do on paper. In other words, we will eventually re-discover that the medium is the message.
As the antiquitarian bookseller Ed Maggs says: ‘As books become less a quotidian part of our lives, replaced by various digital formats, the extraordinary virtues of the book will be more recognised for what they are … as photography only increased our appreciation of fine art, so digital books with replace only the ugly and the ephemeral, and will sharpen our appreciation of the real thing.’ Good news for any of the physical bookshops that remain.
I can resist everything except temptation. And books. I have a load of books I’m supposed to be reading (the Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain, An Optimists Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson, Your Flying Car Awaits by Paul Milo and Books V. Cigarettes by George Orwell). However, I have a funny feeling that Alone Together by Sherry Turkle is going to be wonderful. I’ll let you know…
I forgot to say something. If you live around Oxford you simply must attend the Creation Theatre Company’s production of Doctor Faustus – amongst the books in Blackwell’s Bookshop (4 Feb-24 March). There’s also a panel discussion in the philosophy department on Feb 1. Bookshops and libraries (and maybe even pubs) take note – this is exactly the type of thing you should be doing.
Another thought. I mentioned the future of work event that I attended yesterday. As always the best bit was the Q&A. Two important points. First, before we talk about the future of work we should define what we mean by work. Why do we work? What’s work for? Clearly the answer isn’t simply “money.” Personally I think that cutting jobs to save money is shortsighted because work has social benefits at both an individual and collective level. Therefore, you may save money in the short term but end up creating bigger and more expensive problems due to the long-term social harm unemployment creates.
The second thought was that it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of only thinking about a small slice of society when you discuss the future of work. Most people don’t work in the knowledge economy and very few read Fast Company, Wired magazine and the Harvard Business Review. Therefore, whilst discussions about fluid, networked corporations and digital nomads are true they are irrelevant for the person stacking the supermarket shelves, working on a production line or fixing the road. What does the future of work look like for these people?