Tell Me Where to Read, Not What to Read: Or, What to do When Your Cultural Objects are No Longer Objects

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

LibraryThing has a wonderful "local" functionality which enables users to indicate their favourite bookstores and libraries -- the places where books as physical objects can be found, acquired, purchased. But why not allow users to indicate their favourite public places to read? Favourite cafes, parks, beaches, hotel lobbies, bus shelters. These are the places at which the various social and personal functions of books are best served -- whether those be isolation or flirtation, communication or solitude.

What does it mean as we move away from cultural objects as objects -- things -- and towards cultural objects as nexuses of cultural and social moments?

We've written elsewhere about the way in which books are not just containers for their ideas, but also become receptacles of our memories, of the images we hold of ourselves, and of the images that we want to project of ourselves to others. The same, obviously, is true of music, of art, of all cultural pursuits in which we engage -- and should be true of the metadata by which we navigate all of this stuff.

That's all true at a conceptual level, but has implications for how we live with these objects. When you are free from dealing with books primarily as stuff requiring storage space, you can start to organize them according to aesthetics or other whims and fancies.

For all of our "cultural objects", we should start to think about how our world is (or should be) organized around their cultural purposes -- not their physicality.

At last month's BookNet Canada Technology conference, DailyLit founder Susan Danziger and BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn both touched on the social utility books have for flirting -- Tamblyn coining the term "Date Repellent Mode" to describe the current state of eBook devices (skip to 10:02 if you don't want to watch the entire -- wonderful -- presentation).

We need to become better at recognizing the social and personal spaces that our cultural objects serve, rather than the physical spaces that were previously the most manifest -- and challenging -- aspect of their existence. When that takes place, we will have an ecology of business and services around those objects that serves them all the better. And, most probably, better books too. Let's stop making the best ideas for the physical form they have to inhabit, and concentrate simply on the best ideas. In the best places.

Push vs Pull, or, How I Need to Know About Your Product

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

View fullsize

Sharing some love for the extraordinarily attractive Harvard Business Review Classics series, which appears to be devoid of any presence on the web as an independent entity. This I don't understand. A series obviously aimed at capturing and retaining a consumer -- attractive design, brilliant product aimed at a specific market, consistency in both to encourage that 'collect them all' instinct. I will buy them all as they come out.

So why isn't there an RSS feed or Twitter account to inform me when each new volume comes out?

Contrast the blog maintained by 33 1/3, Continuum's series of books on classic albums. There are usually five or so posts per month (I know this, obviously, because I can look at the Google Reader stats), featuring news on new additions to the series, alongside events and media surrounding each publication. It's low volume -- but enough to alert me to things in which I have already indicated my interest. What's more, it's done with an openness and transparency -- for example taking readers step-by-step through the submission process for new titles -- that encourages me to think of it less as a marketing tool, but more of a dialogue on a subject (and with a product) with which I'm already engaged.

It's surprising how few companies are aware of the change in consumer mentality that is taking place with the increase in available data and the appearance of filters to help users better manage their inflow. RSS readers, Twitter, even Facebook -- these are content aggregators allowing incredibly supple management of inputs at a granular level. My Twitter account is a highly idiosyncratic mixture of friends, information pertinent to my job, and select entertainment/leisure news. It's unique to me, and it's something that I'm continually redesigning to meet my needs. Which means that I'm spending more time with it than I am in the presence of content distribution hubs -- magazines, websites, bookstores, TV, the transistor wireless machine -- over which I can exercise less control. So if you've made it onto my Twitter follow list, you're there because I want you to be. It's permission marketing in the purest sense.

Indeed, there is the possibility for the impact of your message to be amplified; as Matthew Forsythe points out, ReTweets are "socially targetted":

People usually only retweet things they’re interested in or they think their followers might be interested in. So as the tweet travels through the twitterverse (for lack of a better word), the message is finding people who are more and more likely to be interested in its content.

I'm not asking you to beg for my attention. That would get on my nerves. Just send me a little note every now and then when you have something new that I would like. Cost to your business = zero (well, thirty seconds each time you publish a new volume). Increased revenue to your business = more than zero.

Why not help your customers build their identification with your product? This is a recession, isn't it?

Update: More offenders from the world of publishing. Hesperus Press's striking On series: Stendhal On Love; Virginia Woolf On Not Knowing Greek, John Donne On Death... are there more? Who knows? Bloomsbury's indescribably elegant The Writer and the City series, so far only catalogued by enthusiasts on LibraryThing.

Entertainment Guides: Or, How the Publishing and Recording Industries Combine to Create the Purest Hell

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

The new -- ninth -- edition of The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings is out now. It's actually been out since October but somehow I missed it, perhaps because Sam's no longer exists and there is therefore nowhere in the city where I might be required to have done a great deal of research before visiting in another episode in my ongoing quest for rare mid-50s hard bop gems. Anyway. The Penguin Guide is still going strong. This is a good thing. Let's just pause to acknowledge that, before I tell you how very, very wrong it is.

The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is the definitive printed resource for jazz lovers. It is a brilliantly curated collection of reviews and general aesthetic advice put together by Richard Cook and Brian Morton, an extraordinary cultural service they have been performing for more than 15 years now. It is to the jazz fan's armory what David Thompson's New Biographical Dictionary of Film is to the film buff's. Only without perhaps quite the same volume of page-turning salacious gossip.

An adventure in the unknowable

The 9th edition will be the fourth copy of this massive book that I will own, with other editions strewn in storage lockers across the globe like obelisks marking my places of former habitation. And, of course, I can't possibly get rid of those editions, because they contain reviews of recordings which are no longer actively "in print", but which might still be available -- or might be rereleased in the time before the next edition. Or (imagine this) released digitally without any corresponding physical presence whatsoever by an enterprising record label looking to earn money from its back catalog with very little capital investment.

And there's more -- this, from the Wikipedia page about the guide:

Due to the increasing numbers of CDs on the market, space limitations and depth of coverage have increasingly become an issue: in the 7th edition, for instance, the index was dropped to save space, but it was restored in the 8th edition (but a number of entries were dropped or shortened to make room for it).

So it's always a contingent and partial exercise. It's a real-world experiment with the unknowable; a test of your stamina contrived by the publishing industry and the recording industry to see whether you are up to the challenge.

Are you worthy? Do you want it enough? Do you deserve the musical pleasures that you think you want? Will they still be there when you realize you want them? Will they have been reissued in thirteen different editions, each of them offering superior remastering and spectacular studio outtakes?

A problem of organization

Ultimately, however, the problem with books of this type is that their organizational assumptions are now fundamentally out of date. You have to navigate by artist, which can be a pain -- there's no way to see the highest-rated albums by genre, search by sidemen, and so on. And obviously there's no preview link to listen to parts of the album or actually download the album(s) directly should you want to purchase.

This is obviously stupid and must be stopped. Users should be able to tag entries by artists, participants, genre, rating, or anything else they want; they should be able to make use of links to direct download, and make links themselves. You could then search for a combination of tags -- for example, 4-star hard-bop albums featuring Hank Mobley. And then you could download like a crazy download monkey.

The same goes, obviously, for any other type of entertainment guide on the market. Videohound -- you're next. Release that fine content from the silo of your website.

Of course, I will buy the Penguin Guide. Even though I would much, much rather spend more money for access to an electronic version that integrated seamlessly into iTunes and any other online music service of which I might make use.

(I will also continue to buy jazz CDs, if only because iTunes can be so dreadful at distinguishing top-quality remasters from their poor initial digital iterations. That isn't to say that I'm not just going to rip them anyway, to the horror of audio purists everywhere. But it does illustrate just how godawful those early CD masters were. Apparently there are two bass parts at the outset of Bitches Brew -- who knew? And the vibraphones on Idle Moments really should shimmer and throb, rather than sounding like bland aural wallpaper as if they were recorded in some appalling bar at the front of a dive motel.)

Entertainment guides should guide you to entertainment. Repeatedly.

I've recently rediscovered Charles Shaar Murray's guide to Blues on CD, a book published in the mid-90s which was invaluable to me when I was first trying to get beyond Robert Johnson and John Lee Hooker. Part of the frustration back then -- aside from the fact that I could afford a fraction of what was recommended -- was the difficulty in finding this stuff. In hindsight, actually, it seems astonishing that I could find a compilation of Otis Rush's mid-50s Cobra sides in a record store in a suburban English town. I'm quite sure that I couldn't find anything nearly as specialized in any of Toronto's largest record stores today (particularly post-Sam's). But I certainly couldn't find Furry Lewis or Ishman Bracey.

Nowadays, I am able to find much of what I want on iTunes -- and most of it in the form of the individual tracks I want to hear, rather than the dull filler that was inevitably recorded as radio bait and pads out most of those CD compilations that I bought when I was 18.

Now, if only Charles Shaar Murray's guide was actually a constantly updated, organically evolving online resource, rather than a one-off produced according to the whims and routines of the publishing industry?

Touchscreen, Touchscreen, On The Wall...

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

Laura Miller had an interesting piece in the New York Times last year about the difficulties some people face keeping their book collections lean. It contained this observation:

When you're young and still constructing an identity, the physical emblems of your inner life appear more essential, and if you're single, your bookshelves provide a way of advertising your discernment to potential mates. I’ve met readers who have jettisoned whole categories of titles — theology, say, or poststructuralist theory — that they once considered desperately important.

We surround ourselves with books and other cultural objects not only because we enjoy them and may wish to enjoy them again. They also help us to moor ourselves -- to remind us of the identities that we have constructed for ourselves; to delineate those identities to others; to remind us of the arduous processes we've undergone to create and solidify our cultural perspectives. Cultural objects actually come to embody us if we allow them to. We arrange our book collections -- consciously or unconsciously -- to show a side of ourselves to others and back to ourselves.

What's true of books can be even more true of music, which is more explicitly public. Music, obviously, transforms the atmosphere around you, both figuratively and literally. Unless your sole experience of music is by headphones, your visitors and friends are exposed to your music regardless of their own preferences or interests. Music selection at a party is as critical a part of the activity as planning food and inviting the appropriate mix of people. While displaying your books -- just like prominently reading Gravity's Rainbow on the subway -- is public manifestation of a (usually) private activity, listening to music is always, by default, public.

What better way to show off your superlative cultural taste than to have your guests literally stand in it?

This is why, I think, the digitization of music risks losing an important element -- the ability to have one's music collection available for the browsing of visitors. Without LP bins or CD shelves, how might a casual browser chance upon something that showcases your cultural identity?

Fortunately, we already have a model for this. It's been around for decades, and it has served as a model for the iTunes GUI for some years.

It's the jukebox.

So here's what I want: a massive wall-mounted multitouch iTunes jukebox interface. It's a big multitouch monitor that lives on your wall, displays images of your choice while you're not using it, and would enable a coverflow interface to browse your music library. And would serve all the other touchscreen applications that we've been excited about for some time.

As Nathan points out:

Bolt a high endvirtual surround source to the screen, and you've got a one-panel touch-screen media centre. Naturally, you're already using an iPhone as the remote control, so why not employ it to calibrate the system to the room? Sync it to the unit and follow the instructions to stand a little to the left, a little to the right, hold it, point iPhone at the screen, away, got it, and voila, reflecting surround sound calibrated without employing anything as cumbersome and wasteful as a cheap single-use proprietary microphone.

Note that the virtual surround effect works best if your walls are free of clutter, i.e. shelves full of books and CDs.

It's the perfect fusion of a classy consumer product and a cultural need. We surround ourselves with cultural works not just because they speak to us -- about their authors, about our memories, about who we were when we experienced them for the first time -- and because they speak to others about us. Locking all your stuff in your hard drive obscures this. But technology should enable all aspects of our relationships to culture, not only those that we think are most obvious.

Last.fm and the Fear of Accidental Exposure

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

I enjoy Last.fm a great deal. That's less, I think, for its admittedly rather limited utility to me at this point, and more for its set-it-up-and-forget-about-it aspect. There's a silent promise that it is taking note of what I'm listening to, and that at some point in the future this information may be of some use to me. In the meantime it's all going into the communal pot to help other people. If you can make your peace with companies storing a great deal of information about you in this way (and if you can't, I'm afraid that you may not enjoy the rest of your life very much), there is a definite social good that can come of it. By telling Last.fm what I listen to -- what the pathways of my taste are -- I am contributing to someone else's enjoyment. Indeed, the more people like me share their listening tastes with Last.fm, the higher the chance that it will allow me to discover something genuinely new which thrills and excites.

(There is also, of course, the danger that we travel in packs and never discover anything new outside our particular cultural envelope, a trend which Oliver Burkeman discusses in his latest Guardian column.)

There is at least one more immediate benefit to society, however, and it's one that at first blush seems horrifying. It dispenses with the guilty pleasure -- the ability to listen to a track, watch a movie, or enjoy a book without the knowledge of others.

The guilty pleasure allows you to maintain a distance between your carefully constructed public identity (perhaps the face you show to friends alone; perhaps the profile you showcase in front of some wider public) and the things you enjoy by 'slumming it'. I'm certain that much of the work of cultural discovery -- finding unknown artists or writers, chancing upon sounds that refresh popular music -- happens by accident or by exposure to works under the liberating cover of anonymity.

But it's also an inhibitor of cultural development, building walls around blocks of content believed to be discreet and in some way -- usually unrelated to their artistic merits -- antagonistic to one another. One doesn't listen to Tosca and Tosca side-by-side.

When I picked up Kylie's Fever a few years ago and listened to it obsessively for a weekend, a friend emailed to make the observation, with a great deal of mockery, that it didn't exactly fit with the avant-garde jazz and austere IDM that I had been listening to for the preceding few weeks. Had my critical faculties been replaced by those of a thirteen year-old?

Well, it's no good being ashamed about these things any more. Shame requires the ability to hide, and Last.fm doesn't let you do that at all. The exercise of snobbery as a substitute for critical faculty is going to become very much harder, because everybody's cultural preferences -- their true preferences -- are that much more visible. We're one step closer to the democratization of taste.

So here's a challenge: if you're a music critic, why not make your Last.fm profile public for all to see?

Negative Data

[NOTE: this post originally appeared on Datachondria, a blog dedicated to technology, data, and modern life.]

Kudos -- again -- to LibraryThing for introducing a very nice little feature called "will you like it?"

View fullsize

This looks to be another quick way of using their very intelligent recommendations algorithm. But the name of the feature itself is another little nudge in the direction of leveraging "negative data" -- what we hate as well as what we like. Why do companies and services not make more use of information on what we spurn, as well as that which we actively seek to consume?

I've no doubt that some of the better recommendation engines do indeed use this data, but the fact that it isn't foregrounded means that users aren't inclined to, for example, apply low ratings to things that they actively hate. Indeed -- the entire conceptual language of our user interfaces is geared against this. When I'm rating items in Amazon or iTunes, I'm not inclined to give any stars at all to something that I hate. I want to banish it, not apply the most meagre of rewards.

What songs do I never listen to? Which songs do I skip away from within the first 30 seconds? When I'm browsing a newspaper website, which writers do I always fail to read -- suggesting that I'm deliberately avoiding them? Which websites do I always refuse to click through to?

What books have I started but never finished? Wouldn't it be nice if Amazon could tell me I have only 50 percent likelihood of finishing Finnegan's Wake?

Companies do everything they can to push highly viewed or rated content to customers -- but toxic content doesn't get pushed out of the way with quite the same enthusiasm. As anyone who has been involved in merchandising will tell you, bad content isn't just a "dead zone" around which good content can exist without impact. It risks infecting everything around it.