re-remediation
"Borrowing and refashioning the conventions of one medium in another opens the risk ignoring what unremediated features are lost."
Or more subtly: reading online isn't the same as reading on paper, yet we continue to treat the web as a distribution tool rather than as a medium with its own material constraints, both suited and unsuited to certain kinds of content."
Ian Bogost
This discussion is filled with clues. To begin with there are exclusive, native attributes of paper and the same for screen. And the dismissal of these distinctive traits as paper is suited-to-linear reading and screen-to-ramified reading is way too unexplanitory.
FotB visitors know of the trilogy of legibility or immediacy of meaning, haptic efficiency and persistence as exclusive paper traits, but these are inadequate by themselves. A more curious dependancy is at work. One aspect is the curious difference between attentive regard for content and an attentive ulterior motive for reading. A distinctive paper affordance is an easy capacity to track both author content and reader ulterior motivation in a sustained, long paced exchange AND to afford assured re-access to any specific concordance between.
analog link
"The first-ever
National Train Day is on its way, and there’s never been a better time to celebrate. With passenger ridership growing every year, more and more people recognize that trains are the best way to relax and enjoy the ride. To
read, talk, work or snooze the time away."
"The date of National Train Day, May 10, holds special meaning as it is the anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. At Promontory, the east coast and west coast were connected for the first time by rail. From Promontory in 1869 to the creation of Amtrak in 1970 to the launch of Acela Express in 2000, Amtrak employees across the country will celebrate the history of train travel while looking towards the future on National Train Day."
bridges
"The success of libraries is not to be counted by the number of books, either digital or paper, held by libraries or the number of pretty pictures that libraries can put online. Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. Libraries are successful when they offer new services and when they help others discover services provided by others. By building bridges among these various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation. They will become the architects of collaboration."
Peter Brantley
Be honest, does this really sound new? Isn't this what libraries do anyway? What is different is that the librarian's old skills suddenly have new relevance and value. Think of the librarian's strange skill at evaluating an unread book! That's exactly what is needed to measure the quality of a website or compile relational citations of links.
What has also changed is that the conceptual works that librarians evaluate and organize are now more mortal than they are. This adds a futility to the work of librarianship. The churn and transience is regarded a virtue of electronic discourse. But, unfairly, the futility involved is allocated to librarianship.
Next librarians will be blamed for biased, ethnic-like enclaves of political action and partitioned virtual community exactly at the moment when the librarian's over-arching and discipline-neutral approach to information is what is needed. Here, again, the allure of wide, global connectivity is allocated to the electronic discourse and the disconnections left to librarians.
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