> Financial Times - February 18, 2006
>
> Talk to Trevor Butterworth and have your say at the blog set up to
> discuss this story:
> <http://ftmagblog.blogspot.com>.
>
> Time for the last post
> By Trevor Butterworth
<snip>
> To illustrate the point, I asked a number of bloggers whether they
> thought Karl Marx or George Orwell, two enormously potent political
> writers who were also journalists, would have blogged if the medium
> had been available to them.
Walter Benjamin would have blogged, creating a virtual arcades project.
As far as I'm concerned, though, what's on the Net -- blogs as well as all other things on the Net, including Net editions of print publications -- is not for "reading." It's not easy to actually read an article -- let alone a book -- on a computer screen. Your eyes begin to water if you try to read a long one. But the Net is useful if what you want to do is to look up particular bits of information, especially if you know what you are looking for. You can search a particular page, a particular document, a particular site, and even the entire Net for them.
Print culture already had developed the key tools for information storage and retrieval: indexes, footnotes, concordances, bibliographies, etc. The Net mainly souped them up, facilitating ease of storage and accelerating speed of retrieval. By doing so, the Net socializes memory. You may not remember it, but Google remembers it for you. Socialization of memory, needless to say, has liberating and (potentially) repressive aspects: liberating, because you can now remember more than you could before; and (potentially) repressive, because others can remember what you have -- or would like to have -- forgotten.
The Net changes consumer habits as well. The music industry fought a war against file sharing and has succeeded in getting an increasing number of people to pay for music downloads, rather than just sharing music files for free. Consumers don't necessarily pay for entire albums, though. They would rather buy only songs and tunes they like, paying 99 cents each.
The same may happen to books, magazines, newspapers, etc. if some corporate giant -- maybe Google -- breaks them down and puts their components on sale. Readers may begin to buy just particular chapters, particular pages, and even particular paragraphs and sentences.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>