Gongol.com Archives: July 2024
July 26, 2024
A community really thrives when it has a steady source of profitable "exports" that mean its people aren't just exchanging goods and services among themselves. And it further prospers when it can grow its own local enterprises from scratch, usually on the backs of skills developed or demanded by the flagship employers.
The paradox of digital publication
Compared with at some prior generations, Americans today enjoy a spectacular amount of free time: An average of more than five hours per day. Among teenagers, almost five hours per day are spent on social media alone. If adolescence is (as commonly believed) a time of long-term habit formation, it seems likely that we should brace for a long-term future in which social media influences "adult" culture nearly as much as it influences "youth" culture. ■ Only a few centuries ago, information was produced in small volumes and moved slowly. The renowned Great Library of Alexandria, accidentally burned by Julius Caesar's army in 48 BC, may have contained around 400,000 manuscripts. In the time when every manuscript had to be copied by hand, that made it (probably) the world's largest collection. Hand-copying was extremely slow and the labor involved placed a severe constraint on the amount of work that could be printed. ■ Along came Gutenberg's printing press in 1448, and suddenly both the speed of dissemination and the quantity of it could be vastly expanded. Today, the Des Moines Public Library contains 365,000 printed books -- about the same as the Great Library of Alexandria. ■ Digital publication effectively destroys all of the previous barriers to both speed and reach -- digital publications can be distributed instantaneously and infinitely. There are 70,000 copyright-free books just on Project Gutenberg, and another 41.8 million scanned print items available on the Internet Archive. And those are just the libraries, counting none of the billions trillions of items published to the various platforms of the Internet. ■ While that liberation from material constraints probably is mostly for good, society will regret it if we don't reflect thoughtfully on that rapidly escalating share of time spent on social media (the content value of which will tend to start low and quickly fall to nearly zero) and how it could displace the attention paid to higher-value work (like what might be worth curating for a library collection or editing for publication in a periodical). It's especially problematic because the incentives in place now reward producing even more content even faster, with the biggest rewards often accruing to those who mercilessly exploit the phenomenon of the "curiosity gap" rather than directly enlightening the audience.
