Monday, March 15, 2010

In the domain of science publications transition to electronic documents causes "twitterization" of research media:

The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph [books]... to the modern research article.
As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473

It's quite possible that proliferation of e-book devices will benefit magazines more than books. Shorter chapters/articles are easier to jump in and out on the go; embedded audio and video clips are better suited for the "show, not tell" style of presentation; more recent events mentioned in the text are more fresh in the mind and psychologically close to connect for the reader. To summarize, attention spans are getting shorter, authors and publishers will have to find ways to feed readers with small easily digestible info-chunks.

tags: information, payload, system, time, internet, digital,  media

1 comment:

Unknown said...

well, the bright new world is not going to look exactly like Fahrenheit 451 devoid of books but like of world of full of ... info porn, Pictures and video are undoubtedly can convey information at higher bandwidth that reading can and there we will have it in the future.

Also, I've read somewhere recently that in the future information will be taken in pills, snorted, injected intravenously etc. This is also to help widen the bandwidth of information flow between the world and the individual.