Following from our previous post “The Outside the Book“, I want to explore the comment by Gihan Perera. Gihan mentioned “documents with interactive multimedia”. It prompted me to think of two sources…
Most famous in the 1960’s for his book “The Medium is the Massage”. Still worth reading today! He’s been one of my mentors for unravelling digital, internet, electronic and social media technology. Here’s McLuhan’s Wikipedia Page. McLuhan talked about electric technology as being instant, automatically synchronised and interactive. This was back in the 1960s!
In this issue we explored Web2.0. And, in particular we discussed how organisations used to live in castles – there was a clear divide between who was inside the organisation and who was not (e.g. customers). Now, organisations live in glass houses. Every thing is transparent because digital media has merged all our communications.
And, this is the future of the book that I hear in Gihan’s comment. The basic principle here is the humble hypertext link. It’s the basis of the web. I can link one page to another. There’s already a couple of links in this blog post! And, when you link things you connect them, you mesh them together and you form new entities and relationships.
Want a demonstration? Print out this web page. Then click on the links. No connection, no interactivity, no synchronisation. No link.
Printed books live in isolation. Electronic ‘books’ are connected. The future of books is to merge with everything digital!
Click on the “link” below to leave your comment. The future is here!
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