Subcompact round up and The Daily
It’s been just over a week since Craig Mod wrote Subcompact publishing. And my, what a coincidence of a week it’s been.
Even the death of The Daily — though easy to label ‘failure’ — is anything, in my opinion, but a failure. What it’s done is shown us you can’t build a print island in the middle of our digital ocean. Yes: many of us knew that. But, still, to see an old-school structured publishing institution thrust upon this new space, have it willfully ignore many of the rules-of-engagement obvious to us, and then fail means we are, indeed, somewhere new. It’s nice to be able to say that with reinforced confidence.
AN EMINENT Prussian bachelor once argued that rational creatures are bound, by the very nature of reason, to act only according to rules of conduct one would affirm, when at one’s rational best, to equally guide everyone’s choices. This is not, it turns out, very useful as a day-to-day rule of thumb. It is, however, an excellent test for government policy in a multi-party democracy. If a policy seems advisable when one party is in power, but inadvisable when the other party is in power, then it is inadvisable, full stop. This is how we know that the Obama administration’s drone policy is, to put it mildly, inadvisable.
In Hidebound books, I spoke about the publishers locked into a business model based on out-moded data containers: books. That they are trying to keep an old model, based on the scarcity of physical books, and not embracing the challenges and opportunities offered by digital distribution.
It strikes me that one of the things I’ve said in the past is hypocritical when viewed against this argument. I’ve said one should be able to lend digital books. In retrospect this is precisely what I’ve criticised: taking an action predicated on a physical manifestation of a book and applying it to a digital one. But it leads us down some interesting paths.
Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing
We’ve got a pretty comprehensive range of metadata that gets attached to our photos nowadays. Location, timestamp, people we’re with, gear setup. Up until now, though, we’ve lacked a really clear way to digitally or non-verbally share the fluffier experiential and emotional metadata that shines through when we talk about our images.
That’s where Instagram steps in. Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.
Nonetheless, Peter Chernin’s announcement shows us the future of Twitter: a media company writing software that is optimized for mostly passive users interested in a media and entertainment filter.
Though my usage of Twitter was declining over time anyway, this is what finally drove me out.
I’m wondering if I’m just not that “social” in the “social media” sense.