http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book, about the book (with this title) by Mortimer Adler.

“The idea of communication directly from those who first discovered an idea as the best way of gaining understanding is the basis for Adler’s argument in favor of the reading of the Great Books. He claims that any book that does not represent original communication is an inferior source to the original, and, further, that any teacher, save those who discovered the thing which they are teaching, is inferior to these books as a source of understanding.”

Well, one has to be very conservative-minded to truly believe this. (Yet, in reading philosophy I do prefer to go back to the source.) It is hard to combine with ‘reading & writing on the web’ — though the web makes checking sources easier. But that’s slightly different.

Btw 1: Adler distinguishes 3 types (stages) of reading a book: structural, interpretative, critical.

Btw 2: More stuff from the business/communication perspective — definitely not my world –. A look at the book titles sez all… Annotation to books by Matt Vance on Minezone: http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/BookNotes.

I’m beginning to wonder why I’m looking at these things…. I’m just going through a lot of tabs that I opened while browsing & reading about blogging, tagging, reading & knowledge…

Found this great post: http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2006/02/how-to-read-lot-of-books-in-short-time.html. Title says it all.

It’s a summary of various methods from knowledge management, tips & tricks regarding how to process information quickly (well, how to parse it through the brain and only act on the important bits).

It sure isn’t novel-reading, it assumes text is just applicable information. One could ask the question if these methods, gathered by Matt Cornell, should properly be called ‘reading’ at all.

I use texts like this:
1. look at index, glossary, contents
2. quick look at a few passages, read conclusion
3. go read the book or part of the book, [or put away]; tag sentences with post-its
4. type (or copy-paste) (selection of) tagged sentences in blogpost, voodoopad or texteditor, for future use.

Does it work? I don’t know. What really counts is what I remember. And that process isn’t so one-dimensional. But I am happy with post-it-tagged books, and I can find quotes quicker now, and sometimes I remember texts better than I used to.

Btw: the methods mentioned by Matt Cornell also explain why I find it impossible to ‘properly’ read business books: too many superfluous sentences, too many skippable examples, everything get repeated. Those books are written for speed-reading.

Back in 1986 Michael Heim wrote in his book Electric Language: “A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book’s definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface” (xvi). Read “web” or ‘internet” or “blogosphere” for “hyperspace”. I’d say this is still true. But how much of this respite/contemplation do we need it to keep the world (and culture) running?

(Copy-pasted the quote from Dennis Jerz’s http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/blogtalk/index.html).

Now browsing through Blogtalk-papers: http://blogtalk.net. (I’m not there, don’t ask why, earlier this year I thought about maybe going, then apparently decided not to, since I’m here, not there).

The blogtalk-presentations (happening now) are all online at Googlevideo: click from the program: http://blogtalk.net/pmwiki.php?n=Main.Program

Some links — very different btw — with somewhat web 2.0 related stuff:
http://sioc-project.org/
http://www.peopleaggregator.net/
http://structuredblogging.org/
http://www.newsvine.com/
http://www.blogdigger.com
http://itags.net/index.php/Main_Page
http://www.ourmedia.org/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.techmeme.com/
http://wink.com/

And a very interesting small study of tagging here: http://itags.net/index.php/Study_of_tagging_with_bloggers”

Picked up the current issue of thee Irish magazine on contemporary arts Circa (Online stuff here: http://www.recirca.com. And come across a very interesting interview with of San Diego-based art historian Grant Kester — had never heard of him. His work deals mainly with collaboration in the arts. It seems he has a much more interesting view on the state of contemporary art than Jacques Ranciere — or no, more precise, might have an answer to some problematic point in Ranciere’s theories. Good links from his university homepage: http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~gkester/.

I’ve been spending (losing?) time the last three days by looking at various projects that one could call ‘web 2.0’, or, more precise (?) websites & softwares that try to use (cash in?) on the power of social networking. Mostly it’s applications that provide users with some sort of wiki- blogging, FOAF-networking, and/or tagging functionality — a particular blend (melange) of it, plus a nice (?) interface designed to appeal to a certain userbase. Or hoping to find a user-base. Some of them, I’d say, are nice & will succeed to find that user-base, others come across to me as a commercial wager that can either succeed (like MySpace) or be forgotten. Some are closer to the idea of the Semantic Web, others hope that order (or usability) will emerge from the ‘multitude’.

On a personal level — speaking about this particular user: me — I haven’t seen a project that I would use regularly myself. I might sometimes use delicious, upload photos to Flickr and I have an account on Technorati (that I do not use) — but all three services are in no way necessary. I could do without. This probably posits myself as an old-skool internet-user, generation 1994. If I need wiki-functionality, I’ll use a wiki myself. (Btw my provider has set one up for every user). I can publish using ftp, html &c. Of course I enjoy the functionalities that are available now. Yet most on them strike me as ‘not designed for me’.

It’s not that I am content with whatever there is: I would really like to see a better (= more aesthetically appealing) interface for reading RSS-feeds. A better way of organizing the feeds. And I love to see better content, especially for news & background to the news.

(Not reading newspapers every day, and skipping a few days of newspaper reading last week I missed that the chess-match between Kramnik and Topalov had started! I was extremely annoyed: I like to follow that, but it’s below (or above) the radar of all the web-sources I’m bound to check. I wonder if social networking would have helped here. Chess won’t pop-up that easily in my profile.) (Just to say that — I think — there will always be a need for ‘general interest’-publications = newspapers, and for human editors next to software-channeled editors).

Software-channeled (software/computer/algorithm) newsservices like Digg and Newsvine can work. Mankind has been experimenting with these sort of concepts for ten years now (chuck a lot of stories in a database, let users vote, analyze the voting and the user-behavior & then deliver the personalized content to the user). But I’m utterly unimpressed with both Digg and Newsvine. Not enough content and no content that has my interest.

And wrt Technorati. I hardly feel tempted to explore all the different functionalities (though I’d say the search engine and the tags work quite well). I’m not interested in my ranking (don’t think I’m ranked, did I ‘claim’ my blog at all?) And what keeps me from using it, is the feeling/impression that every action I perform there is part of a huge datamining-experiment. It’s mostly a ‘feeling’ — though it is a huge datamining experiment, but Google is as well & I use Google without too many second thoughts. (We’re not going to escape datamining. The question is: who is doing it, on what grounds, what is done with the data).

I’m also not so much into social networking: I like to write & read. Let’s say — radically — : it’s the texts, the content, that weaves the web; not the functionalities of the software. I’m happy if I can give my attention to that.

Wrt to attention: I still have to order the (new) Richard Lanham book about the economy of attention. And it seems Roseanne Stone said some important things about this in her lecture at the crossmedia-week, referring that we live in a ‘partial attention’ state of mind. That’s not multitasking anymore: we’re continuously partially paying attention to lots of things. Research learns that this leads to enormous stress. We know that, but what captured my attention is the apparent difference between multitasking and partial attention. Found on http://www.uzy.nl/2006/09/28/picnic-06-dag-2/. Will check for a more elaborate reference.

Maybe the disappointed, irritated tone of this entry is to be traced back to ‘too much browsing around’ and too little concentration.

Wednesday-night four (ex)-students/artists presented their works at Amsterdam’s Upgrade: Dragana Antic, Jonas Vorwerk, Ralf Baecker and Daan Brinkmann. Very good work from all four of them. Very good. Yet, both Kristina Andersen and me were missing something… grittyness maybe?

(Kristina, Aadjan van der Helm and me were the panel. Felt a bit strange with Matthew Fuller, Florian Cramer, Eric Kluitenberg, Josephine Bosma, Richard de Boer, Tanya Gorucheva, Anne Nigten, Michael Murtaugh, and who am I forgetting? in the public. And I felt I wasn’t very sharp).

Apparently we’ve come at a point were ‘we’ (well, art students & artists working in the interactive field) know very well how to make installations that are working smooth, are reactive, are intuitively pulling you into the world (or game), and are ‘nice’ to interact with. We know how to do it, what works and what doesn’t. It is as if we have figured out the ‘aesthetics of interaction’. That leads to the question, ‘why?’ (why this work?), what does it do? and why is that important, what’s it “saying” or doing to me — what does that experience mean, what does it “say”, or critize, “complexify” or clarify, waht does it change, what does it ‘estrange’ (Dragana Antic was very much inspired by the Russian Formalists’ idea of ostranenie).

Is there a “way out” of just “nice interaction” for these sort of works? (Or could that also be enough — I guess that depend on what one expects of art…). I had the feeling that however great the works presented were, they seemed to be lacking a strong answer to those questions. There is definitely something of an answer in Dragana Antic work (maybe more in her theory than in the installation itself — though I should be careful with that, I did not spend that many minutes inside it). Ralf Baecker seems to work in another direction — landscapes carved out by a milling machine on the basis of search queries typed into a German search engine (and the project that he is working on now — he told me about it afterwards — makes me very curious).

I do not have an answer ready. (Though, if I had a hardcore theory about what good art is, and what bad art, based on — for instance — an Adorno-inspired avant-garde programme, I could come up with some readymade answers… But that’s not my style). I’ll be thinking about it…

Dragana Antic: http://pzwart2.wdka.hro.nl/~dantic/D/F/main.html
Jonas Vorwerk: http://www.beatnologic.com/site/homepage.php
Ralf Baecker: http://www.no-surprises.de/
Daan Brinkmann: http://www.daanbrinkman.nl/ (offline now?)

More reading matter (on the train): the most recent issue of the Flemish arts magazine De Witte Raaf. This issue focusses on typography. De Witte Raaf has quite a close connection to the Jan van Eyck, with director Koen Brams as on of the editors & frequent contributors to the magazine. Some (not all) of the JVE-approach to artistic research is reflected in the theoretical approach & editorial focus of De Witte Raaf. This issue also has a long interview with Jan van Eyck’s advising researcher Filip Tacq. But my ‘favorite’ in this issue is Dirk van Hulle’s article on typography and full stops in Joyce’s Ulysses and FW.

De Witte Raaf online here: http://www.dewitteraaf.be/web/flash/default.asp.

Dirk van Hulle’s article: http://dewitteraaf.stylelabs.com/web/flash/content.asp?enz..

Which reminds me that if you would ask me which is the single most influential bookpage for my ‘taste’ of literature & design, it would be page 260 of FW. Or no, it would be the page in the Spectrum Encyclopedie, with the lemma on Joyce, that reprinted page 260 of FW.

(Btw, this is a Dutch encyclopedia from the nineteen-seventies that was organized in longer lemmata — in length between half a page, up to over 20 pages — with lots of cross-referencing: both links at the end of a lemma, indicating related articles, and ‘underlined links’ in the running text. My parents bought this encyclopedia when it was being published, which meant we would get a new ‘tome’ when it would come out. I have spent many many hours reading and browsing this encyclopedia. And I sometimes wonder if my ‘early’ interest in hypertext has been influenced by it.

The wikipedia entry is a bit on the short side: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Spectrum_Encyclopedie. Here’s what ‘bison’ says: http://cf.hum.uva.nl/nhl/bizon/grote_spectrum.htm.)

Which also reminds me that I haven’t yet referenced Jouke Kleerebezem’s most recent article “Onderzoek worden” (“Becoming Reseach”) — in Dutch –: http://dewitteraaf.stylelabs.com/web/flash/showfile.asp?enz..

“The transition from family and dynastic governement supported by the loyalties of tradition to popular was the outcome primarily of technological discoveries and inventions working a change in the customs by which men had been bound together.” p. 144

“Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.” p. 148

“It is an ideal in the only intellegible sense of an ideal: namely the tendency and movement of some thing which exists carried to its final limit, viewed as completed, perfected. Since things do not attain such fulfillment but are in actuality distracted and interfered with, democracy in this sense is not a fact and never will be. But neither in this sense is there or has there ever been anything which is a community in its full measure, a community unalloyed by alien elements.” p. 148

“Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.” p. 151

“Associated activity needs no explanation; things are made that way. But no amount of aggregated collective action of itself constitutes a community.” p. 151

“Interactions, transactions, occur de facto and the results of interdepence follow. But participation in activities and sharing in results are additive concerns. They demand communication as a prerequisite.” p. 152

[How to arrive at a Great Community?]
“… the perfecting of the means and ways of communication of meanings so that genuinely shared interest in the consequences of interdependent activities may inform desire and effort and thereby direct action.” p. 155

“[K]nowledge is a function of association and communication; it depends upon tradition, upon tools and methods socially transmitted, developed and sanctioned.” p. 158

“There can be no public without full publicity in respect to all consequences which concern it. Whatever obstructs and restricts publicity, limits and distorts public opinion and checks and distorts thinking on social affairs.” p. 167

“Science is converted into knowledge in its honorable and emphatic sense only in application. Otherwise it is truncated, blind, distorted.” p. 174

“Record and communication are indispensable to knowledge. Knowledge cooped up in private consciousness is a myth, and knowledge of social phenomena is peculiarly dependent upon dissemination, for only by distribution can such knowledge be either obtained or tested. A fact of community life which is not spread abroad so as to be a common possession is a contradiction in terms.” p. 176-177

“Public opinion , even if it happens to be correct, is intermittent when it is not the product of methods of investigation and reporting constantly at work. It appears only in crises. Hence its “rightness” concerns only an immediate emergency.” p. 178

“But its meaning [of the news] depends upon relation to what it imports, to what its social consequences are”. p.180

“The function of art has always been to break through the crust of conventionalized and routine consciousness. Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought. This process is art.” p. 184

“We have but toouched lightly and in passing upon the conditions which must be fulfilled if the Great Society is to become a Great Community; a society in which the ever-expanding and intricately ramifying consequences of associated activities shall be known in the full sense of that word, so that an organized, articulate Public comes into being.” p. 184

“The highest and most diffficult kind of inquiry and a subtle, delicate, vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the physical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it. When the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means life and not its despotic master.” p. 184

“Democracy will come into its own, for democracy is a name for a life of free and enriching communion.” p. 184

“But while associated behavior is, as we have already noted, a universal law, the fact of association does not of itself make a society. This demands (…) perception of the consequences of a joint activity and of the distinctive share of each element in producing it.” p. 188

“Individuals find themselves cramped and depressed by absorption of their potentialities in some mode of association which has been institutionalized and become dominant. They may think they are clamoring for a purely personal liberty, but what they are doing is to bring into being a greater liberty to share in other associations, so that more of their individual potentialities will be released and their personal experience enriched.” p. 193-194

“Vision is a spectator; hearing is a participator. Publication is partial and the public which results is partially informed and formed until the meanings it purveys pass from mouth to mouth.” p. 219