I’ve been meaning to write about David Cushman’s The Power of the Network book for a while now. I read it voraciously when the purchased print copy arrived in the week it was published and have read it again over the Christmas/Newtonmas break. I really enjoyed it. I find any conversation you have with David stimulating and I’ve been lucky enough to see him give talks at conferences. His writing is excellent and he’s one of the few people whose opinions on “where we are currently/in the near future” with the social web I trust implicitly. His insight into the current landscape in the book is fantastic and from it he provides a stunning vantage point into the networked world which is building minute by minute, connection by connection, conversation by conversation around us. For people outside of this networked world this vantage point could quite easily be daunting, even vertiginous. However through examples, quotes from other thought leaders and a very good and not overdone smattering of illustrative case studies he makes things simple. This is done without making things over simplified though, and the book can almost seen as a way of talking someone from old marketing/advertising off the ledge they may currently be finding themselves on.

Themes running throughout the book often have a recurring linguistic motif; a quote such as the lovely one from Stowe Boyd “I am made greater by the sum of my connections and so are my connections”. This makes the book almost like a piece of music where themes will come in and out of focus but remind you of their presence. This makes the book feel very well structured although in essence it is a collection of semi-connected essays and it could feel very disjointed. 

As a short primer on the “we media” and the power of conversation and communities of purpose, I can’t really think of a better place to start and I’ve recommended it to quite a few people now.

So why am I recommending a dead tree version of selected extracts of a blog? I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit of late.

I really quite like print. Actually I love books. It sounds really environmentally unfriendly, but I do. This love of books only been made more obvious by a quick trawl through some bookmarks, a move to my new study at home which finally reunites me with a desk and wall-to-wall bookshelves, finding a copy of a book I designed and what I’m writing about here: reading David’s book . 

The bookmarks which particularly appealed were ones relating to remote printing of material that you could send to people in different ways. One was from Tom Taylor talking about sending virtual clippings of interesting things to his grandmother using Viapost and a collection of Ruby scripts. The other was the social printer/letterbox idea from Schulze and Webb. What really appealed to me on re-reading this was the description of physicality in there.

The social letterbox printer sits on the wall so that when it’s finished printing, the paper falls to the desk with a satisfying thump. 

This was enhanced by a comment from Tom Carden which made me smile even more.

well, you could possibly catch the pages as they drop out, quickly bind them with some thermal gunk, and then drop the bound thing on the table. Heavy thud (single sheets of thermal paper might be a bit quiet on their own).

A lot of what I like about print is it’s tactility and physicality. The only thing which has come close to this experience of late from an electronic device is Stanza on the iPhone/iPodTouch (I haven’t yet played with a Kindle or other e-book reader yet).

I’m interested in this because I’m very aware that I may be part of the last generation whose “study” experience is primarily through print and for whom physical objects such as printed photographs, CDs, vinyl, DVDs and books were a primary route to content. Although we read to Sam and he has a great interest in the tactility of books, it is unlikely to be his main route into content. At 20 months he’s already very fascinated by computers, phones and devices like the iPodTouch/iPhone (obviously because he’s interested in interacting with the world of his parents).

I learn best, I find, with books. I’m intrigued constantly as to why. I use online resources constantly, yet if I want to learn a new skill or grasp a new subject I find a book helps. Even printing the resource works to some extent, but not as well as a book. What I’m also intrigued about is that my attention span for books seems to be diminishing. This could be to do with the shorter attention span we have for online materials, it could be to do with city life (thanks to Matt Hanson for dropping just that link into Twitter today). 

And so we come back to David’s book. As an ex-scientist, it was an excellent chance to get some starting points for theories relating to how I read/why books work for me. I know lots of the material well, yet I had a really different response when I was reading it. It seems just as authoritative as the blog itself; not more so, not less so. The writing is unadulterated from its online form and yet it seems different. I got to realise that it was how and when I was reading it that made a real difference. 

Firstly because you can’t immediately follow the links you tend to not get distracted and fall down content rabbit holes. Secondly you can if you’re that way inclined put a tube ticket (or something similar) in to mark your place even mid-text flow. You can even (in pencil of course) underline things and put notes in the margins. It’s also immediately a social object, you can share it, show it to someone, lend it to someone and then obviously furiously demand it back when they’ve forgotten to return it. 

Also important for me, aside from reading in a more linear manner, was where I read it. I was reading on the tube without any of the usual distractions which pop up when often I read at home. This at first glance seems quite mad. Often if I’m reading online Twitter or email will intrude, or my phone will buzz or bleep. This lack of distraction either internally to the text or from the surrounding chrome of the browser or the periphery of the screen or the physical location of me made a huge difference I found, far more than the contrast of ink on paper over screen reading.

To test things a bit further I decided to listen to the audiobook of Tribes by Seth Godin. For me it didn’t work as well as print. Partly because of the recording where Seth keeps saying “in this programme”. It’s a book not a radio show, and with the content material it felt more like a self help tape or an evangelical broadcast. Someone else’s voice coloured the material drammatically and I found myself frustrated by the overuse of the word “tribe” whereas with David’s book I enjoyed recurrent linguistic motifs and phrases. I now feel I have to read a dead tree version of Seth’s book as I feel I didn’t really ingest the content of the audio book, it was almost like it floated past, but not in such an enjoyable way as really great radio such as Radio4 and NPR does. 

Finally, it was in my opinion just the right size. Maybe it’s my reduced attention span, but I find myself getting daunted by the length of lots of books nowadays. I always have enjoyed compendia of short stories and essays, but size does matter really and the sense of achievement for someone who sometimes finds reading books hard (despite my love for them) of finishing a self-contained segment rather than an essay was really wonderful.