*Okay, this little article is concerned with "teaching" – teaching people software usage, basically. But that's not what it's REALLY about. This is about what we've been doing to ourselves with media for the last 20 years.
*The article is about what we strongly seem to WANT to do to ourselves, which is good, but the *intermediate stages of what we have done are all getting smashed.* There's the old-fashioned printed book, which is primeval, mute and just sitting there, and then there are all these intermediate stages of network culture, like the "blogosphere," which are extremely useful and popular and then obsolesce in terribly short order, leaving no detectable trace.
*Since this blog's migration, links to several years of previous BEYOND THE BEYOND posts have simply vanished into 404-land. People are sending me anxious email asking if I have died or been kidnapped by corporate ninjas. Those links are probably gonna be restored somehow. Sure. Fine. But what to what highly perishable content do those links link?
*At what point do we realize that we are impoverishing ourselves by doing this? We are not *merely* impoverishing ourselves by this, we are also radically enhancing ourselves, but every mediated extension of man is also a mutilation. There is a whole lot of scary mutilation going down this year. There's blood all over the place and the way forward is shrouded in mist. Books are in bad shape, newspapers mortally wounded, magazines reeling, the less said the better about music, but *blogs*? Social software pages? And tweets? Oh my goodness those are pitifully frail little entities.
http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/05/immediacy-and-teaching-for-diy.html
"In the beginning was the book, and documentation more broadly. Whatever the source, printed material was what we wanted twenty years ago. Training and classes were wonderful, of course, but expensive, and imposed on time in ways that printed books didn't. Books and documentation gave you a foundation, but you had to build your own experience with the books, often reading them repeatedly, focusing on or marking up sections, and praying for a useful index.
"Fifteen years ago I encountered Microsoft's documentation CDs. The amount of information, even then, was staggering, but suddenly there was a search function. It wasn't perfect, but it gave me much more flexibility to interact with the material. It wasn't social yet, but it already felt much more open than the book. (((Okay, great. Now try to imagine reading a 15-year-old Microsoft documentation CD. That's right, sit down, get all cozy with that CD. Do you take my point here yet? How much money would someone have to pay you to painfully master the utterly useless, totally obsolete information in a 15-year-old Microsoft documentation CD? And when you mastered all that – when you "learned" it? – where would you apply that "learning"?")))
(((Given that you can't actually deploy any of the learning you have "learned," perhaps this process should not properly be described as "education." Perhaps it's better understood as something closer to battlefield military training: learning to efficiently follow somebody else's orders in conditions of rapidly accelerating chaos.)))
"Ten years ago, documentation was in a much more social space. A lot of the formal documentation that had been in those CDs and print was online, yes, but suddenly people were posting their own material, sharing their experiences. Online forums and email lists were common, no longer the preserve of a few brave pioneers on newsgroups. Search engines gave the flexibility I'd enjoyed with the CDs, but now these documents had creators I could contact by email. The nature of the conversation could also shift, from just learning to talking, arguing, and creating.
(((It's great stuff, but let the Voice of Doom get another word in edgewise. Online fora are nifty, right? Go find me a ten-year-old online forum discussion that anybody wants to read. There might be some on the WELL. Possibly. After you blow a couple of kilos of dust off of 'em. It would be technically trivial to assemble and publish the "Best Online Fora Discussions of 1999." Super-interesting year, 1999, right? All kinds of famous geeks, future web superstars, blowin' smoke about all kinds of cool stuff in forum discussions? Well, where is it? If you saw a book like that in the street, or a DVD like that, or even a thumb-drive with the best fora discussions of 1999 loaded on it – for free – would you bend over to pick it up?)))
"Five years ago, the social space for those conversations was decentralizing. Content had always been scattered across the Internet, of course, but the rise of blogs and their comment systems changed the dynamics. Commenting on a blog entry let you ask questions in a space tied to a particular subject and creator, getting responses in that context. It wasn't as intimidating as sending an email to someone, or sending an email to a list of people with a broad interest in the surrounding field.
(((This new blog platform seems to lack a way to block comments across the board. BEYOND THE BEYOND has, of course, always blocked comments, one of the reasons that it has survived. A blog post from 5 years ago might conceivably be useful and interesting if it had some original material, but five-year-old *comments*? )))
"Over the last five years, the distance between information creator and information consumer has shrunk even further. Podcasts and screencasts let you hear the voice of their creators. Even when they're distributed as broadcasts, there's a sense of closeness there that just isn't available through text. They have the key advantage of documentation - you can go back over them easily, watching until you get it - but they feel very different. (((They do indeed feel very different. They feel downright alien, which is why all the stuff we are doing right now is gonna get obsolesced even more quickly than the 20 years of previous stuff we have already generated and effectively destroyed.)))
"Which brings us to last night...."
