Phil Shapiro is a thinker, visionary and writer in the Washington D.C. area. He takes a keen interest in the social and psychological dimensions of online communications. This is the 20th column in the ongoing, "Thinking About Online Communications" series. It comes to us through the generosity of The Washington Apple Pi Journal, the bimonthly publication of the Washington Apple Pi user group . http://www.wap.org
Thinking About Online Communications
Phil Shapiro
LAST MONTH I finished reading an excellent new book, "The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality." Having finished the book, my mind was swirling with ideas. So I sat down and wrote a lengthy e-mail message to the author of the book, Michael Heim. His Internet address was printed right there in the preface of the book.
__ Within a day of sending the message, I received a friendly reply. Incredibly enough, the very person who had spent months and months of work writing this book was ready and able to respond to my own reactions to the book.
__ The excitement of being able to communicate with someone whose book you just read is hard to describe. The experience is akin to going backstage after a play to chat with the director and actors of the production. Or being invited backstage at the end of a rock concert to chat with your favorite performers.
__ Truth is, I was already familiar with Heim's work from his earlier book, the uniquely insightful, "Electric Language: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Word Processing." I had written a feature length review of this earlier book, so I e-mailed Heim a copy of the review .
__ Heim was duly appreciative to receive a copy of the review I wrote. Actually, it took me all of five seconds to send him the review. The review was already sitting on my hard drive as a text file. The least I can do to show my appreciation of an excellent book is to send the author a copy of a review I have written about the book.
LAST YEAR I engaged in an equally invigorating e-mail exchange with syndicated columnist Michael Schrage, whose 1990 book, "Shared Minds: The New Technologies of Collaboration," has some immensely interesting things to say about collaborative creativity. Schrage is currently working at MIT's Media Lab, a place whose mission is to dream and play with all the possibilities of converging technologies. (For a probing report on the goings on at MIT's Media Lab, see Stewart Brand's 1987 book, "Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT.")
__ The excitement of direct communications between writers and readers is something that results in great benefits to both. Writers, after all, derive emotional sustenance from the feedback they get from readers. The very purpose of writing becomes real and tangible when readers are able to respond to your books right in your own e-mail mailbox.
__ Online communications transforms the "imagined audience" into a "real audience." By doing so, it nurtures the emotional bonds between writer and reader.
__ The possibilities of writer/reader interaction got me thinking about the experiences I had writing a column for my college newspaper. While an undergraduate, I wrote a regular commentary column on the back page of the college’s literary newspaper. The words I would write on Sunday evenings at my desk, in my room, would be be multiplied 10,000 times to appear in bundles of newspaper around campus on Thursday afternoons. I'd often receive feedback from friends within an hour or two after the papers hit the sidewalk.
__ The positive reinforcment feedback created by hearing reader reaction to my ideas served as a potent source of creative energy for my next column. This same type of tight feedback between writer and reader is made possible by online communications.
__ It's only fair to admit, though, that there are some downsides to having book readers communicate directly with book authors. A popular author might receive several hundred fan e-mail messages per day. Naturally, fans will come to learn that not each and every e-mail message can be responded to personally, in detail.
__ On the other hand, online communications allows book authors to personally involve themselves with the publicity for a book. Book publishers will naturally start favoring those authors ready and able to put in the hours to answer online reader responses. Grueling and expensive book signing tours will thankfully take on a lesser role in book publicity.
__ Authors who write books on telecommunications subjects, especially, will be expected to be available to interact with reader fan mail. Before the turn of the century, it won't be surprising to hear the comment, "I can't for the life of me understand why this author didn't include his/her Internet address in the beginning of this book. Perhaps they're one of those 'recluse' authors, or something."Phil Shapiro
The author can be reached at: (202) 686-5465, pshapiro@aol.com, and http://users.aol.com/pshapiro/
Addendum:
Copies of the book reviews mentioned in this article can be found as text files in the Digipub Roundtable file library, and in the new "Readers" Roundtable file library here on GEnie. To locate the particular number of the file, search under the uploader: p.shapiro1To navigate to the Digipub Roundtable, simply type "digipub" (no quotes) at any standard GEnie prompt. To navigate to the new "Readers" Roundtable, type "readers" at any standard GEnie prompt.
Also, persons interested in following (and contributing) book reviews with the Internet community in general may enjoy the newsgroup titled: rec.arts.books.review
This moderated newsgroup tends to have a broader and more interesting selection of book reviews than the New York Times book review section. To contribute book reviews to this newsgroups, read the instructions given in the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) file for the newsgroup, which is posted periodically as a message to the newsgroup.
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