I think about the true promises of digital publishing: the collaboration, the near-spontaneity combined with almost real-time revision, the multi-genre and multimedia results of such writing and publishing. I also tend to shift my attention from the technological disadvantages of technically imperfect e-readers and palm pilots to new notions of authorship, readership, and the nature of texts themselves. . . . I think that the most exciting promise of digital publishing is the increased and improved collaboration between various writers and even readers. It is the spirit of collaboration and the idea of writing and reading texts together that has been transforming texts, reading, writing, and literacy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
We’re still pursuing the dream of bringing the creator closer to the act of composing complex, multimedia(ted) texts. Nick Carbone recognized that we might have to wait a generation or two before digital natives would realize this potential:<\/p>\n
We’ll need a few more generations of scholars, so that students who are now in grade school and learning how to write WWW pages and PowerPoints as part of their courses, and are reading online, often textbooks that K-12 educational publishers are putting on WWW sites, link to self-study guides and self-study quizzes. When these kids get through graduate school, growing as scholars as the e-technologies for writing and reading evolve, we’ll hit a cultural convergence where e-reading and e-publishing meet, and then there will be a market, and a domain, for digital publishing.<\/p>\n
I say give it seven to ten years or so.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There’s a well-known saying, attributed to William Gibson, that perhaps suits this kairotic<\/em> moment at Computers and Writing 2003, when the democratization of production and distribution promised great changes. As explained by Scott Rosenberg in the San Francisco Examiner<\/em>,<\/p>\nOnce whole worlds can be simulated for the senses, the only way to assure the integrity of the public imagination will be to get the power to create those worlds out of the hands of an elite and into general circulation. As William Gibson put it: “The future has arrived \u2014 it’s just not evenly distributed yet.” (“Virtual Reality Check Digital Daydreams, Cyberspace Nightmares,” 19 April 1992, page C1)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As Thomas DeQuincey might put it, we have seen the first intimation of digital publishing’s possibility. 2003 seems like yesterday, but we have a long way yet to travel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Origin Story: Digital Publishing F5 | Refreshed First, two\u00a0overtures: “The flight of our human hours, not really more rapid at any one moment than another, yet oftentimes to our feelings seems more rapid; and this flight startles us like guilty things with a more affecting sense of its rapidity when a distant church-clock strikes in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":164,"featured_media":13871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[513],"tags":[511,528],"ppma_author":[1318],"class_list":{"0":"post-13848","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-blog-carnival-10","8":"tag-digital-publishing","9":"tag-academic-self-publishing"},"authors":[{"term_id":1318,"user_id":164,"is_guest":0,"slug":"dblakesley","display_name":"David Blakesley","avatar_url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/a88a211522660157fc033263f8e6c215?s=96&d=identicon&r=g","user_url":"","last_name":"Blakesley","first_name":"David","job_title":"","description":"David Blakesley is the Campbell Chair in Technical Communication and Professor of English at Clemson University, as well as the founder and CEO of Parlor Press."}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/164"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13848"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13848\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20876,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13848\/revisions\/20876"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13848"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.digitalrhetoriccollaborative.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/ppma_author?post=13848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}