Resumo de Gam3r 7h30ry - McKenzie Wark

GAM3R 7H30RYGAM3R 7H30RY is McKenzie Wark's experimental online book, created with the Institute for the Future of the Book.I've always found Wark's writing both fascinating and infuriating andwhat little I've read of this work keeps up the pace. But what is farmore interesting is just accurately the digital book format mirrors thesame sort of fascinating/infuriating oscillation. In the end the format both fails and succeeds in big ways. Like Bruno Latour's similar, yet less ambitious experiment Paris: Invisible City,the content is just incredibly ill suited to be read on a computerscreen. Part of the problem is resolution, computer screens today tendto have resolutions around 100 pixels per inch. Reading comprehensionoff a screen apparently doesn't match that of printed matter until theresolution is about 200 pixels per inch. When you are reading the news,or some blogger, or the sports scores this does not matter much. Butwhen you are trying to grok a complex academic text, forget it. I onceread the entirety of Hardt and Negri's Empire on my "smartphone". I enjoyed it completely, yet I could not recall a single thing from the text. The other side of the problem is posture, academic texts are alsonot meant to be read while sitting upright at a desk, and putting a hotlaptop on your lap is not exactly the same as curling up with a goodbook, is it? But this again is ultimately a technical issue, and likewith the screen resolution issue odds are it will be solved soonenough. Which brings us to the good stuff. What's great about GAM3R 7H30RYis the incredible amount of commentary it is generating. It is prettymuch the most dynamic feeling text out there. Lots of call and responsegoing on and it makes it all feel very alive, like a breathe of freshair in a stagnent library. Not only does it capture the vibrant energythat occurs in good blog powered exchanges, but thanks to it's ajaxinterface it actually pushes past into something even better. The real question I have, and it's one I seem to ask all the time,is how much of this scales? How much of this is repeatable and how muchis just a function of time, place and circumstance. There certainlymight be some first mover advantage here, the novelty generatesinterest, which generates more feedback than the next experiment willget. Then there is the matter of the books structure. Wark is a highlystylized writer, and he loves playing with form. In this case the formis an almost ritualized structure of rather discrete paragraphs. Chunksof text that do not need a huge amount of context to be understood. I suspect this structure is extremely helpful in fascillitatingfeedback. The pauses between paragraphs are so big and so deliberate,it makes it very easy to pause to type out a comment. You actually needto actively click to get the next paragraph, so it's pretty much achoice of two actions, react or continue on. The big question here iswhether that amounts to something more like a parlor trick, or awriting tactic that can be replicated with relative ease. Or maybe it'sa red herring, but then again maybe every academic book in some futurewill be written in these little chucks, explicitly to provoke feedback.In the end though, I'm still waiting for the printed version to read this thing...

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