(2010-08-02) Stein Future Of The Book App

Bob Stein has been pondering a new Framing of the Future Of The Book, for going beyond the shovelware EBook style. *Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called "a book," people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been a variant of the following: while it's true that whatever replaces the book as a crucial mechanism for moving ideas around time and space is not likely to be called "a book," since we don't have that word yet, "book" works better than "institute for the future of discourse" or "institute for thinking about what comes after the book." I end my answer by suggesting that one day we'll realize that a word describing a new-fangled object, or perhaps a word referring to a range of behaviors has come to signify the dominant media form which has in fact supplanted the book.

I've always assumed that day would be years or even decades off. But recently, while listening to the Flux Quartet play Morton Feldman's First Quartet on a gently swaying barge in the east river, i suddenly recognized our first candidate -- "app." It's not the pretty or expressive word I was hoping for, but it feels right... While I think it will take some time to deeply understand the long-term implications of this flattening of all media types and experiences into varieties of apps, i don't think it's too early to suggest that "app" is on its way to linguistic hegemony. In the past we had books, movies and songs. now they're all being bundled into one category -- apps -- to be further delineated by a descriptive prefix.* One Big Soup of HyperMedia.