Dear Councillor Vaughan,

I am writing you to express my concern that trees may be torn up in the downtown core as part of the security measures for the upcoming G20 Summit taking place here in Toronto. I am writing to you, in particular, because I am a resident of Trinity-Spadina, and because you were quoted in the National Post piece that brought the issue of the trees to my attention. The removal of the trees is an unnecessary and disgraceful addition to what has already become a shameful display of security theatre.

There are police officers in my family, and many close family friends are also officers, some serving as constables on the street, some in higher, supervisory or investigative roles at various police services across this country, including in the RCMP. I understand their professionalism, their commitment to public safety, and it is my most profound wish that everyone—ordinary citizens, visiting officials, protesters, and police and security officers alike—make it through the Summit safely. Unfortunately what I see in the news is not professionalism, but rather a show being put on, perhaps in response to considerable pressure and public scrutiny, not the least of which concerns the Summit's vastly inflated budget.

Professionalism demands balanced, reasonable preparations and responses in order to ensure the safety of citizens, visitors, and property. I and my fellow Torontonians have watched the announced security preparations slide from being professional and measured, to a wasteful farce, and now finally to a dangerous obscenity, a baroque and overblown theatre of the absurd.

The citizens of Toronto do not need a police state to keep us safe. We do not need our public transit infrastructure disrupted, our reporters harassed, our green spaces and other urban flora violated, our neighbourhood communities cordoned off from one another. We do not need checkpoints and credentials to enter or leave our own homes, to be safe. What we need is measured, responsible policing, that understands the city, that respects and works with its citizens. We need a city council that will stand up for these things, even against the Integrated Security Unit and the federal government. It seems that, for the coming Summit, we have too much of what we don't need, and precious little of what we do.

This most recent measure, the tearing down of trees to prevent their use as weapons, seems far more likely to provoke unwanted behaviour than to curtail it. It is, as Mark Calzavara put it, "insane." Your comments to the Post appear to justify this insanity, to give it your and the City Council's tacit approval. To give such approval is craven in the extreme, and does not, in my opinion, represent the best interests of your ward, or the city as a whole. I have seen comments you have made regarding financial compensation for businesses affected by the Summit, but no criticism at all of the security measures themselves. If you and the other councillors lack the fortitude to speak out against this absurdity, then I am ashamed to have you as my representatives, ashamed to live in a city that accepts such things. If the city is this willing to abandon the best interests of its citizens in the name of security—for what has been widely acknowledged as little more than a photo-op—what will happen if a real emergency, a genuine security crisis, ever comes to Toronto? What faith can I have that whoever is in charge will respond to an appropriate degree, now that you have shown us this total submission to paranoia? The answer is none.

I have lived in Toronto nearly four years now, the whole time in Trinity-Spadina. In that time, and in my travels around the city, though I have twice been mugged, I have never once been afraid to live in Toronto, to walk its streets. Until now. When the G20 Summit arrives, I will stay indoors, out of fear. But make no mistake: I am not afraid of any protesters. In the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that has been created, I am afraid that because of the stupidity the Integrated Security Unit has brought down on our city—the stupidity that you have allowed to go largely unchallenged—some poor, work-a-day police officer, infected by the paranoia and under tremendous pressure, will overreact to something innocuous, and I or someone I care about will suffer for it. All of this security has not made me feel safer, Mr Vaughan; it has made me more afraid than I have ever been.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

August C. Bourré

Social media isn't going away. Anyone arguing that isn't paying attention or is just straight up not very bright. Everything is "going social". Services like Facebook and Twitter, when coupled with the rise in popularity and greater affordability of mobile computing are making it easier for folks to stay connected to one another over long distances, and to feel like they have a relationship with their favourite brands, celebrities, media outlets, whatever. In some ways it's a marketer's wet dream.

There's this idea that social media, or the social web, or whatever you want to call it, is about making direct connections between people rather than, say, connections between dumb web pages and PDF documents and what have you. This dichotomy is true if you think of the Internet as being largely made up of automated, corporate-controlled, business-centred websites and tools. Accurate statistics have always been hard to come by, but I've been rolling around these here Internets since 1998, and that's only been true for people who think of the Internet as a place to extend the same old things they were doing before, rather than a (metaphorical) place with its own rules, its own conventions, its own reasons.

I've had two great loves in my life, and the two relationships could not have been more different. J and I were together for seven years, as inseparable and connected as we could manage, but according to Facebook's metric, we never should have been able to manage a single conversation without boring each other shitless. We had nothing in common—in fact we often hated the things that the other person loved. Her friends didn't really care for me, and mine hated her. The relationship developed—and lasted—because we found ourselves in situations where we were forced to interact, and the more we interacted directly, the more we found how awesomely powerful, and more importantly, how attractive the tension between us was. Weirdly, our romance was incredibly stable, solid as a rock for nearly the whole seven years.

With A Certain Young Lady, things couldn't have been more different. We hit it off right away, and while it's true we didn't love every little thing that the other was into, we had more common likes and dislikes than I share with even my best and closest friends. Every conversation contained a frisson of recognition as we learned more about each other. It was more like discovering a new facet of myself than getting to know another person. But the relationship was volatile, turbulent. We both, at various times, admitted to never having had so emotionally intense a relationship. We saw each other on and off, as friends or lovers, sometimes barely speaking to each other, for roughly three years, never managing more than a handful of months at once. By Facebook's reckoning we should have been a flawless match, but instead we haven't been able to have a civil conversation for going on two years.

Facebook has it backwards. Social relationships aren't built using blocks like simple likes and dislikes; it doesn't matter if you have X number of things in common, because those commonalities are not what you use to forge real social ties. Relationships are forged because we use direct social interaction to discover the frisson that happens when our likes click, or the tension that happens when they don't. And it's those elements of frisson and tension that make relationships work, make them real. To start instead with a data set of likes and dislikes, common interests and concerns, and move from there into direct social interaction and then to tension or frisson is to have all the ingredients right, but to be putting them together in the wrong way. Facebook's way is simpler, but I worry that by tying to understand people's relationships with each other as a function of having similar relationships to things, that simplification creates more problems than it solves. (I swear to God this is leading up to books, just bear with me.)

Hugh MacLeod has written a post on something called the Social Object, and Dare Obasanjo has done a pretty good job suggesting that it's Facebook's model for how social connections are made and work. I think Obasanjo is right that Facebook is using that model. The problem is that the model is wrong.

Let's look at how MacLeod defines "the Social Object":

The Social Object, in a nutshell, is the reason two people are talking to each other, as opposed to talking to somebody else. Human beings are social animals. We like to socialize. But if think about it, there needs to be a reason for it to happen in the first place. That reason, that "node" in the social network, is what we call the Social Object.

This isn't as straightforward as it looks. MacLeod apparently likes talking about something called "Marketing 2.0" (seriously dude?) which is probably going to make this a little fuzzy by default, but I see at least two competing ideas here. First, the straightforward bit: MacLeod believes that Social Objects are the reason people connect. If you and somebody else both like Star Wars (to take one of his examples), then that common like gives you a reason to talk to each other and make a social connection. I think this is a bit of a stretch (I'm a fan of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which are books written for and mostly read by young people, but I don't think that gives me a reason to talk to any of his twelve-year-old fans), but it is straightforward.

If we were to redo Obasanjo's diagrams strictly with this definition, Star Wars would probably fit best as an edge. In his example, the nodes Jennifer and Kim, who are currently connected by the edge "is a friend of," are both connected to the node "Justin Bieber" via the "is a fan of" edge. But according this part of MacLeod's definition, Jennifer and Kim's fandom of Justin Bieber would not be an indirect connection through a third party node, but "is a fan of Justin Bieber" would itself be an edge connecting them. Fandom is not the thing they do to express their connecting, it is the thing that connects them. This probably wouldn't work in terms of the code, which is what Obasanjo is mostly concerned with, but that's how the relationships actually functions.

The competing idea in MacLeod's description is that Social Objects are also sites for social relationships, or put another way, they are the things we do to express our connections. To take another of MacLeod's examples, educated-but-bored wives of rich men (let's not get into all the things that are wrong with MacLeod's examples, or we'll be here all night, okay?) want to get out of the house and socialize in a way that stimulates the mind, so they organize a high-profile charity event. In this example, MacLeod lists the charity event as the Social Object (as opposed to the boredom, which would have been the Social Object if we were going by the first part of his definition). In this case, the Social Object is quite clearly the kind of node that Obasanjo represents in his diagrams.

What happens when you try to define a network where major elements are both nodes and edges? Well, I haven't worked with network theory in years, and I wasn't an expert then, but I'm pretty sure that at worst you get nothing, and at best an arbitrary, fucked up network that doesn't work, doesn't make sense, and doesn't really tell you anything useful. Either way you have to go back and redefine your terms. Let's do that now.

First, we should take a closer look at MacLeod's first definition, and talk about some rules. Obasanjo was right to describe "Justin Bieber" as a node with "is a fan of" as the edges connecting it to Kim and Jennifer. If being fans of Justin Bieber truly is the reason Jennifer and Kim are talking to each other, then the "is a friend of" edge between them exists only because they are already connected to the Justin Bieber node. In other words, it's a catalyst. Two nodes of a certain type (People) must be connected to at least one node of another type (a Social Object) by one or another of a particular kind of edge (in this case "is a fan of"), in order for any kind of edge to form between them, in this case the "is a friend of" edge, though from MacLeod's examples it's clear that other types of edges are permitted between People nodes. I think this has problems, but let's keep going with it for now.

The second part of MacLeod's definition already sets up Social Objects as nodes, so we're on safer ground already. What we need now is to talk about edges, because in his "bored housewife" (ugh) example, a new Social Object node is being created because of existing "is a friend of" edges. Here's MacLeod's example in full:

You're an attractive young woman, married to a very successful Hedge Fund Manager in New York's Upper East Side. Because your husband does so well, you don't actually have to hold down a job for a living. But you still earned a Cum Laude from Dartmouth, so you need to keep your brain occupied. So you and your other Hedge Fund Wife friends get together and organise this very swish Charity Ball at the Ritz Carleton. You've guessed it; the Charity Ball is the Social Object.

There's actually more than one Social Object in this example, but there are some problems. In two of MacLeod's first three examples, the Social Objects are physical things that you can have feelings about (books you can like, mobile phones you can be interested in). All the others (with one notable exception: MacLeod refers to human children as Social Objects, and while I think that having children ought to be, on some level, an expression of love between the parents, there's a lot more going on that MacLeod doesn't seem to want to look at too closely), they are all things you do to express certain kinds of relationships between people. For all the Hedge Fund Wives to get together to create the Charity Ball node, they must a) already have "is a friend of" edges joining them, and b) already be connected by other Social Object nodes. The nature of the Charity Ball node makes it easy to pick out the other Social Object nodes that connect the Hedge Fund Wives. They are Rich, Married (Wives, remember?), Educated, and Bored. It's interesting to me that none of these are the external, physical things that folks have feelings about that characterize MacLeod's examples of how people form social connections. They are all abstract characteristics of the people themselves. Common properties of the People nodes, rather than People nodes who both connect to a certain Social Object via a particular kind of edge.

Even when trying to simplify things, we wind up with a great many flavours of Social Object, a near infinite number of edges, and we even have to be able to say certian things about the People nodes in order to set rules about how they interact with Social Objects (or we have to set up certain characteristics of the People nodes themselves as Social Objects—allow nodes in the network to be networks unto themselves, essentially—and set rules about what kind of nodes can connect to what other kind of node via what kind of edges; in MacLeod's example, you wouldn't want Hedge Fund Wife Number Three to be connected to Social Object "Bowling" via the same kind of edge that she is connected to the Social Object "Bored", would you? Probably not... and what if I like the Lady Gaga song "Bad Romance", but dislike the rest of her work. How would you represent that social relationship in this kind of network?). It's enough to make one's head explode.

And here's the real kicker: it's not even half as complex as the way things really work. I didn't bring up my two great loves to demonstrate how shitty my love life is, but rather that MacLeod (and Facebook's) model of social connections being made is extremely flawed. In fact, it falls apart in one of his own examples:

You're a horny young guy at a party, in search of a mate. You see a hot young woman across the room. You go up and introduce yourself. You do not start the conversation by saying, "Here's a list of all the girls I've gone to bed with, and some recent bank statements showing you how much money I make. Would you like to go to bed with me?" No, something more subtle happens. Basically, like all single men with an agenda, you ramble on like a yutz for ten minutes, making small talk. Until she mentions the name of her favorite author, Saul Bellow. Halleluiah! As it turns out, Saul Bellow happens to be YOUR FAVORITE AUTHOR as well [No, seriously. He really is. You're not making it up just to look good.]. Next thing you know, you two are totally enveloped in this deep and meaningful conversation about Saul Bellow. "Seize The Day", "Herzog", "Him With His Foot In His Mouth" and "Humbolt's Gift", eat your heart out. And as you two share a late-night cab back to her place, you're thinking about how Saul Bellow is the Social Object here.

Saul Bellow may be the Social Object in this example, but he's not the reason for the connection being made, mating is. In fact, a social connection is made without a Social Object at all. Horny Young Guy goes up and interacts with Hot Young Woman (ugh), and they form a real, if shallow and probably short-lived, social relationship (fellow guests at party) without any help from a Social Object. When a Social Object finally is introduced, it serves as a catalyst to upgrade that relationship to a more intimate one, but it could have done the opposite, or, and here's my favourite part, even if any number of Social Objects had been introduced and they had found none that connected them both, it may very well have been the tension resulting from encountering that strangeness, that alienness, that upgraded the relationship. MacLeod's definition of a Social Object, and his examples, are simply too open-ended and self-contradictory to actually be useful.

Facebook has gotten around the complexity and open-endedness problems by making everything abstract, and limiting the nodes and edges to a simple handful, using the information that generates largely as a tool for selling advertising (and God knows what else in the future), and that seems to be the same sort of road that most people want to go down when they talk about the "social" web. One thing I worry about is that these over-simplifications of how social connections are made and what they mean will take away a certain amount of our intellectual autonomy. When the Canadian Government was doing consultations on copyright reform last year, the bulk of the people who submitted comments did so by sending a form letter. How many people fully agreed with the letter, do you think, or had done any kind of looking into it? I admit that I sent the form letter, and it wasn't until later that I examined my reasons for not writing my own (something I would have done ten, or even five years ago). What I realized was frightening: I sent the form letter because someone had simplified the issue for me, and it was easier than dealing with the complexity of it. I thought, "this person has clearly spent more time with the issue than I have, and the letter looks reasonable. I should defer to their judgement." In retrospect this is appalling, but I think it's symptomatic of how much we've come to rely on the superficial, simplified, and somewhat fuzzy versions of real world issues and relationships that come to us from folks like MacLeod and companies like Facebook.

So what does this mean for books?

For starters, it means that it's a bad idea to take the reported value of any kind of social media at face value, or to use the numbers those media generate (fans, follower counts, comments on a blog, clicks on a "like" button) as any kind of true indication of message penetration, market share, or even potential sales. I like Microserfs, but I've hated everything else Douglas Coupland has ever written, and reading interviews with the man has led me to believe he's kind of a flake. Does it make sense to market his books to me because I once clicked a "like" button next to the title Microserfs? How would you even know?

(Back in the summer of 2004 I worked as a research assistant on a project led by Dr. Madhur Anand and Dr. Hoi Cheu at Laurentian University, looking to find a link (using complex systems theory, and network theory in particular) between literary theory and science, perhaps even hints at a biological imperative. Much of the next few paragraphs has been adapted from a summary and analysis document I wrote on the materials I was reading for that project. The research and writing are mine, but the ideas, tentative and incomplete as they are, are heavily influenced by feedback and direction from Dr. Anand and Dr. Cheu, and the original idea and parameters for the project came from Dr. Anand.)

One of the things I think MacLeod got right (and Obasanjo illustrated well) is that we need to think of Social Objects and people both in terms of networks if we're going to say anything meaningful about how they interact. MacLeod's explanation of Social Objects tried to do too much. We need to limit ourselves to one kind of Social Object in order to say anying meaningful—in this case, books (or to limit things further, literary texts in general, including poems and short stories) are our only Social Object, and humans are our other node, networks unto themselves. Some basic assumptions:

Minds are worldviews (subjects).
Worldviews are networks of ideas. For the sake of clarity, I will define ideas as information plus context (which may or may not include interpretation).
Texts are models of worldviews using a network of selected ideas.
Humans create models to help them understand their world and themselves.
Texts exist to help humans understand their worldviews.

Texts exist to help humans understand themselves and each other.
Texts can only be understood/interpreted through the filter of a worldview, using specific tools from that worldview (a combination of cultural codes, norms, and local knowledge/experience).

As nodes in the network, humans are worldviews (something contemporary literary theory identifies as "subjectivities," although that word has too many other meanings to be useful here). A worldview is a network of ideas that together form a whole. Liane Gabora (in "Ideas are not replicators but minds are." Biology and Philosophy 19: 127-143, 2004. Gabora is not consistent about the makeup of her worldview networks; sometimes they consist of ideas, sometimes ideas and attitudes, and similar vague terms. I will treat all such units simply as "ideas.") writes that

what is evolving is not separate ideas or attitudes but worldviews, i.e. interrelated networks of them. Worldviews are primitive replicators, which replicate without copying from a code. Underlying any idea is a web of assumptions that render it not only possible to be expressed, but sensible and worth considering in the first place. Even when one does not believe an argument or adopt an attitude, one's worldview is nevertheless affected by (potentially indirect) exposure to this underlying web of assumptions. As Spurber points out, it is not necessary that an idea be understood or even believed to be true for its influence to spread. For example, if Ann's argument for why free trade is good appears flawed to Bill, and thus strengthens Bill's conviction that free trade is bad, the structure of Ann's argument has spread even if the final conclusion has not. Thus even if no particular overtly expressed act or belief gets copied, through exposure to parents and other influential members of society, a general framework for how the world hangs together falls into place in the child's mind, and this worldview will have some likeness to that of its predecessors. The worldview of a child is a replicant of the worldview of its parents (and others) so long as the fidelity requirement is not applied stringently (137).

What is important here is not so much the concept of the worldview as a replicator that allows culture to evolve, but rather the concept of worldviews as networks of ideas that can interact with one another and change one another.

The ideas that form these worldviews are not entirely random. After all, if interaction between worldviews is how culture evolves, it stands to reason that despite all interactions being local, certain ideas, or kinds of ideas, such as social norms and codes, spread more or less evenly, although not identically, throughout the network. Gieseke (in "Literature as Product and Medium of Ecological Communication." Configurations, 2002, 10: 11-35, 2003) quotes Nonaka and Tekeuchi, calling this

tacit knowledge, which is hard to articulate with formal language. It is personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and involves intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective, and the value system ... (25)

Because tacit knowledge is not easily expressed, it does not fit smoothly with Gabora's notion that ideas must be transmittable and worth transmitting. Rather it implies that when worldviews meet there are interactions on more than just the explicit level. In order for worldviews to interact with one another, they must have in common a certain amount of tacit information—or the tacit information in the interacting worldviews must be similar enough that they have a framework for more explicit communication. Gieseke quotes Nonaka and Tekeuchi's comments on explicit knowledge, as that

which can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals, and so forth. This kind of knowledge can be transmitted across individuals formally and easily ... (25)

That definition seems much closer to what Gabora had in mind when she wrote about interrelated ideas, but clearly those kinds of ideas alone would be inadequate.

Explicit knowledge is the same as what I will call "selected ideas." These ideas are added to worldviews as a result of specific local interactions that involve deliberate communication, such as schooling, time spent with parents and peers, and sometimes even texts (it is possible to learn how to make jam by reading Anna Karenina, for example). These ideas are often less reliant on the interpretation than tacit ideas, but have a greater influence on the uniqueness of the individual worldviews, because unlike tacit ideas, these ideas are defined by the fact that not every human in the network has access to them.

Texts are model worldviews made of chosen (and if they stick around long enough, selected) ideas. They exist for the same reason that all models exist: to help humans understand their world (or in this case their worldviews).

When a writer creates a text, they choose ideas from their worldview (and very often those ideas were incorporated into that worldview from other texts) and constructs the text from those ideas. All of the ideas incorporated into the text are chosen, but they are not necessarily "selected," i.e. they can be ideas unconsciously taken from the writer's tacit knowledge. The author has a limited power to direct interpretations because they can pick and choose which ideas to include, but because the author also relies on the tacit knowledge of the reader, the text can only ever be partly directed. What little power the author has also diminishes over time, because cultures and worldviews both evolve, while texts cannot. Therefore if a text remains in the network long enough, it becomes exclusively a network of selected ideas because the tacit ideas that originally informed it will no longer be operating in the network as a whole.

What is present in the text is present in the text and cannot be added to. However, the interactions between humans and texts are interpretive. Humans use their own worldviews as a filter when interpreting texts.

Alright, so as stumbling and half-formed and academic as all that nonsense is, what does it mean? It means that books are already a social medium. What they aren't is a simple social medium. You can't engage with it by clicking a "like" button, or joining a Facebook group, or typing your email into a subscription box. When the project ended in 2004 we were just starting to work out how the interactions might work between nodes and edges. We were looking only at how people interacted with literary texts, largely to see how new texts were created and what the network would look like as a whole. People (worldviews) and texts (model worldviews) were the only two nodes on the network, and two potential flavours of edge (reading and writing).

These are the sort of interactions we were looking at:

When a worldview and a model worldview meet, the worldview evaluates the model in terms of its tacit information to determine if any interpretive act can be performed (this is itself an interpretive act, but is not the meat of the matter). The worldview behaves as if the model is a code (or several linked codes) to be deciphered rather than another subjective network of ideas. Multiple codes (and multiple interpretations) can be recognized by the worldview, but the text itself never changes and therefore its subjectivity (its network) cannot evolve the way a human's idea network does, because it does not carry with it the information from each interaction.

The interactions themselves are fairly straightforward and limited. They are either "embrace," " resist," or "treat with indifference." Indifference is not the same as an idea being neutral; there is no such thing as a neutral idea. An idea that is treated indifferently is one that is either embraced or resisted, but the reaction is so weak that it makes no qualitative difference to the worldview's network of ideas. An embraced idea is one that the worldview makes a part of its network, perhaps affecting the network in a way that the worldview feels is positive. A resisted idea is one that the worldview tries to avoid bringing into its network, or isolates/actively resists/works to eliminate if it does become part of the network. The processes are not necessarily conscious (and most often probably are not).

I can't tell you for sure if that's how things play out; we didn't get to the point of actually building computer models and seeing what happens, so the rules never got refined, errors weren't given a chance to crop up. All kinds of things still needed to be looked at. But that's not really the point. The point is that all kinds of things go on when you read a book that could qualify as social, but they don't work the same way as the "social web". What Facebook is doing with their new protocols, by turning everything into Social Objects, is simplifying those interactions to the point where one may be tempted to let somebody else do the analytical heavy lifting.

Digital books are something else entirely. The possibilities are enormous, especially when open formats like ePub (and the readers that can actually read it) start fully supporting the possibilities of HTML 5, CSS 3 and other technologies coming down the pipe. But there's potential problems there too. Mark Bertils has made some interesting suggestions about borrowing elements from customer reward programs, and more importantly, video games. Adam Greenfield has posted about this in another context, but he directed me to this excellent post by Russell Davies on taking game elements and adapting them to other contexts. Davies writes:

The problem is, up to now, we've mostly experienced these point scoring mechanisms in the context of well-designed games. They're part of a larger experience - properly thought through by people who know what they're doing. We like scoring points, partly because, up to now, all the contexts in which we've scored points have been fun.

However, as I've slightly grumpily encountered myself, not everyone who wants a game wants to pay for a game designer. It's a bit like advertising, everyone thinks they can do it themselves.

Which means we're going to encounter a bunch of crappy sorta-games foisted on us. Those rudimentary game schemes are going to be rolled out by everyone with a rewards card, CRM system, loyalty scheme or something that can be plotted on a graph. And they're going to be no fun. They're going to drive us all mad. This'll either lead to wholesale abandonment of the whole idea or a recognition that proper games design is necessary.

He make a couple of good points. I'm part of a long-running private web community made up mostly of web designers and developers. These are the people—not the biggest names in the business, but not your nephew who "knows computers" either—who could make these game elements work using formats like ePub and the various associated technologies. Recently there was a candid conversation between some of them about salaries. Publishing, in this country especially, is notorious for being cash-strapped. The one thing I learned from reading the discussion about salaries is that developers cost money—real money, not publishing industry money. More than one said they wouldn't get out of bed for less than $80,000 a year. Now imagine a Canadian publishing house having to hire not just one, but a whole team of developers to implement some of Bertil's game-style suggestions. And if you want a full-on, application style treatment of an ebook, like this Alice in Wonderland ebook, then you're only talking a handful of projects a year, even with a team, at least if you want any kind of editorial oversight. Greenfield is terrified of what game-related triggers can do in the hands of somebody who knows what they're doing, but I'm with Davies on this. I am most definitely not looking forward to the half-assed implementations of rewards systems that will proliferate because folks can't or won't spend the money to do it right. Never mind the cost of servers and a back end to handle all the interactivity and reward programs and craziness at the client side. Regardless of where you see publishers falling on this spectrum (I know some that would do it up right but can't, and some that could but won't), either way I think most will fuck it up somehow. Davies thinks that other elements could be taken from video games and used effectively, like the cues for entering another world and being "someone else" for a time. The thing is, books already have these things.

I don't pretend to have all the answers, or even any answers. What I do know is that publishers need to find a way to engage directly with readers in ways that take advantage of new technologies without undermining the existing strengths and complexities of books and reading, and without simply doing a half-assed job of implementing somebody else's existing programs.

I know this post was just a collection of incomplete ideas. For now that's all I have; I'm really deciding what my opinions are as I write them down. Expect more of these, mostly on ebooks. Hopefully they won't all be this long.

re: recent changes to Facebook Connect/Open Graph

I am concerned that I had to 'opt out' rather than 'opt in' to letting Facebook and my friends on Facebook release my private information to third parties not of my choosing. This is a disturbing trend, and it's clearly not in keeping with the spirit (nor perhaps the letter) of your agreement with the Privacy Commissioner of Canada. Frankly, it feels like Beacon all over again, with OpenID grafted on top of it. I will continue to tighten my privacy settings and scale back my use of Facebook until such time as you have default settings and policies/practices that treat my privacy with respect, rather than making me feel like you'd sell my information to anyone and everyone, and just hope I won't notice.

best,
August C. Bourré

I've been running vestige.org for just a touch over a decade now, and one thing that I have always, always, always said, is that I didn't want the site to be about making money. No advertising, no affiliate links, no donations or sponsored posts or any of that nonsense. What you do on your site is your business, but I didn't want any of that here. Most of my current readership was not around back when I used to be vocal about this sort of thing, so it probably won't matter to you folks, but I remember it quite clearly, and it matters to me.

But.

This site isn't very expensive to maintain, if you define "not very expensive" in relation to some kind of objective measure, like the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto. The thing is, I don't make the average income for a thirty-something, university-educated white male living in Toronto, despite the fact that I am, well, blah blah blah, you get the picture. What I actually make (and I want to be clear I'm not complaining about my employer here, because my employer is pretty awesome) is considerably less than that. Enough less than that to make any purchase over $25 something that has to be budgeted for in advance. At that point running this site, yeah, isn't hugely expensive, but it's expensive enough that I feel it come budget time.

The point is, I'd like to apply for an affiliate program to help mitigate the cost of running this place, but I want to make sure that it's cool with you folks first. I say apply, because that's how it works over at McNally Robinson; you have to apply for membership in their program. That's right, not Amazon.com, but McNally Robinson. There's a few reasons why I chose their program as the one I want to apply for. I like their stores. I've visited the flagship store in Winnipeg, and their short-lived store here in Toronto, and every time the staff was courteous, knowledgeable, and not only did I find the (sometimes rare) books I was looking for, I often found books I didn't know I was looking for. Also, they are a Canadian indie retailer, and supporting our independent booksellers matters to me. In addition, they do customer service really well. I was given a McNally Robinson gift certificate for Christmas, but was unable to redeem it before their Toronto location was closed, so I placed my order online. Before shipping my book, one of their staff noticed that I was using a gift certificate that, at the time it was given to me, should have been redeemable locally. So, without my asking for it, they picked up the tab for the shipping, and I didn't have to pay a dime more than I would have if I'd walked into their store. They didn't have to do that, but it was pretty awesome of them, and I'd like to see them succeed in the future. I also feel that linking to a retailer instead of directly to the publisher is good for the publishing/bookselling ecosystem here in Canada. If you buy from someone like McNally Robinson, not only are you supporting an independent retailer who is (in my opinion, anyway) worth keeping in business, but the publisher and the author will still get their cut. And the last reason why I'm choosing their affiliate program over someone like Amazon's, is because Jeff Bezos eats kittens (not really, read the link).

If you folks give me the go-ahead, McNally Robinson accepts me, and I find the terms of their program agreeable, here's what will change: almost nothing. When I mention a book, I'll link to McNally Robinson. I'll go back through the archives and add links to the books I've already reviewed. And I might, might add a small banner advertisement to the navigation menu on the right of the page, where my AugustBourré.com banner is now, if I can find one that I like (I am insanely picky about the aesthetics of this site, which is another reason I don't like the idea of running ads). I would also add a text link to McNally Robinson in the menu bar. And that's it. It would in no way affect the content of this site, or my editorial direction, or whatever you want to call what I do here. It will just mean a handful more text links, a single banner ad (no more than one per page), and maybe it will be a little easier for you to buy the books I talk about, if you're so inclined. If it helps me out a little by dropping some silver in the coffers, then so much the better.

So is applying for an affiliate program okay with you? Let me know what you think in the comments, and thanks for reading and for contributing to the discussion.

Oh, P.S.: research and writing for The E-Books Post is going well, but it's going to take more time than I thought. While you wait, I invite you to read The Sea As Hypertext, my first attempt at addressing electronic literature and the work of art in the age of digital reproduction (well, technically my third; I'd written two previous variations of that essay, both of which have been lost to the sands of time).

This is not a post about the Bechdel test, nor The Frank Miller test (dramatised here), aka the How To Tell If A Male Science Fiction Writer Is Obsessed With Whores Test. This post is not actually about gender representations at all. It does, weirdly, come from my having just read a post that is kind of, sort of, about those things.

You see, a while back I wrote about China Miéville's novel, Iron Council, and I had some trouble explaining exactly what was wrong with it, stylistically speaking. What I wrote was:

Events that would later be referenced with specificity were described with a dream-like vagueness that often made it difficult to figure out just what the hell was going on. It felt like he was in such a hurry to move the plot forward that he ignored the mechanics of his prose. In addition, he once again made use of the pseudo-stream-of-consciousness interludes that are a kind of trademark of his novels. They are always, always, always the worst parts of his work, and they are a chore to read through, because he's frankly not very good at the technique.

Reading thene's post today, in which she referred to those passages as "that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book that some people hate and I hopelessly adore" got me thinking about the gaps in experience between readers of genre fiction and readers of literary fiction.

I suppose I'm a crossover reader to some extent, but my reading habits are heavily weighted on the literary fiction side, and I only stray into genres like science fiction, fantasy, or crime if I can be assured of the quality of the work (the author has a solid reputation), or something about that specific book has piqued my interest. I find I'm atypical in that respect. Most of my friends who read literary fiction only read literary fiction. I also have a great many friends who are genre enthusiasts, and they will read literary fiction, but pretty much all of them stick to literary works published before the Moderns (ie. before "literary" fiction was established as a marketing category). I hate to generalize, but it seems like a deliberate pact for the two communities to ignore one another. The literary types avoid genre as beneath them (or if you find that too harsh, then "not serious enough"), and the genre types avoid literary fiction as pretentious. Either way, I can just as much count on my friends who are SF fans to have read absolutely nothing by Lisa Moore as I can on my literary friends to not have a goddamn clue who Samuel R. Delany is.

And then it hit me what was really wrong with Iron Council.

James Morrison (the Caustic Cover Critic) recently posted about a gorgeous new series of Margaret Atwood covers designed by Nathan Burton, and had this to say:

[H]er science-fiction (which she goes out of her way to pretend isn't science-fiction) is usually awful: it has the self-satisfied unoriginality of somebody who hasn't read anything in the genre from the last 50 years, and so thinks that their daft cliches are new and exciting.

That's exactly how "that wild present-tense 150-page book-within-book" from Iron Council felt. For those of us who have spent years pouring over Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, hell, even David Foster Wallace and Jeanette Winterson, what China Miéville was doing in those passages was not fresh or wild, it was a fumbling, clumsy-as-fuck attempt to tackle a convention that authors of literary fiction have been refining for something like a century. To a science fiction fan who hasn't read widely in Modern and contemporary literary fiction, the "daft clichés" I saw in Iron Council probably do seem "new and exciting."

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that reading more widely outside our preferred genres would be of benefit to us all, readers and writers alike. A diverse gene pool is a healthy gene pool, after all.

On a more personal note, friends of mine from way back will know that I've always wanted to write some science fiction and high fantasy, and over the last ten or fifteen years I've written reams and reams of plots, character profiles, background information and supporting documents, enough to spawn a dozen novels. And I can assure you that there are more than two female characters, none of them are prostitutes, none of them get raped, they get to talk to each other about things other than men, marriage, or babies, and they even get to have adventures.

My eyelids are heavy and my hands are cold for no apparent reason because I left the window open and this is a basement apartment wherein the heating is controlled by someone in an apartment the heat rises to rather than from, so what we have here is just a "hey, I'm alive" post for those of you that don't follow my ramblings on Twitter.

There will be no e-books post this weekend, because apparently there's some holiday called "Easter" coming up, and I'm going to be out of town visiting family, which is the sort of thing I do on holidays. Not having a laptop or other portable computing solution makes posting while out of town a touch difficult. On a related note, there won't be any post on the Jeff Rubin book for a while either; I'm taking extra care reading it because I think it will help when it's time to talk about the sustainability of e-readers. I'm even taking notes! Can you imagine that? I didn't even take notes in university.

I posted the other day about Sociable, a party thrown by the inimitable Julie Wilson, and lo, there are photos that will make you jealous for having missed it, and you'll only have to endure one snapshot of my crusty mug, seen sharing a frame with the always whatever-the-opposite-of-crusty-is Bronwyn Kienapple (who recently wrapped up her excellent I Am Not A Target Market series about male reading habits).

There will be a couple more books to watch out for in the near future. Through some bizarre concatenation of circumstances I've managed to acquire a copy of The Waterproof Bible, by Andrew Kaufman, The Burning Land, by Bernard Cornwell (which I'm going to have to get to soon so I can loan it to my father when he passes through town; he's the one who gave me the first four in the series, after all), and next week the fine folks over at Melville House will be sending me a paperback copy of Hans Fallada's Every Man Dies Alone (I was quick on the draw this afternoon and won a Twitter contest). So there's that.

I managed to register on time for BookCampToronto this year. I'm very excited about that; last year I forgot about it until it was too late to register, and by all accounts I missed a powerful good time. I hear some interesting things were said and done concerning the future of books, and that makes it the place to be if you want to have your fingers in that particular pie. And lord do I.

Oh yeah, and some of you may have heard that I was recently interviewed via email by Erin Balser for Books@Torontoist. I'm kind of a long-winded bastard, so I do hope I managed to be at least marginally coherent.

You can ignore the rest of this post, because the bits that I'm about to quote are the only bits that are relevant to what I want to talk about. Adam Greenfield writes:

The reason people keep blogs – let me be more straightforward: the reason I keep a blog – is to express opinions. Precisely to not, always, have to be consistent or sensible or bound by a duty to the truth. To not, always, have to be responsible. To not, always, answer to the same standards I'd expect of (say) a writer for the New York Times or the Guardian. To be full of shit, if I feel like it. And, what's more (and this goes to the bozo who whined about my ostensible tone of "world-weary superiority"), to be full of shit in whatever style I feel like adopting.

This is nearly identical to something I wrote back in early 2000, when I was keeping a (very) personal journal on a site that no longer exists. Blogs were a pretty new thing then, and there was still a fair bit of dispute about what kind of a website that word should refer to. Vestige.org had been around for a few months by then, and looked dramatically different from what it is today (and was closer to the kind of sites I'd been building since I came online in late 1998), but the site my journal was on was most definitely what would become knows as a blog. I updated and archived everything by hand, because content management systems like Wordpress either didn't exist, were expensive, or were difficult to customize or coax genuinely useful behaviours out of. It was just easier to manage everything by hand. Most of us were still using FONT tags for fuck's sake. I wasn't even writing about books.

These days it sometimes feels like keeping a personal website—now a blog by default, rather than them being the exception—has to be about developing a personal brand, about marketing yourself or your interests in some way. In 1998 the Internet didn't feel like a marketplace, it felt like a frontier, the closest someone like me would ever get to lighting out for new territory, planting some stakes in the ground and calling whatever was between them my new home. I was lucky enough to find a community of people I could respect and learn from, programmers and web designers, illustrators, sysadmins, UI architects, writers and Flash gurus. Some of them, like Adam Greenfield (who I doubt would remember me today) would become influential in building the Web as we know it now. The businessmen were already setting up shop by then, and we were on the cusp of the boom. They knew there was gold in them thar hills. A lot of us would make our careers that way (my path was different, though the Internet will always play a role), but most of us were, and still are, driven by what can be done, how far things can be pushed, not just by how many more and better ways we can sell shit. I came here for the adventure, and while it's true that now even I am using things like my Twitter feed to "network" and make connections, to advance my interests, most days the adventure is still why I'm here. It's a place where I get to be full of shit, and full of shit in whatever way I want.

What's crazy, though, what I didn't expect, is that the things I've been doing over the last little while to "market" myself (a term I use loosely), are turning out to be a hell of a lot of fun, and they've helped me—especially over the last two months, thanks in particular to things like Kerry Clare's Canada Reads: Independently, and Twitter, which I've already mentioned—start to find a place in a whole new community, one where we aren't building the Web, but maybe something just as exciting, if a little smaller. A niche frontier, if you will.

Anyway, thanks for letting me come out and play.

As I write this, Apple's supposedly wonderful Time Machine software is busy making its third attempt in twelve hours to backup my system. Those who follow me on Twitter (again with the Twitter—all the cool stuff happens there first these days) will know that I've been having issues with the hard drive in my iMac, and that I finally have the opportunity to get it fixed. What I didn't have was an external hard drive large enough to do a full system backup onto before taking it into the shop. It would be an incredible shame to have my computer repaired only to lose all my data. Like curing a disease by killing the patient.

Someone who relies on their computer as much as I do not having a backup drive is kind of like a lawyer who doesn't have a will, and since I'm not all that eager to be compared to lawyers at the best of times, I went out and bought a 2TB (that's right, TB) external drive. It took me some time to figure out how to format it for use with Time Machine, but I got that down, and started the backup. Five hours later, "Time Machine Error: Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume." Fuck a duck, as my mother would say. Being the Google super-sleuth that I am, I found a couple of fixes, but only one that really looked promising. I did that, started it up again, and went to bed. I awoke six hours later to find... "Time Machine Error: Blah blah blah." Fuck a duck. This time I was more clever. I reformatted the target drive, went back to Google, and poured through the Time Machine logs.

It turns out that Time Machine chokes on corrupt files, and deep in the rabbit-warren that is my downloads folder was a music video I downloaded more than a year ago and then completely forgot about, letting it sit there and collect dust, corrupt as you like. 30MB of bad data, all confined to a single file, made a 320GB backup fail. Fuck a duck. So I deleted that, and twenty minutes later my third Time Machine backup seems to be going smoothly. Fingers crossed.

Oh yeah, the reason for my post. I was supposed to take my machine into the shop today, but because I'll be at work by the time this nonsense finishes, it's going to have to wait until tomorrow. I still have Marina Endicott's Good to a Fault and Martha Ostenso's Wild Geese to review before next week, which might be a bit tricky without a computer. The folks at the shop tell me I should have my computer back by Saturday afternoon, barring unforeseen complications, so aside from on Twitter, which I have access to at work, you won't be seeing much activity from me online in the meantime. Just a heads up.

(Oh, and in case you're wondering, my Time Machine backup drive is named "Wells".)

This weekend I went to Waterloo to visit my mother. She and my stepfather were originally supposed to come and see me in Toronto so we could visit the King Tut exhibit at the AGO, and go to one of my favourite neighbourhood eateries, Caplansky's. But my mother has been very ill these last few weeks (she's on the mend, never fear), and it's perfectly reasonable for me to be the one to travel instead. I love traveling by train, and it tends to be a tad cheaper than the bus, so I booked a ticket on Via Rail, and off I went. Those of you following me on Twitter know what happened.

I sleep when I travel. I don't know why this is so, but it's been the way of things since I was too young to speak my own name. Put me in a car, a bus, a train, a boat, sometimes even an airplane, and I'll be in the land of Nod before we've gone more than a couple of miles. I'm a decent highway driver with a lot of experience on different road conditions, but this selective narcolepsy generally makes me a poor choice for driver on long trips. Anyway, I knew I would fall asleep on the train ride to Kitchener (only getting two hours sleep the night before didn't help), so I asked the guy in the seat next to me to wake me when we got there. He agreed, put on his headphones, and did his thing.

The next thing I know I'm being nudged awake by the guy in the headphones. I look at my watch, and we're right on schedule. I stumble out of my seat, wipe my eyes, and zombie-walk my way to the terminal. I look around, and my ride has not arrived, so I go to the washroom and wash some of the sleep out of my eyes and off my face before heading out to the parking lot.

Here's something you may not know about the Kitchener train terminal: it doesn't have a large entrance with steps and stone pillars, nor is it on the crest of a hill. Somehow those things are present. Still groggy, my first thought is: when did they renovate this place? Disoriented is not the word. The terminal looks pretty much as I remember it on the inside, though granted I'd only been there the once, but everything outside is cockeyed. Familiar, but not quite right. A rather bracing blast of wind and snow hits my face, and I wake up enough to read the signs on the businesses across the street. They tell me I'm in fucking Guelph.

Christ on a bike.

I turn around and grab the terminal door so I can cut through, and the damned thing is locked. I look through the window, and, oh yeah, the fucking train is gone, snuck off like some fucking diesel ninja on rails. Now don't get me wrong, Guelph is a lovely community, home to one of Canada's finest bookstores, and the reason it had looked sort-of familiar is because I had been there before. But Guelph clearly wasn't where I wanted to be. I walked around the terminal trying all the doors, and every one of them was locked. I have no idea how I even made it inside the first time. Perhaps I didn't, and was simply so groggy I was peeing on some frozen bush and didn't even realize it. The world may never know.

Thirty or so minutes later, as I was beginning to fear for my fingers and toes, my mother and stepfather arrived to collect me, finding the situation rather funnier than I did. You know, I didn't realize there was such a plethora of traveler-at-the-wrong-stop jokes out there, but by God I've heard them all now. I was extra careful on the way back. I didn't even fall asleep.

Fucking Guelph.

There is this thing out there called Goodreads, which appears to be a kind of Facebook for books and book people. I signed up today to see what it's all about. I only have one friend so far, so it's not very "social" for me yet. If you're the sort of person who's into that kind of thing, we should be friends. I've added a little under half of my books to the account already, and will be adding more as the week progresses.