The Lurker: A Category

Accord­ing to the “Lurk­ing” entry on Wikipedia:

In inter­net cul­ture, a lurker is a per­son who reads dis­cus­sions on a mes­sage board, news­group, cha­t­room, file shar­ing or other inter­ac­tive sys­tem, but rarely or never par­tic­i­pates actively.

I am a lurker. From Prof Hacker to William J. Turkel, from Smash­ing Mag­a­zine to 456 Berea St (Roger Johans­son), from A New Cen­tury of For­est Plan­ning to Can Enviro Rock? (Lau­ren Wheeler), I tra­verse the world wide web via RSS and links as a lurker, rarely par­tic­i­pat­ing, but always learn­ing and col­lect­ing via Pin­Board, InstaPa­per, and Zotero, and here­after on this blog under the cat­e­gory: “The Lurker.” The major­ity of those items col­lected under “The Lurker” are related to the Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties, Web Design and Devel­op­ment, and Envi­ron­men­tal His­tory. It is prob­a­ble that the act of post­ing col­lected items will negate my self-​imposed moniker, but I hope not. I like being a lurker regard­less of how “inter­net cul­ture” regards the lurker.

On with the lurking …

The Lurker: The Sub­ver­sive, Dis­rup­tive Nature of Readability

Read­abil­ity is a tool that allows the user to turn any web page into a:

com­fort­able read­ing view right in your web browser. Too busy to read right then and there? Read­abil­ity makes it sim­ple to save your favorite arti­cles for read­ing later.

Read­abil­ity is avail­able for Fire­fox and Chrome as an exten­sion. For Safari, Read­abil­ity comes as a core com­po­nent called “Reader” — a but­ton located at the end of the URI bar. Reader for Safari, how­ever, is “avail­able only if you have Mac OS X v10.5 Leop­ard or later, and “the Reader but­ton appears only when a web page con­tains text-​based arti­cles.” For other browsers, like Opera, one may also install Read­abil­ity as a Book­marklet.

I have used Read­abil­ity exten­sively since it came out, and have found it par­tic­u­larly use­ful not just for read­ing reg­u­lar web pages, but also when sav­ing web pages and blog posts in Zotero. Until the other day, how­ever, I did not con­sider any of the broader impli­ca­tions of Read­abil­ity. Beside just improv­ing the read­abil­ity of a text – based page, Read­abil­ity also impacts how we read, how we use a web page, and how we inter­act with not just the visual design of page but also with the writer of that web page. As Jef­fery Zeld­man argues, Read­abil­ity is dis­rup­tive because

Read­abil­ity focuses the user’s atten­tion on the con­tent, cre­at­ing an enhanced – and often much more acces­si­ble – read­ing expe­ri­ence. It also sub­verts the typ­i­cal web brows­ing design par­a­digm, where each web­site offers a dif­fer­ent visual experience

Zeld­man also argues that Read­abil­ity dis­rupts not just “typ­i­cal web brows­ing design par­a­digm,” but also because it dis­rupts con­tent monetization.

For the first time, con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion is no longer the prob­lem of con­tent cre­ators. Writ­ers can stop being sales­peo­ple, and focus on what they do best: cre­at­ing com­pelling con­tent. The bet­ter the con­tent, the more peo­ple who engage with it via Read­abil­ity, the more money writ­ers will make – with no book­keep­ing, no ad sales, and no has­sle. This is a huge sub­ver­sion of the ad paradigm.

I was struck by the issue of con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion that Zeld­man brings up. Based on my expe­ri­ence, most human­ists on the web seem to be very much behind the idea of open access and open pub­lish­ing, and con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion does not seem to have been issue, or at least not one that I have seen con­sid­ered in dis­cus­sions revolv­ing around issues of pub­lish­ing and author­ity. Read­abil­ity, how­ever, does strike me as hav­ing some place within this dis­cus­sion. I could be wrong on this point, see­ing some­thing that is not there, but just out of curios­ity: How should human­i­ties schol­ars — and aca­d­e­mics in gen­eral — view Read­abil­ity and its sub­ver­sion of not just the typ­i­cal web brows­ing expe­ri­ence but that of con­tent mon­e­ti­za­tion? Com­ments, thoughts, issues?

Of Rocks: Conclusion

The under­ly­ing rock of the Puente Hills from the Bed­ford and South­ern Cal­i­for­nia Batholith base­ment to the Miocene and Pliocene sand­stone, silt­stones, and shale tells us a story about the nat­ural his­tory of the Puente Hills, about how they were made and how they came to be Hills. This was not a short process. Time passed slowly but surely for mil­lions of years, tec­tonic plates floated on molten rock, bump­ing and grind­ing against each other. Where two pieces rubbed edges, the earth twisted, slipped, folded, and buck­led over and up. The land was, for the most part, cov­ered by an ocean. Water crea­tures lived in forests of sea­weed, and when the crea­tures and the forests died, their bod­ies set­tled to the bot­tom. When mixed with sand and mud, and heated and pres­sur­ized, they became the thick lay­ers of rock and oil under­ly­ing the Hills. This hap­pened for 245 mil­lion years, and some hun­dreds of thou­sands of years ago, the Puente Hills emerged from the ocean, as it fol­lowed one of its many ebbs and flows, slowly becom­ing dry land 1.

As the Hills emerged from their oceanic exis­tence, wind and water imme­di­ately began to shape them. The soft sed­i­men­tary rock under­ly­ing the Hills would ulti­mately com­bine with the cli­matic effects of wind and rain and the sur­face streams and creeks, result­ing in the deep ero­sion evi­dent in the Hills today. Ulti­mately, the rock and water would com­bine, cre­at­ing the land­scape nat­ural his­tory of the Puente Hills. Wind and rain and streams carry their own sto­ries of the nat­ural his­tory of the Puente Hills.

Excerpted from Richard H. Ross. “From Rock, Wind, and Water: A Nat­ural His­tory of the Puente Hills.” Clare­mont Grad­u­ate Uni­ver­sity, 2006.

Notes:

  1. Kim Stan­ley Robin­son, The Gold Coast, (New York: Tom Doherty Asso­ciates Book, Inc., 1988), 43 — 45 ↩