I've been using the New York Times Editors' Choice app on my iPad for a few weeks now. It's a pretty good way to discover interesting stories in the Times, but each time I use it I feel a sense of disconnection, of something missing. This unease was just a low-level background hum until Steven Johnson (author of, among other terrific books,
Everything Bad Is Good for You and
The Ghost Map), nailed it his lecture
The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book (the video is
here; SJ shows up at about 9:00):
You can’t do anything with the words. They’re frozen there, uncopyable, unlinkable, like some beautiful ice sculpture. Frozen is the right word, because we’re so used to selecting and copying digital text, encountering text on a screen that can’t be selected leaves you with a strange initial assumption: that the application has crashed, and the screen is frozen.
Ah, that's it. [Insert sound of hand slapping forehead.] So much of the text you read on the iPad is web-enabled, that the absense of links in the Times app is just plain weird. And not being able to quote from a story without—gasp!—typing it by hand, is perverse:
When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.
In the same essay, Johnson coins the phrase "textual productivity":
Ecologists talk about the "productivity" of an ecosystem, which is a measure of how effectively the ecosystem converts the energy and nutrients coming into the system into biological growth. A productive ecosystem, like a rainforest, sustains more life per unit of energy than an unproductive ecosystem, like a desert. We need a comparable yardstick for information systems, a measure of a system’s ability to extract value from a given unit of information. Call it, in this example: textual productivity. By creating fluid networks of words, by creating those digital-age commonplaces, we increase the textual productivity of the system.
The real problem, then, with the New York Times app — and, as Johnson reminds us, the iBooks app, with its inability to copy even snippets from DRM-encrusted ebooks — is the extreme lack of textual unproductivity. These apps add precisely nothing to the information ecosystem, which in this digital day and age just feels wrong.