TITLE: The Patterns, They Are A-Changin' AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: February 13, 2012 4:13 PM DESC: ----- BODY: Seth Godin's recent blog entry at the Domino Project talks about how changes in the book are changing the publishing industry. He doesn't use the word 'pattern' in his discussion, in the sense of an Alexandrian pattern, but that's how I see his discussion. The forces at play in our world are changing, which leads to changes in the forms that find equilibrium. In particular, Godin mentions:

Patterns of length. There are tradeoffs involving the cost of binding and the minimum viable selling price for publishers versus the technology of binding and a maximum viable purchase price for consumers. These have favored certain sizes in print.
Patterns of self-sufficiency. "Electronic forms link." Print forms must stand on their own.
Patterns of consumption. These are are driven even more economic forces than the other two types, not technical forces. Consuming e-books is, he says, "more like browsing than buying."

Godin looks mostly at the forward implications of changes in the patterns of self-sufficiency, but I've been thinking about the backward implications of print publications having to stand on their own. As noted in a recent entry, I have begun to adapt a couple of my blog entries into articles for print media, such as newspaper and magazine opinion pieces. My blog entries link generously and regularly to my earlier writings, because much of what I write is part of an ongoing process of thinking out loud. I also link wherever I can to other peoples' works, whether blogs, journal articles, code, or other forms. That works reasonably well in a blog, because readers can see and following the context in which the current piece is written. It also means that I don't have to re-explain every idea that a given entry deals with; if it's been handled well in a previous entry, I link to it. As I try to adapt individual blog entries, I find that they are missing so much context when we strip the links out. In some places, I can replace the link with a few sentences of summary. But how much should I explain? It's easy to find myself turning one- or two-page blog entry into four pages, or ten. The result is that the process of "converting an entry into an article" may become more like writing a new piece than like modifying an existing piece. That's okay, of course, but it's a different task and requires a different mindset. For someone steeped in Alexander's patterns and the software patterns community, this sentence by Godin signals a shift in the writing and publishing patterns we are all used to:

As soon as paper goes away, so do the chokepoints that created scarcity.

Now, the force of abundance begins to dominate scarcity, and the forces of bits and links begin to dominate paper and bindings and the bookshelves of the neighborhood store. It turns out that the world has for the last hundreds of years been operating within a small portion of the pattern language of writing and publishing books. As technology and people change, the equilibrium points in the publishing space have changed... and so we need to adopt a new set of patterns elsewhere in the pattern language. At first blush, this seems like unexplored territory, but in fact it is more. This part of the pattern language is, for the most part, unwritten. We have to discover these patterns for ourselves. Thus, we have the Domino Project and others like it. The same shifting of patterns is happening in my line of work, too. A lot of folks are beginning to explore the undiscovered country of university education in the age of the internet. This is an even greater challenge, I think, because people and how they learn are even more dominant factors in the education pattern language than in the publishing game. -----