In publishing, the area of my DJ, there are definitely foxes and hedgehogs. You can be a very specific kind of publisher, concentrating on, say, medicine or antique automobiles or cat breeding. There are books and magazines on all of these, and many of them. (Cat Fanciers Association recognizes 40 pureblood breeds, so one has to wonder what they talk about in the 41st issue of their magazine, but who am I to cast stones?) On the other hand, you can be a very general kind of publisher. The age of the generalist editor in print has sort of moved on (Life magazine would be the perfect example), but what is the internet if not one gigantic generalist publication, comprising a bazillion little specialized publications. The net is that giant, labyrinthine library that Jorge Luis Borges would have invented if he were a computist.
I maintain that the nature of the interwebs library is so overwhelming that most individuals hardly bother with it. We all have an infinite-access library card to a library that is virtually infinite, and most of us run past the thing with fear and trembling. At best there are some who pop into the coffee shop for chats with their friends, or we go look something up in the encyclopedia, but that’s about it. Because there’s too much to digest, we don’t even try.
There are some tools that purport to help us access this library, but they’re far from perfected, if they ever will be. RSS can take certain internet material and collect it for us, but only certain internet material. Twitter can aggregate other certain information. There are the Flipboard-type programs in the iPad that collect material (from RSS and Twitter and Facebook). But while we can automate access to some extent, soon enough the automation is as overwhelming as the lack thereof. There’s just too much damned information out there. There’s even just too damned much information that we want! It’s not as if all that stuff is of no interest to us. We just have trouble getting at it.
The librarians of the future will be the people who help us access the internet. We’re presently calling them curators or aggregators, but the key thing is, they bring some human discrimination to the material on the web, selecting a reasonable number of materials to pass along. Which makes them very much like editors (or exactly like editors, really), picking out material that they think others will like. They can be hedgehogs, picking out very specific material, or foxes, picking out a broader base of material.
That’s what Grinwout’s is all about. I do this because I am compelled by internal forces. It is the way my mind works. I thrive sorting through data. I enjoy picking out the best data, and I love writing it up and passing it along. I’m trying to provide an access point to arts and entertainment (and some miscellaneous) content on the web, because I think people will enjoy it. I was trying to do this for my DJ, but it just didn’t fit into their digital plans. Whatever. I thought I could stop doing it, and I went cold turkey, but it took only a few weeks and I fell back into my addiction. I think I’m actually good at it because, well, viewed other ways, it’s been my career for the last 40 years, and I just happen now to be applying it this particular way.
The site is still evolving. I’ll talk more about specifics tomorrow.
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