faster, shorter, younger, etc.

Books will surely begin to be published faster as a result of electronic technologies. This speed will probably lead to their becoming shorter and livelier as well. The sorts of massive monographs with elaborate scholarly apparatus that went hand-in-hand in a feedback loop with slower publication processes will probably become less common.

And with the steady increase in guerrilla and open access presses, and with electronic accessibility of academic documents in general, we will probably see an erosion of the stages of development with which people of my generation were familiar… Publishing a few articles in late graduate school or shortly thereafter, gradually working one’s way up to larger works. In the blogosphere we already see major participation by students on an equal footing with more established people, and this will soon become visible in the medium of books, with authorship at an age where my age group peers and I could never have dreamed of publishing anything that big.

One result of all of this, I have suggested, will be an end to the “gatekeeper” function of presses. It will be much easier to publish things, but also much easier for one’s works to be lost in an information glut, particularly those who had not yet established a readership before the change in technologies.

So, it may be easier to get published but harder to get noticed. And one side-effect of this might be an increase in controversies. These are familiar enough in the blogosphere already, but I would expect to see them increase as a way of establishing interest in published work. Go back to as recently as the 19th century, and exchanges of rapid polemic were quite common (just think of Nietzsche and his friends vs. the philologists in the wake of the publication of The Birth of Tragedy). Controversy is inherently attention-grabbing. And though I think it is often a bit too fast and a bit too hot in the blog medium, it might be quite suitably paced if conducted through PDF debates conducted in chunks weeks or months apart.

In The Speculative Turn there is I.H. Grant’s response to me, my response to Shaviro, and Nathan Brown’s response to Peter Hallward’s response to Meillassoux’s After Finitude. I hope I’m not forgetting any others at the moment. But I think these will be interesting exchanges for readers.