Google Wave, Writing Strikes Again
The fascinating presentation for Google Wave has been watched by millions of people in just a few weeks. It’s an hour and a half long video, a whirlwind of ideas and possibilities that paves the way to a new way to work and network. It’s exciting and compelling, even though it only shows just two people typing and editing text. Not the exactly what should make for a great video.
Video and audio are more effective that the written word, more direct and suggestive. It’s easier to manipulate people through these means, and many people are thinking that, as time goes by, writing will become less and less important . In a very interesting indie movie released last year, Sleep Dealer, one of the characters wants to become a writer, and sells her blog posts. But her “writing” consists in recording her voice while a device captures the images in her brain, converting them to video. It seems perfectly natural: writing images and writing words is not that different. One can hardly think that the most important moments in our future history will be shared with the written word.
But most of our communication is still happening via text, especially when it comes to work and building projects. Text has a lot of advantages when it comes to put down ideas. Reading is not linear: we can go back and forth from paragraph to paragraph in instants, ordering our ideas at will. We can tackle issues and complex systems while keeping an eye on the big picture. Pictures, videos and sound can help with that, but the spine of any creative and productive work flow is still text.
Google Wave is like a turbo engine for the written word. It enhances the unique possibilities of writing and reading to a new level, with a special focus on the possibilities of editing. It gives the chance to make changes in real time, giving an instant view on the impact of these changes to multiple people. This can’t be done with the same clarity even when working in the same room with people: spoken words fades constantly, and concept evolve in a linear wave.
This is the appeal of the Google Wave video. Seeing the documents in the presentation growing in all directions, from the center to the concept to its end, is a incredible testament of the reason why writing and editing words is such a powerful tool. It’s almost as if it makes editing as fluid and organic as making music.
Also, wave makes ever more clear that content is king. Form can be corrected by the program, form is tech. But ideas will stay, and will be shared and will grow in a group. Again, something much harder to track in words, and too cumbersome and slow to work out with video. And as a non native english speaker living in an international, the possibilities of real time translation from multiple languages can be a real revolution in the way we communicate. A real Babelfish, another tool only suited to written words, at least for now.
It’s hard to tell what this will mean for the future of writing, but I have the feeling that this can put the spotlight back to substance. The system uses the immediate feedback of IM, chats and blogging in a way that seems to celebrate the permanence of words. Blogging is a great tool, but it makes for a writing style that privileges immediacy to depth, and uses linking and commenting to make a community reach powerful, collective ideas in a disjointed process that leaves no space to polished, effective products that can be shared with people not involved in these small communities. But people working in a wave can make their primary goal to work together in editing and thinking as a group for something that can transcend the process itself: the final product of each wave should be one strong product of multiple minds. It feels like an architectural tool rather than a writing one.
It will be interesting to see this system grow with the rise of e-reader like Kindle. The combination of the two systems can give a new boost to writing. And maybe even prove Steve Jobs wrong when he says that reading is dead.
