Annotations are an experiment, and we consider this a beta release of the feature. The idea is to encourage thoughtful commentary and substantive contributions. Because you are annotating a specific paragraph, the discussion ought to be much more directed than usual. We’ll also reward your great annotations by featuring them more prominently, responding to you, and removing others that are off-topic or abusive.
Other websites have been an inspiration to us as we’ve built annotations.Soundcloud allows users to annotate audio; Gawker Media, images; and Medium, text. Rap Genius, originally focused on hip-hop lyrics, has recently expanded its mandate to letting people “annotate everything.” And our own product engineering director, Michael Donohoe, whose team built this new feature, has been toying with these ideas for a while. (Michael has written a piece about how the design and architecture of annotations evolved over time.)
A Hypertext Field Guide to McLuhan Understanding Media
The annotations in the left column are provisional glosses of my own. Highlighting can be very distracting to readers, especially when it is someone else’s, so I have tried to use it sparingly. Highlightings are a lot like scent-markings, a staking out of territory: lime denotes an interesting passage, yellow a central theme. This field guide began life as a self-help project. While it is entirely possible others may find it useful, I have tried to observe a strict discipline in interpreting McLuhan’s book: to write exclusively for myself; for I noticed that as soon as I began to think of these notes as product (rather than process), the adventure of free association failed and I lost touch with the material.
.. McLuhan did not index his books; he was a firm believer in the part played by intervalin human understanding and he may have felt that a specialist approach to his ideas would isolate and strip them of their rich elliptical associations.