Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy is a book by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association and Visiting Research Professor of English at New York University, published by NYU Press on November 1, 2011. The book provides an overview of issues facing contemporary academic publishing, including the closing of academic presses and the increased pressure on faculty to publish to achieve tenure. Fitzpatrick's central argument is that academia should embrace the possibilities of digital publishing, which will in turn change the culture of academic writing and publishing.
Major themes The book is divided into five chapters, not including the introduction and conclusion: Peer Review, Authorship, Texts, Preservation, and The University.
Toward a new form of peer review Fitzpatrick starts the book by deconstructing one of the most important steps in the academic publication process - peer review. Drawing on a wide-ranging history of and problems in the process of academic peer review, she argues that much of the peer review process is about credentialing rather than about encouraging good ideas. Digital technologies allow for a review process that is more in-line with promoting good ideas: "putting them on the digital table, welcoming diverse attitudes toward them, selecting, shaping and reconfiguring them “curatorially” in imaginative response to freely offered and serious opinions". Keeping this in mind, Fitzpatrick offers a new model for peer review - 'peer-to-peer review'. She uses MediaCommons as an example of a community-filtered web platform that can function as a site to comment on a draft of scholarly work. On such an online platform, authors can post a draft manuscript and invite comments from their peers or the public, or both. Planned Obsolescence itself was posted on MediaCommons Press as a draft and comments were invited from the general public.
Changing conceptions of authorship With digital publishing, Fitzpatrick envisions a shift in the accepted conception of authorship from a solitary enterprise with a definite endpoint in the creation of the text to one of writing within a community as part of an ongoing process. This change is a result of the capabilities of word processing, which allows for the swift and simple revision of text, and the digital networking, which enables linking, reader commentary, and version control. By releasing text to be read and commented upon online authorship becomes ongoing, process-oriented work taking place in a community of interested readers. Another aspect of community or collective authorship that Fitzpatrick explores is related to remix culture. She proposes a possible model of scholarly writing that collects and compiles work in illuminating ways. To be viable, this would require institutional acknowledgement that this kind of work is as valuable as the traditional scholarly monograph, and also the participation of the scholarly community in a gift economy with their work. She suggests that scholars use a Creative Commons license for scholarly work to facilitate the use and reuse of material for the collective benefit of the community. Fitzpatrick acknowledges that online writing, and particularly the use of platforms that enable reader comments, will require authors to develop a different relationship to their work. They must be committed to supporting online discussions without dominating them, and they must accept that this will increase the amount of time that they must invest in their writing, both because online discussions require regular participation and because their duration is indeterminate.
New textual forms For Fitzpatrick, blogs, hypertext, and databases suggest directions in which digital scholarly publishing might move. She sees early attempts at hypertext writing as ultimately about the thought process of the author rather than the reader, but locates a possible future in the use of databases as platforms to create works by pulling together writing and media elements to create “new forms of networked arguments driven by the juxtaposition of digital objects and their analysis.” Such texts might be multimodal, Fitzpatrick's term for texts that do not simply include media objects but instead incorporate media into their analysis or use media as analysis.
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