These are interesting ideas, even though it feels like we are sort of there already — in particular, this very platform seems like a natural step towards that — if not that already. It also happens with Medium articles — one can see the most highlighted passages on a given text, for example.

Many observers believe it’s only a matter of time before social-networking functions are incorporated into digital readers, turning reading into something like a team sport. We’ll chat and pass virtual notes while scanning electronic text. We’ll subscribe to services that automatically update our e-books with comments and revisions added by fellow readers. “Soon,” says Ben Vershbow of the Institute for the Future of the Book, an arm of USC’s Annenberg Center for Communication, “books will literally have discussions inside of them, both live chats and asynchronous exchanges through comments and social annotation. You will be able to see who else out there is reading that book and be able to open up a dialog with them.” In a much-discussed essay, the science writer Kevin Kelly even suggested that we’ll be holding communal cut-and-paste parties online. We’ll cobble together new books from bits and pieces lifted out of old ones. “Once digitized,” he wrote, “books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books,” which will then “be published and swapped in the public commons.”

That particular scenario may or may not come to pass, but it does seem inevitable that the Web’s tendency to turn all media into social media will have a far-reaching effect on styles of reading and writing and hence on language itself.