Photo by ankit Bhattacharjee on Unsplash
Playing around with Twine this week and reading about how our collective creation of knowledge has moved through periods of unfettered growth and also periods of concerted efforts to organize, has, to my surprise, made me think of the pulsing of a waveform, the seasonality of monsoons, and the regularity of waves breaking on a beach. It has reminded me of the cycles of nature, despite the interface through which I’ve consumed the information and the topics being covered being entirely electronic in nature.
Perhaps these metaphors are a reaction to my own understanding of our evolution of communication, similar to how a snake molts, or a rock weathers. But in reading, listening, and watching about the affordances of the digitization of print media, I observed a periodicity that reminded me – and brought me comfort – of being grounded in the physical world.
When I explored the Zoom function in the Twine desktop app, rather than simply looking at the page details and their immediate connections, I began to appreciate the outline of the narrative I was creating on the fly.
And although the interface invited me to just begin authoring, it wasn’t until I had zoomed out that I began to reflect on the structure and flow of the story. This is both powerful and liberating, because it facilitates an iterative workflow and capability that doesn’t exist for printed text. Case in point, in speaking about the “writing machine”, a reference to the word processor, Engelbart states:
This one innovation could trigger a rather extensive redesign of this hierarchy; your way of accomplishing many of your tasks would change considerably. Indeed this process characterizes the sort of evolution that our intellect-augmentation means have been undergoing since the first human brain appeared. (Engelbart, 1963)
While digitization frees readers from having to follow the path of authors (Bolter, 2001, p. 79), and information overload inspires the exploration of systems to organize (Nelson, 1999), I was most struck by something written by Bush (1945) because of its prescient relevance to generative AI:
The Encyclopædia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. (Bush, 1945).
Large language models are highly compressed representations of information, which, in contrast to the explosion of digitization that has happened over the past 30 years, generates imagery associated with contraction, concentration, the trough of a waveform, and the quiet anticipation of the interlude between waves crashing onto the shore.