February 5th, 2009
We live in media as fish live in water
The other day I was looking for a quote by Ted Nelson, a computer pioneer and maverick thinker. I found it: “We live in media as fish live in water.” This is very descriptive of our daily lives, imho.
As I searched, I was reminded of why I’ve long been interested in the work of Mr Nelson.
He came to my attention years ago because of his work on the Xanadu Project, which was developing an advanced form of what is currently known as hyperlinking technology.
The mission statement of the Xanadu Project describes a compelling technology:
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents– with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.
Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.
He is sometimes described in these terms:
While the World Wide Web may owe much of its inspiration to Project Xanadu, Nelson himself is an opponent of the Web, the Internet, XML, and all embedded markup.
Here is a taste of his sharp wit and insightful thinking:
No one’s life has yet been simplified by a computer.
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Why are video games so much better designed than office software? Because people who design video games love to play video games. People who design office software look forward to doing something else on the weekend.
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I see almost no difference between the Macintosh and the PC. The Macintosh interaction is much better tuned, but it’s the same conceptual structure, the PARC User Interface (PUI) with ordinary hierarchical directories now called “folders”.
Calling a hierarchical director a “folder” doesn’t change its nature any more than calling a prison guard a “counselor”.
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Strange– nobody believes that God created computers. Therefore we are under no divine obligation to use them according to tradition. We are, in principle, free to start over. But most people do not dare think about it. I say it’s high time.
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. . .technology, here as elsewhere, masks an ocean of possibilities frozen into a few systems of convention.
Inside the software, it’s all completely arbitrary. Such “technologies” as Email, Microsoft Windows and the World Wide Web were designed by people who thought those things were exactly what we needed. So-called “ICTs”– “Information and Communication Technologies,” like these– did not drop from the skies or the brow of Zeus. Pay attention to the man behind the curtain! Today’s electronic documents were explicitly designed according to technical traditions and tekkie mindset. People, not computers, are forcing hierarchy on us, and perhaps other properties you may not want.
Things could be very different.
Mr Nelson reminds us that computer technologies enable limitless thinking and that we do not need to constrain the development of new systems and paradigms to those that exist today. There isn’t much original thinking going on these days in the computer industry, maybe people just need to be reminded that they can.
Here is some more of Mr Nelson if you’d like explore more of his ideas:
A visit to the Googleplex in January 2007:
Video - Transclusion: Fixing Electronic Literature
Transliterature, A Humanist Design
Doug Engelbart’s Colloquium at Stanford | Session 9: Ted Nelson
An evening with Ted Nelson: visionary prerequisites for a vision - O’Reilly ONLamp Blog
Here is a Wired feature: The Curse of Xanadu
Tom Foremski reports on the business and culture of Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology and media. He also writes at Silicon Valley Watcher. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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