(2015-07-21) Caulfield Beyond Conversation

Mike Caulfield: Beyond Conversation. When people talk about Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article As We May Think, they are usually talking about the portion that starts around section six, which seems so prescient:

The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow.

Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own

But the problem is that it is not prescient. Not at all. The web works very little like this.

Let’s look at some of the attributes of the memex.

You have a library of items. You own them, they are in your memex

Each memex library contains your original materials and the materials of others

Links are associative.

Links are made by readers as well as writers.

Links are outside the text

There are both linear trails and side trails. (annotation systems)

I don’t just get to read Alan Kay’s work — I get to see what occurs to Kay as he reads the work of others.

What was so exciting about these sections of As We May Think when I first read them was this idea of a new way of transferring knowledge — not by exposition or commentary, but by linking. By extending. Trail-blazing.

But this memex thing isn’t how the Internet works. There is no class of trail blazers. You don’t share a set of linked documents with a friend.

Why? I increasingly think that Ted Nelson gets it right. It’s partly about where the links live

Early hypertext did not have links as we know them now.

In fact, links as imagined by the heirs of Bush — Nelson, Van Dam, etc — formed a layer of annotation on documents that were by and large a separate entity.

The “hot spot” link we know today first appeared in the HyperTIES system in the 1980s, almost 15 years after the early hypertext systems of Andy van Dam and Douglas Engelbart.

The brilliance of this HyperTIES design is immediately evident. By mixing links with text you can have your cake and link to it too.

The brillance was not lost on Berners-Lee as he designed the web. In his 1989 proposal he specifically mentions the power of highlighted phrases

It’s genius. But it’s also a very author-centric version of linking

More importantly it does something unintentionally evil — for any given document there can be only one valid set of relationships, inscribed by the author.

Federated wiki deals with this issue by keeping links within the document but letting every person have as many copies of that document as they like

What I’ve been interested in however (and something that MC Morgan has been looking at as well) is the way in which writing in federated wiki pushes people to a new way of thinking about links and content.

I’m going to decribe my own evolving behavior here

In the newer style, content is kept fairly short, and fairly link-less. But at the bottom of the articles we annotate by linking to other content with short explanations of each link

What is interesting about this method is it plays into something else we saw in the federated wiki happenings. We expected people to edit each other’s documents a lot, and they did some of that. But what people liked to do most was add links and notes at the bottom to related pages, or, in many cases, create a new page specifically to be linked from the old.

It reminded me of storytelling sessions where you tell a story in response to my story

as federated wiki pages move through a system they are improved, and that’s true. But the more common scenario is that as they move through a system they are connected.

Jul22 Follow-up: Reader as Link Author

When we initially put people into federated wiki people didn’t do that. Instead, they commented, by adding endless signed thoughts to the bottom of the page (ThreadMode). This is bad for reasons I won’t go into here. So I told people stop commenting, and some people complained, but most complied.

The next behavior that emerged was more interesting. People started extending articles not by editing them, but by linking to older articles or writing new ones.

Over time I started to formalize this pattern in my own writing on wiki.

This started to become the most enjoyable part of the process for me, and the most profitable.

The chances that any given reader knows more about that subject than the person who just wrote it are slim. It happens, but its not the median experience. On the other hand, the chances that any given reader knows something related to that subject are very high

this is actually the Vannevar Bush vision, where the median user is neither a full-fledged writer or a simple reader but a linker

Now you do get these capabilities in some annotation systems, but talking about problems with annotation systems is perhaps for another post.