February 19, 2006, 4:21 PM — As a kid, I learned to write letters of the alphabet onto sheets of paper using a pencil. Then I learned how to join these letters into bigger units called 'words'. After that came the concept of a sentence, then of a paragraph...
Once I had mastered the concept of a paragraph, things stepped up a gear. I started with letters to Santa, then worked my way up through poetry, short stories, prose essays and then novels. Every step along the way revisited the fundamental structural imperative, namely, all non-trivial forms of written communication have a beginning, a middle and an end. In that order. Always.
In the paper world, we pay homage to this structural imperative every time we declare a page to 'the first page' and some other page to be 'the last page'. We have a menagerie of words to describe things that obey the structural imperative - documents, books, chapters, articles and so on. We wrap these things up in tight, formulaic swaddling cloths known as 'front and back matter'. At the front comes the all conquering Table of Contents. At the back - the ultimate in good manners in refined circles - a well thought out index. In between these two, all snugly wrapped up, is the content itself, neatly paraded before our eyes from beginning, through the middle and onto the end. In that order. Always.
Well, that was then and this is now. Now things are different. More accurately, now things are in the process of becoming very different indeed. Consider this: to a search engine, words like 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end' have no relevance. Consider this: to a WIKI, all orderings of content are fair game. WIKIs positively thrive on breaking down pre-conceived notions of orderly progression from beginning to middle to end. Consider this: a personal weblog is like an essay without an end. The end is always moving, always co-located with the last entry on the weblog.
It seems that search engines, WIKIs and blogs are re-writing some fairly time-honored assumptions about written communication. Let us try a crude bifurcation. Before the electronic revolution, communicating in written form involved pulling all the content physically into one place, putting a specific order on the content and pumping it back out, strapped to the back of a dead tree.
Now, in the aftermath of the electronic revolution, we do not have any time to pull everything together into a perfect order. Even if we could, there would be little point in doing so because these days, things change too rapidly. So rapidly, that any freeze-dried representation would be out of date as soon as it is ready to be published.
These days, we do not order things into tidy beginnings, middles and ends. We just push everything out electronically, all together, every day, changing it all the time. Everything is live. We then bring ex-post-facto order to this chaos with powerful tools not available to our pre-electronic forefathers. We add order through instant findability provided by search engines, we add commentary using blogs, we slice'n'dice views of the content with WIKIs. Views that go way beyond mere Tables of Contents.
It is interesting to watch the reaction to the apparent chaos of the new approach to publishing. Horror is a not unusual reaction from those well versed in the arts of the old ways. Equally however, it is not uncommon to find complete comfort in this new world amongst the younger generation. Sure the world of information is chaotic and changing all the time but how could it be any other way? It is chaotic in the same sense that downtown is chaotic. Wherever humans go, a form of chaos is sure to follow but the chaos is only skin deep. There is an underlying structure to information just as there is an underlying structure to a city. Having a beginning a middle and an end is not the only way to structure something.
Some things are too complex to have simple beginnings, middles and ends.
Information, at least in its grandest, macro forms, is one of those things.
