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| By Michael Utvich |
Line Noise
The highly evolved conventions we use to communicate information and entertainment have become so deeply ingrained in our sense of the world that they are, for all intents and purposes, invisible.
We think it impossible for an idea or program to have no beginning or no end - the natural order of things we have been taught is to think of ideas and stories as straight lines. We approach everything we communicate as bringing order to chaos. Hence, the whole edifice of topics and hierarchies, beginnings and ends, premises and conclusions, sequence and causality that define so much of our established literature.
The ancient mind was not defined by such conventions. Prior to the advent of the printing press, the common means of translation of ideas, stories, and information was through the spoken, not the written word. In other words, conversation, presentation, oratory. Certainly, written forms of communication existed, but they tended to be the province of elites. The printing press accelerated the dissemination of information to the common man, but it also forced dynamic ideas to be structured, cut, sliced, diced, and fitted to the requirements of the printed page.
Thus, the linear forms of storytelling that emerged on the page - and ultimately, the straight line defined by a long strip of film - defined our culture. Interactive technology offers us the opportunity to seek entirely new ways to structure what we communicate to others.
Reinventing the Page
The printed page might seem like the most basic and self-evident of all things, but in fact is a highly developed series of conventions. We understand the page by reading from beginning to end, left to right, top to bottom.
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The computer screen knows none of these conventions, save to the extent that it reproduces block paragraphs of text. Computer screens are dynamic spaces: Menu lines, pop up windows, feature icons and other components may appear anywhere within the screen space. We don't think of a software screen as having a beginning or an end; it is simply a hot space where we use different areas of the space fluidly to accomplish our purpose of the moment.
The graphic language that defines the dynamic domain of computer software programs is beginning to reshape our ideas of how a page should operate. For years, magazines have used dynamic, non-linear page layouts - slices, cuts, chunks, and fragments all clustered in a noisy graphic competition for our attention. The computer has taken this visual and intellectual logic to the next phase: fragments are now hot - each of them a portal to another idea, a chain of connection, a different world.
Links to Oblivion
Reduced to essence, the defining difference between the printed page - regardless of its format - and the computer screen is the concept of links. As we read text and react to media, links are the portals from one idea to another.
Just as the graphical word processor lets you select features, capabilities and tools from a variety of menus, icons, and pop-up windows, so the interactive content of the Web or CD-ROM lets you select different areas of a story or information resource. You are not forced to start at an artificially or arbitrarily defined beginning. The end, or outcome, is what you define it to be.
Closing the Loop
Bring the beginning and end of a straight line together and you form a continuous loop. This offers a highly effective metaphor for what is happening to our concept of communication space. The circular page metaphor takes us from the logic of hierarchies and sequence to the fluid simplicity of a steering wheel.
As we turn the circular page, we steer the content in different directions - instead of a beginning, we are offered a variety of points of entry into a complex system of ideas or a rich story framework. The human mind is rich, varied, dynamic, and works on multiple levels. For the first time, interactive technology offers us a comprehensive system to create media that actually operate like we think.
Interactive writing begins with this dynamic restructuring of our concept of the page. Even more, it means understanding the incredible degree to which the architecture of print has influenced the way we conceive our stories, ideas, and information. The underlying paradox - that the structures we have used to communicate operate very differently from the dynamic way we think and process ideas - is central to the issue of creating and inventing the media of the future.
Michael Utvich
© Michael Utvich 1996
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