[extropy-chat] Umberto Eco: In Defense of Vegetal Memory

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Nicholas Anthony MacDonald
<namacdon at ole.augie.edu> wrote:
>  It's likely that this will change in time, but the
> first attempts at creating "paperless" offices and
> plants have largely been failures.

Partly, this requires knowing how to use it.  I may
be self-promoting here, but I raise my own hand to
signal an example of a success story.

One of the keys is organizing the online data in such
a way as to take advantage of its electronic form.
Portable viewers help, as do having things in
quick-to-load (even if they're large) documents (for
example, hypertext lets you go from document to
document with a single click, which takes about as
much time and effort as turning a page, while Word or
PDF files typically require you to go through the
relatively cumbersome - many seconds! - procedure of
finding and opening a new document).  If you know the
text you're looking for but not the section, don't
bother scrolling, just let the computer seek it out
(usually via Control-F).

Taking a note from Eco, there's also the fact that
most office - and *specifically* office - documents
are more for consultation than for reading.  User
manuals might be read through once or twice, but most
uses will be after that, when some specific fact needs
to be looked up.  In addition, if you're at a computer
(which, with portable viewers - especially
context-sensitive ones, such as augmented reality
goggles for mechanics that recognize what is being
worked on - can almost always be the case) and a
problem comes up, which is easier to get information
from: a help window that, at most, you can access with
a quarter minute's mouse activity, or a book on a
bookshelf you have to stand up, walk over to, look up,
remove, then find the right page in?  Most office
documentation reflects this use, and a growing number
of products now offer electronic documentation in
addition to or instead of paper.

For examples of portable viewers - for instance, on
any system that usually has power anyway, you could
add an almost standalone IR port and button, to beam
standard format documentation to any handheld device
in range with an IR port (like, say, almost every Palm
and most other PDAs being manufactured today), though
a battery backup would be a good idea (say, if you
have to diagnose problems with the power socket).  Or,
if the documentation is simple enough and the device
large enough, "print" the docs in the device's surface
(unpowered devices tend to be ones you're close enough
to read while using anyway).  And there's been many a
meeting where I've tapped out notes on my PDA and
shared them with a select few co-attendees without
interrupting the main speaker (usually, the speaker
was on the other end of a conference call, and the
topic of the moment only concerned a minority of those
physically present at my end).

There's also apparently a bit of a social factor.
Many people complain about trouble reading long
stretches of text on a computer screen, but I can do
so just fine, and I know several people who likewise
do not suffer from this disability.  (One of the
mailing lists I'm subscribed to is about online
fiction, and several of the stories posted to the list
would easily qualify for "novel" status, as opposed to
"novella" or "short story", based on their length.  Of
course, they're posted in chapters, partly for ease of
bookmarking and partly since the list is intended to
review and improve the works before they get too far
off track.)  Although, I have to wonder if part of the
difficulty is in knowing how to read text on a
screen...and it's difficult to quantify that without
knowing what people find difficult.  (Examples of
difficulties I've heard of include contrast and font
size, both of which should be far more controllable in
an electronic display than for paper - but, of course,
one must know how to control these to take advantage
of that.)