The Future of Text 1 Quotes

“My solution (NeyroKod) evolved in complex ways. I can’t say that it was inspired by a particular idea, but it can be understood better through analogy with some ideas. Open hyperdocument system (OHS) by Engelbart. Heptapod B language from “Arrival” movie.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“I claim that modern text (including hypertext) is essentially the same in structure as the earliest spoken/gestural language circa 100,000 years ago. We need language that handles complexity much better. Linear text is bad for that, documents are bad. These old tools do not allow collective thinking about complex problems.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Reinvention of language was required. Thus after a decade of thinking I have created a new fractal (2,5D) nonlinear scalable, mental-model compatible language, supported by a novel GUI.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Key features Always write in small chunks (also-called blocks ). Unlike many paragraphs, only one topic per chunk. Nothing extra. Chunks can contain several sentences. Label very chunk with an informative, relevant, short, bold-face title. Standards for organizing and sequencing large documents. Diagrams and illustrations can be chunks. Use them. Possible to cluster most of the 40 sentence types into seven categories: procedure, process, structure, concept, fact, classification, principle. Another 160 chunk-types available for Report Documents and Scientific and Technical Reports. About 400,000 technical and business writers world-wide have been taught to write structured writing since 1969.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Partial solution: structured writing (aka Information Mapping®) Structured writing is an integrated synthesis of tools and techniques for the analysis of complex subject matters (primarily explanation and reporting) and a group of standards and techniques for the management of large amounts of rapidly changing information. It includes procedures for planning organizing sequencing and presenting communications. For stable subject matters, you can divide all the relevant sentences into 40 categories. Examples are: Analogy, Definition, Description, Diagram, Example, Non-example, Fact, Comment, Notation, Objectives, Principle, Purpose, Rule, etc. Some of the sentences stand by themselves in these categories (e.g. Definitions, Examples). Others make sense as part of larger structures (e.g. Parts-Function Table).”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Cognitive overhead is the main obstacle to the proliferation of unbounded textual maps. Manually adding metadata, creating explicit links, and maintaining versions is time-consuming. Machine-readable formats have been historically difficult for humans to comprehend and interact with. Because transferring ideas from the mental to the digital space adds an extra step to the creative process, knowledge workers tend to only publish the final output of their reflection. Nevertheless, recent years have brought an explosion of human–computer interaction technologies which will drastically reduce the cognitive overhead of creating and navigating textual maps.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Text is a technology not any more exclusively aimed at supporting human communication. Text is used for encoding and decoding human and machine communication, define new ideas and activities, foster action and interactions and operate on the human, social and material sphere we live in. Thus, the Future Of Text is far beyond natural languages.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“The result is that today, text is the cornerstone of our global digital, fast-paced world. Indeed, requirements concerning accessibility and media management are not the only reasons for the use of text. Interestingly, text is also the response to the growing complexity and range of application of information communication technologies. Interface design is rapidly progressing toward a full conversion from flashy buttons, animations, icons, images, audio and video to plain text. This process, combined with the systematic process of digitisation and hybridization of daily life objects with digital technology, results in a progressive translation of identity, objects, activities, places and material and conceptual artefact in a text-based form.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“A recent study has shown that even with the meagre super-computers of the 60s (which were literally 10s of millions of times slower than a single iPhone 6), all the climate simulations done back then have proved to be accurate within a few percent. Thus science and computing did their jobs to provide (as of 2020) about 55+ years of accurate predicting of the future that we are now just starting to cope with today. Many things could have been done starting back then, but were not. In the context of the present book, this is one of the most important “futures of representations” — to be able to represent, simulate, and understand complex dynamic systems, especially those literally concerning life and death. This was already invented and in use by a tiny percentage of the world’s population 60 years ago. To paraphrase William Gibson “The future was already there, but just not distributed evenly”.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Two examples that are critical right now are epidemic diseases and our planet’s climate. Our normal commonsense reasoning, much of it bequeathed by our genetics, is set up for the visible, the small, the few, the quick, the soon, the nearby, the social, the steady, the storied, and to cope. Epidemics and climate are not like these. It is hard to notice and take seriously the beginning of an epidemic or the climate crisis early enough for something to be done about it. Nothing seems to be happening, and normal commonsense thinking will not even notice, or will deny when attention is called to it. McLuhan: “Unless I believe it, I can’t see it”.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Similarly computers can be made entirely from just a single kind of simple component which does a comparison: if both inputs are true then the output is false, otherwise the output is true. The rest is “just organisation” of these elements. A powerful approach is to set up the components so they can manifest a symbolic machine (software), and the software can then be further organised to make ever higher level software “machines”.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“An enormous such piggy-back invention is Science, which as Bacon called for just 400 years ago in 1620, is a collection of the best methods and heuristics for getting around our “bad brains” (what he called “Idols of the Mind” that endlessly confuse and confound our thinking). This larger notion that Science is about much more than just poking at nature, but is very much about dealing with our mental deficiencies, has been sadly missed in so many important quarters.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“McLuhan, Innis and Havelock were the most well known who started to ask how human thinking is not just augmented, but fundamentally changed, by writing and reading, and how this affected what we call the growth of civilisation.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Interactions should support reading digital text skimming for salience, deep reading for comprehension and evaluation, as well as support for following and evaluating inbound and outbound citations, implicit links and high resolution explicit links. Annotations which ‘live’ in their own dynamic environment, text for thought–and so much more. Interactions should also support sitting under a tree and reading a paper book with beautiful typography and nothing to come between you and the physical paper pages of the document, be it book or paper or whatever else you would like to read. Of course, in due course interactions will include all of those, at once.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“In human terms what we are doing is using our visual processing (occipital lobe) to offload work from our higher level conscious thinking (prefrontal cortex).”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“In order to write something, you have to translate a series of connected thoughts and vague notions into a rigid, visible form which forces you to make decisions. If you want to build something, invent something, create something–or if you just have an idea or insight which you want to communicate clearly to others–the first step of making it real is making the decisions you have to make when you ‘commit’ to paper. This process allows you to freeze your thoughts and organise them and edit them as you see fit, giving you entirely new insights into what you first ventured to note down. Exactly how our tools allow us and constrain us in freezing, organising and editing shapes the space of thought.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“The full title to the book was originally ‘The Future Of Text, a 2020 Vision’ but the pandemic, political turmoil and climate crisis of this year has changed the meaning of 2020 from ‘perfect vision’ to one more of ‘clouded vision’. We still hope this year will be an inflection point for our species to grow up and look honestly at ourselves and our interactions with love, not to succumb to easy ignorance and hate. But only you, dear reader, will know what the year 2020 will stand for in the future.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“The same goes for textual authoring. It is easy to dictate or type in volume and most people today do, in the form of short ‘text’ messages, social media posts or longer pieces for study, work or leisure. It is much harder to make this mass of text truly accessible–we still write mostly in columns, import illustrations from elsewhere and have severe restrictions for how we can connect or link information from different locations or sources and hardly any opportunity to address specific sections of text. We then leave little information in our primitive digital documents, which are currently in the PDF document format, when we publish the result of our work.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“Our great ancestors adapted when faced with new landscapes. For them it was adapt or die. We have entered cyberspace–an entirely new information landscape. It is no different for us. The cost of investing in the future of high, but the cost of not investing is higher, in terms of opportunities for understanding lost and fake news spread.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“What is different from all the experiences humanity has gone through however, is the nature of our communication environment[2]: Digital communication has different characteristics than analog communication environments. Some of which are obvious such as the speed of transmission and the limitless reproducibility at virtually no cost. Some are beginning to be seen, including the potential of digital links and connections. Others are still beyond our imagination.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1

“If this is not the time to look at how we go about the business of being humans and how we, and uniquely us, use symbols to think and communicate then I don’t know when would be.”
― Frode Hegland, The Future of Text 1