books: white bread for the mind

Traditional collections of linear content for self-paced consumption by broad audiences.

Books are optimized to capture and share three type of content:
inner monologues (such as fiction), processes and timelines (such as cook books or history overviews), and random access entries (such as dictionaries and photographs). Books are often chunked into chapters, and dense or tangential material is included in the back in appendix chapters.

Books typically raise awareness.

Compare to workbook.

Author’s note: White bread is wonderful. Our parents and their parents swore by it as key to our diet. It is part of our culture, depicted in oil paintings and discussed in epic poetry. Preparing bread is a cultural milestone from our own Paleolithic history. Just mentioning a great baguette, brioche, or even peasant bread makes my mouth water.

And yet we are learning that it is not the perfect food. The process of preparing white flour might take out much of what was good in it. The results is something that tricks our body into thinking it is getting nourishment, while spiking and upsetting parts of our own internal chemical balance.

White bread is still a fabulous treat, and it fits nicely into a healthy diet. But to go overboard with it results in bloat rather than health.

That brings us back to books. We are very proud of books. Many have a religious zeal about them, especially those old enough to remember when they were scarce, or with strong connections to people who did. We all have books that transformed our view of the world, and influenced moral and career decisions. There is no better way of transferring someone else’s internal monologue than a good book. They teach us empathy and respect. We can also get facts, allowing us to make more informed decisions.

Books are also a great example of mature technology. They are cheap to produce, easy to store, and require no energy or other supporting infrastructure. The only access barrier is literacy. Libraries are filled with them.

And yet, as we try to take what we have read and apply it to real situations in an attempt to get a desired result, we are starting to have our own Atkins “aha’s.” We become increasingly aware of what they don’t contain, such as a focus on actions, and the impact of rigorous systems including the emergent actions of units, as much as what they do contain. We love the buzz of a good book, like a good vacation, but hate the transition back to our world.

Consider the pairing of frustration and resolution. This is at the heart of, well, probably everything to do with life and growth.

But look at frustration/resolution in passive stories and frustration/resolution in simulations; you can see why stories might be making us feel smarter by tricking us, rather than actually increasing our capacity.

In creating a passive story, it is fairly easy to set up a good frustration/resolution pairing.

• Shark attacks swimmer.
• Physically attractive ex-girlfriend/boyfriend re-emerges after 10 years with a dark secret.
• The instructions for a better life/how to avoid a major problem are to follow…

In all of these, whether it be a novel, a movie, or the evening news, we just have to sit back and consume more, and we will get the resolution. We can be members of an audience. It feels so satisfying, for a few moments. But we are instantly hungry again, and the right masters of the medium will once again tantalize us with another frustration/resolution pairing (or have three or four recursive pairing going on at once, so while we are told the resolution of a more specific paring, we still have the bigger one to resolve).

In an educational simulation, much like a computer game, and of course in learning to ride a bike, swim, speak a foreign language, close a big deal, make a customer happy, or build something, that frustration-resolution can not be closed by passively consuming more. The frustration can only (and not even all of the time) be resolved by actively doing something.

Passive stories are thought to be crowning achievements of our civilization: driving books, movies, magazine, and most of our school system. We all have intense, positive relationships with at least a few examples of each.

But like white bread and refined sugar, they may just be addicting us, actually reducing our ability to act, not increasing it. And maybe, just maybe, the manifest destiny of knowledge creators is to help people overcome this addiction, not enable it.

(By the way, just because computer games involve active frustration-resolution, doesn't mean they are not a) self-referential and b) addictive. They hint at solutions, rather than represent them). At the same time, the business model behind linear content is becoming increasingly strained. By 2010, we will have seen the collapse of the business model around linear content as the dominant form of educational material. The best lectures will be available for free as podcasts. Wikipedia, essentially open-source content, and its children will decimate textbooks. Blogs change the definition of class participation. The walls between academics and enterprises will be more permeable.

See also The Campfire and The Veld.