a new tack

Professor, I am, as I noted, really encouraged about corresponding with you. Having thought it over, I think I can be more forthcoming, or lucid, about my goals, and that just sending you some more thoughts proactively (hopefully without abusing the privilege) might be a good idea.

I have been labeling some of my notes to self "web theory". Approaching it from a very broad perspective might be useful. I see in the Web the possibility for so much more usefulness. There's an absurd quality to that idea, because the Web is already so improbably useful, but what if its current improbable usefulness actually foretells even more improbable usefulness in the future?

I do dream of running a giant company. I seek your guidance in navigating and just mapping the small steps - hopefully building one upon the other - that seem to be the way towards large accomplishments. My hope is you will engage me in a discussion around my thoughts.

In the broadest sense, what is the nature of the Web's usefulness? It is obviously useful to individuals, as a way to communicate with each other, as a way to navigate certain practical tasks, such as shopping, as a way to browse what we now call "content". How can the Web's usefulness be even larger than that? What is the larger arena in which the Web can be useful - to individuals, and to society? Perhaps we could say it is essentially political. What is the Web for, in the largest sense? I'm thinking it is for, we could say, negotiating, with society, and really with reality, for what we need, for general prosperity.

That's all rather metaphorical. What are the specific capabilities the Web provides us with, that apply towards negotiating with reality for what we need? It already provides some of those capabilities in great measure: the ability to browse an infinity of content, the ability to share content very freely, i.e., messaging, blogging. But when I say "very freely", there's actually a limit that I think is rather narrow.

There's an expression for this, data overload. The almost universal perception seems to be that an individual person can only usefully handle a rather small amount of data, and that the limit on that is a limit imposed by the human mind, but I don't think that is so at all. I think the limit on the amount of data, or content, we can usefully handle is imposed, essentially, by software. The human mind, the perceptual being, is clearly able to absorb, remember, revisit, and work with astonishing amount of data that we encounter in the course of our days. Our contemporary experience on the web does not even begin to compare. What kind of web design could bring the data density of our Web experience closer to that of our life experience?

Today we certainly can, in the abstract, "look at" a great deal of content, and, in a more practical sense, we can look at a fair amount of content. Helping people look at even more content is one of my goals. Making our interaction with the Web, with content on the Web, more fluid, is, I think, possible. I think my demo websites illustrate some useful strategies, in this regard. But there is something else that I think is fundamental to the problem, and I feel like it is almost not recognized at all, and that is the ability the Web could provide us with, to not only look at content but also to keep what we look at. Yes, the web provides us with that capability to some extent, but it seems to be treated as rather a side issue, or perhaps as mostly the province of "professionals". Web designers seem to think it is not really that important for the average or lay user to keep a lot of content. I think that's completely wrong. I think keeping content is extremely important to the average user, and providing all users with that capability, in the fullest possible measure, would greatly enhance the usefulness of the Web.

There is, beyond that, another problem: keeping a lot of content will only be useful if we are fully empowered to manage that content. What does this mean, managing content? It means, first of all, being able to freely revisit the content we have kept. That's another function that would benefit from tools that make content flow, more freely, through the perceptual space that is our experience of the Web. So we could define the whole problem as something like "keeping and flowing". But let's also note another dynamic, which I'll describe as "juxtaposition". The more we can control the way items of content in our collections of content are juxtaposed within the perceptual Web space, the better the Web will be at allowing us to fully benefit from this access to content that is the foundation of the Web's power. So the theme of what I want to develop seems to be "flowing, keeping, and juxtaposing". Late note: flowing and juxtaposition could also be called navigation.

Thank you for your attention, thank you again for your earlier reply. I do hope to hear from you again.

Tom