The guiding principle in the evolution of text has been neither the ease nor the efficiency of communication, but packing efficiency – the imperative of packing as much information on as little space as possible.
For most of history, the cost of the medium – clay tablets, parchment, even paper – dominated the economics of writing. The medium was expensive, so text had to pack a lot, on a little space.
And like packing a suitcase, this packing of information came at a cost, in cognitive overhead – for the writer who had to pack and fold information neatly, and for the reader who had to dig through the packing to get at the ideas.
A wall of text buries ideas.
To unpack the ideas, you have to follow the text as it snakes across the page, from the beginning to the end, and parse out ideas. Parsing is expensive; it ties up resources in the cognitive bottleneck of working memory. You can feel this when the text is difficult to read, with long sentences, convoluted phrasing, and multiple nested clauses. It’s tiring, and takes a lot of effort – a lot of resources – leaving less of working memory available, to process the actual ideas.
But, the economics aren’t what they used to be: the medium is now digital, has zero cost, and is no longer limited to two-dimensions; instead, in a world of information overload, it’s our cognitive resources that are now the limiting factor.
And yet, our digital tools haven’t moved past the concepts of their predigital ancestors. Even hypertext still deals in pages covered wall to wall in text.
Finding information still involves digging through heaps of text and tying up scarce cognitive resources – resources that would be better off in the service of actually thinking about ideas, and moving our projects, our lives, forward.
