How Books Will Become Machines / quote 6 of 21
Reading the encyclopedia like a hunter
As pages and paragraphs offered clear organizational landmarks in a volume of text, we got used to positioning ourselves spatially within a discourse, to evaluate the length of journey that we need to take to reach the conclusion of a demonstration. We got ac- customed to experiencing the spatial unfolding of discourses. The phenomenological experience of the encyclopedia is quite different. Inside an encyclopedic medium, the reader can only grasp its direction surroundings based on local links but cannot localize himself globally. He must act like a hunter, attentive to pattern, ca- pable of contextual reactions. His eyes develop different kinds of skills than those used for book reading. He is in charge of his jour- ney, responsible for taking the right path. Skimming and scanning become the norm in order to always find the right compromise be- tween exploration and exploitation. [..] The hunter makes relevant uses of specific tools like search en- gine, push notifications, aggregators in order to create a whole tech- nological cockpit helping him to answer the permanently relevant question: What should I read, listen, watch or play now?