One of the things that you’ve been seeing a lot of is hyperlinking in some of these multimedia products and research things that people have been working on. They’re all limited by sequence and by branching. The capability of this kind of environment [“Designing an Information Landscape in Time and Space”] releases you from the rigors and the sequential aspects of branching and, I think, it offers you an incredibly powerful way of going through this vast amount of information that the internet and other kinds of data sources are going to demand of us. Information is absolutely no use if you can’t find your way through it.
One of the questions you have to ask yourself is “Who does the driving?” Do you? Do we? Does the machine? Where does the agent fit in this? What kind of filtering happens? And somewhere, I think, between some shared responsibility for where you’re going and the machine is something we need to look at very hard and build some graphical intelligence into the system.