The Future of Documents

I'm going to speculate about the future of documents, and how bookmarklets, or a "bookmarklet-like" technology, could fit into that future. First, let's review the history of documents... Where we've been Traditional technology roughly works like this: when I want to share a message across time or space I kill a tree and smash it to a pulp. Then I force the fibers of the tree into a regular patchwork and scratch some ink against those fibers. When I give you the stained and smashed wood you can read my scratchings and receive the message. Traditional technology has some advantages, not the least of which is that it has a long tradition, going back to days when cavemen scratched on cave walls. But it also has some disadvantages: Smashed tree pieces don't survive time very well, so my message will tend to yellow and crumble with age. The message involves the sacrifice of a tree, and that tree could have been doing other useful things (such as cleaning the air). The resulting message has been stained onto the smashed wood, so it's very difficult to modify, process, search, manipulate, or otherwise enjoy the message beyond the initial reading. So the traditional technology of "analog documents" may not be the best way for people to share messages. Where we are As I write this, the replacement for analog documents is at a very young stage. For much of the last 20 years people have been able to create digital documents by using word processors, but often the goal was "desktop publishing", which means that the flexibility of digital editing was used with the aim of eventually printing the document onto smashed wood. Only in the last five years, since the beginning of the popularity of the web, have many documents been produced in digital form with the intent that they would be received in digital form, via web browsers. I think that the importance of this has not yet been fully appreciated. Some of the benefits we gained with analog documents are more pronounced with digital documents. Analog documents allowed a message to be carried over great distances; web documents can connect over greater distances, and do so more quickly. Analog documents allowed a message to persist through time (which is why a thing is not "legal" until it is on paper) - and in time we may appreciate that web documents also persist through time (more so... every little detail intact). But it is the digital nature of digital documents that makes the biggest break with traditional documents; digital documents can be manipulated far more easily than traditional documents. Where we could be We can think of the vast sweep of technology as a way of "turning inside out". The early technologies focused on stabilizing core animal processes; the augmentation of skin through clothing, the regulation of body-warmth through fire, the calming of the stomach through agriculture. Later technologies gradually moved through more inwardly subtle and human processes, such as augmenting speech through writing. My belief is that when we reach the point where technology allows us to share messages without regard to time or space then our technology will begin to move through the more inwardly subtle realities of what we do with those messages. After we learn to share messages, we will learn to share ways of extracting significance from those messages; we'll begin the "technology of meaning". Bookmarklets? Bookmarklets are a simple example of a technology that allows you to take a digital document (a webpage) and manipulate it to increase its significance. Whether or not bookmarklets survive into the distant future, we can see that some "bookmarklet-like" technology will be needed there. Bookmarklets have some characteristics that are highly desirable in any "bookmarklet-like" technology: They allow almost complete manipulation of the document. They can be easily integrated into the browsing environment. It's very easy to share them. They use the "common tongue" (by this I currently mean "JavaScript"). The point is that people shouldn't have to learn an unusual language for this purpose. They are extremely safe. It's easily possible to generate them dynamically. This means that scripts can create tools which are tailored toward highly specialized needs. All of these properties facilitate the desirable outcome of enabling people to easily invent and share ways of gaining greater meaning from the (rapidly expanding) universe of digital documents. Beyond the future, and then some... Well, sorry to disappoint you. I have no better idea than you of where the future may lead us. But I do know that we've begun the first steps beyond a very old and very restrictive way of sharing meaning with each other and I believe that this will carry us toward worlds of greater meaning and significance. And I welcome it. It's not a hypothetical future; it's what's happening right now. Steve Kangas Nov. 28, 2000