Communication bandwidth
I have had this quirky idea for some time. Here it is: The amount of information we are expected to learn keeps expanding. Yet our primary channels of learning and communication remain constrained by the bandwidth of reading, listening, and speaking.
In order to learn, we read texts, listen to teachers, and practice on our own. All of these activities are time-bound; it takes time to acquire the information stored in them. And on top of that, although ideas are transmitted sequentially, the act of acquiring meaning is not.
Let's consider what happens in my mind when I read a text or listen to a speech. Words arrive one after another, but meaning does not simply build up as they do. With each new word, I make small adjustments to what I think the sentence means. The sentence unfolds in a straight line, yet my understanding does not. It keeps reorganizing itself until the whole meaning settles into place.
Thinking about all this, I began to wonder what a higher-bandwidth communication channel might look like.
After watching Denis Villeneuve's film Arrival, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it is concerned with this very question. In the film, the aliens communicate through circular symbols. As the protagonists gradually discover, the alien language is not time-bound; one looks at a symbol and grasps the entire concept at once. Once they learn to process the symbols in this way, their perception of time shifts, and the story detaches from chronology, resolving itself outside linear sequence. I love it! So beautiful.
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Not directly related but this back-and-forth reminded me of the old Windows 95 disk defragmentation process. Colored blocks would move across the screen, files being broken apart and then carefully rearranged so related pieces could sit next to each other again.
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The read-later app Instapaper has a "speed reading" feature. It flashes the words of an article one by one at the center of the screen. It removes the need for manual scanning and forces me to concentrate not to miss a word. White text on a black screen, rapid bursts of light in the dark... it's as if I can feel the data streaming directly into my brain, like the scene in The Matrix where Tank uploads kung fu into Neo.
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Cemil Türün mentioned in a presentation that old sayings and memes are effective forms of communication because they compress a great deal of information into a single sentence or image.
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I discovered that the plot of the movie is based on Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, from his collection Stories of Your Life and Others.
