For that matter, maybe I should make some disclaimer that Stephenson is definitely sweeping up too many unrelated things, like saying that working with text instead of images necessarily puts you in the "bottom-up understanding" mode (which I don't think is true for a lot of literary fiction)
To be fair to the clusters (if not necessarily to Stephenson's account of them), it does seem true and interesting that graphics can't do this, even though it's not the case that text must. Language at least makes room for arbitrarily precise kinds of communication, at least within some restricted scope, while pure graphics don't provide a mechanism for resolving arbitrary ambiguities by adding more clarifications. (In practice, GUIs lean on text when they don't expect things to be immediately clear, as in the case of documentation / help files.)
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2019-01-05 06:33 pm (UTC)To be fair to the clusters (if not necessarily to Stephenson's account of them), it does seem true and interesting that graphics can't do this, even though it's not the case that text must. Language at least makes room for arbitrarily precise kinds of communication, at least within some restricted scope, while pure graphics don't provide a mechanism for resolving arbitrary ambiguities by adding more clarifications. (In practice, GUIs lean on text when they don't expect things to be immediately clear, as in the case of documentation / help files.)
Anyway, interesting post!