Date: Thu, 6 Mar 1997 15:26
From: RANDY
As long as the conversation has opened itself up in a number of ways, to include Bob Dylan, father-daughter incest, internet paranoia and the cyberspace equivalent of the dog in the microwave, I thought I'd pass along a line by the poet Elias Canetti. It reminded me of the possible power of media that functions by nonlinearity, spontaneity, and surprise:
"In growing, knowledge changes its shape. True knowledge knows no uniformity. All leaps in knowledge occur sideways; the way knights move on a chessboard.
Anything that grows in a straight line and in a predictable manner is without significance. It is the skewed and particular, the lateral knowledge that is decisive."
Interesting to think that the opposite of linearity isn't nonlinearity or multilinearity, but sidewaysiarity.