(2020-01-31) Krieger Chatting with Glue

Max Krieger on "Chatting with Glue" (LiveChat). Chapter 1: When we converse.... as soon as we open our mouths, we start to think.... Conversational media have accidentally compressed/linearized our thinking... There's a lot of richness in conversations. This richness is most abundance in the minds participating.... And as ideas sprout from our mind-trees, they're enriched and diversified by others...And this is no coincidence: our thoughts activate in patterns of association... What does this suggest about conversation? Not only is it more rich than our utterances alone, but it's nonlinear, and never complete.

Chapter 2: The Shape of Wandering. There's rarely a predetermined path... Gray Crawford and Scott Dombkowski's "Nonlinear Conversational Medium" (link) models my intuitions quite well... I'd like to see what a more vertical, locally-linearly layout would look like... The metaphor I prefer to use here is Outlining (see layouts).... Bullet journals, Roam, and Workflowy treat Outlines as the fundamental primitive for writing... The only problem: bullets are made of text, not messages... We can combine several qualities of outlines... 1. Division of Attention... 2. Recursive Summarization... 3. Splitting (paragraph into tweets)... suddenly the structure of outlining merges with the liveliness of conversation, forming a kind of building material, a Glue.

Chapter 3: Conversation Over Time. Where does a message go, after you send it? How are we supposed to catch up with an excited Outliner, or a Group of them? Tree-mode (top/down) vs Leaf-mode (local/bottom/up).. But what happens to these messages as they age? They evolve... but in the process, we often forget how we got there... what if we made edits (version control) as atomic as messages themselves? Now let's talk about Memory... how does Glue help? Associations (associative)!

Chapter 4: The Power of Paste. I come back to Pink's messages with media... Does that mean I'll just reply? Bi-Directional Links/hypertext...I call the enrichment of text with media "embellishments". What other embellishments might we use? Reactji, linking to prior conversations, marking messages as to-do... showing embellishments in-situ makes a huge difference to me... In a world of paste, everyone's a bricoleur.

Chapter 5: The Future. Many facets to reimaging chat I didn't examine... 1. Affect, 2. Environments & Workspaces, 3. Two-dimensional Outlining (John Palmer's spatial software, muze.nyc, Andy Matuschak's Peripheral Vision... 4. Academic work, 5. Rhizomes & Trees, 6. Code, 7. Glue Chat Itself