Synthesis

Just as there is grammar in written language, there is 'Synthesis' in Electronic Language. One would say that text is composed gramatically, in this case of Electronic Language one would say that something is composed synthetically.

A comparison between Grammer and Synthesis can be seen in the diagram below:

The basic unit of Grammar is the 'clause' which is very much related to the more colloquial term 'sentence'. In Synthesis the basic unit is 'System'. A system is a combination of instructions that form or make a program, that in turn when a series of programs are linked form a system.

An example of a system I have composed is a document called "Electronic Composing". This document is constructed through in combination using PersonalBrain 2.1, MSWordPad, MSExcel, MSWord, Radio Userland and Internet Explorer. The 'system' means only in combination and is a structure of text that can now be pointed to and studied just like one may see this text and identify the particular grammatical construction.

A system has a utility value as well as a meaning value -- using a sentence can get something done, and a sentence also has particular embedded meanings. Similarly the system I have composed called "Electronic Composing" is a structure of 45 meg of files that combined form the Brain (a text built in PersonalBrain 2.1) that show the realtionships between thoughts, ideas, texts and graphics, that when the Brain is updated it automatically generates changes to the base files of a MS Word document, that when Word is opened and the Word Document is opened, all updates are automatically included in the document which can then be published by way of Radio Userland to go onto a website, into Adobe Acrobat to make a pseudo-print documents, can be printed on a computer printer to obtain hardcopy and can be zipped up for sharing with other people electronically.

The utility value of this particular system is that I can prepare a text and have automatically updates made to that text and produce the text in various versions according to the need. The meaning of the 'system' can best be understood if we focus on the meaning of a grammatical cosntructions for a moment. Let us ask a question about the meaning of a clause. We can say, "What does that sentence mean?" for example. The sentence may be "Tom rode his bike to school today." The answer may be something like, "The meaning of this sentence is that Tom, my cousin, rode to school perhaps inferring that I am lazy and get driven to school each day, or something like that.

IN the case of the text "Electronic Composing" the meaning is that the text is a highly efficient text being able to provide a utility action with few activities on the part of a human, and that it is a text that is truly electronic in that it is genuinely modifiable, active, interactive, databased and collagic (the tests of electronicity). "Electronic Composing" also messages to us that it can only be truly read and interacted with on a computer and that anything that may look like a complete text is just a shadow of the real text on a computer.

Further work on Synthesis will be done to explain it more fully in the next weeks. 

1:15:39 AM