Martin Post

Atheist, Idea generator, Writer/Editor

Hypermedia, digital content creation tools, spreading ideas, building help + support systems.

Information is becoming increasingly granular. People do not read anymore; they dive into an ever-changing sea of information - and occasionally, they'll want to keep, change or rearrange what they found. Data silos and proprietary formats are a thing of the past. As we cannot stop this trend, we should embrace it on all levels - as content creators, distributors and software developers. Give away small bits and pieces (samples, images, translation units) and allow others to build upon them. In the short term, this may hurt profit lines - in the long run, it will create new forms of art and business. We'll soon see equivalents to the (re-)sampling technology used in electronic music across all media and formats. Carl Sagan once said that "the beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together." The same should be true for art, media and information systems. This is an idea which I think is worth spreading: Embrace Granularity.