Also influenced by Whitehead, Jorge Luis Borges published _The Garden of Forking Paths_ in the 1940s, a short story that explored new constructs for storytelling, one that defied the singular linearity of storytelling and unleashed a new potential for meaning emerging from nonlinear imaginative space.
Borges, a leader of a literary movement called 'magical realism', was exploring that creative potential that emerges when the boundaries of imagination and physical reality blur.
Here, in this story of intrigue, espionage, and murder, Borge tells a story where different endings are possible based on random junctures of the characters. We learn that all these stories simultaneously exist, just one happens to be told.
This concept of many possible concurrent stories, each a 'forking path', shifts the responsibility for creating meaning from the author to the reader – a concept that was to have a profound impact on programmers when they began to explore the potential for computers to augment human intelligence.
Think of a web page for a moment, filled with hyperlinks that lead a reader from page to page as they explore based on _their_ needs, _their_ interests. There is no single prescribed path, but many potential ones. To create this experience, they use a programming device called 'hypertext' – a concept that can, in part, be traced back to the many forking paths in Borge's garden of imagination and possibility.
The impact of this new nonlinear information structure on how we learn and, indeed, how we think is profound and is only now beginning to be more deeply appreciated.
When elders grumble that those who are 'digital natives' think differently, they are, indeed, right.
Next: Verbs, Not Nouns
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