1. From 2900 BC scrolls to
200 BC wax tablets,
100 AD codices to
600 AD illuminated manuscripts,
1500 Gutenberg’s redactions to
1750 Diderot’s encyclopedia,
1600 Shakespeare’s stanzas to
1800 Dickens’s staves,
19th c. textbooks to
20th c. pulp-fiction,
magazines to blogs,
readers face linear sequences of
words, sections, ideas. We can be
excused for assuming this is natural.
It’s actually our species adapting to
printing technology.
2. Prior to all that, Homer’s Odyssey, like
other oral traditions, cycled motifs and
repeated actions. The same event is
retold in different light, as the teller’s
mind radiates. Printed words
precipitate spacetime wavelengths
onto 2D surfaces, where linear
sequence becomes the organizing
principal. Printing presses disgorge
strictly paginated documents. By the
20th century, linear, 2D processes
seemed limiting. Scientists and artists
demonstrated reality, knowledge, and
communication have fractal,
multidimensional, relativistic attributes.
Photographs, then films and video,
first punctured, then eroded print’s
3. hegemony. As new generations
appreciated these changes, they
found conventional print technology
restrictive. Fewer and fewer stick
around to watch writers unveil novel
work-arounds, like Proust and James
Joyce did.
Since 1900, the public rings hands
over every new generation’s reading
habits. It was only century before,
however, that Samuel Johnson was
admired for reading without moving his
lips. People adapted silent reading in
the 19th century because high-
throughput printing enabled mass
consumption. If reading capacities
peaked among the educated in the
4. late 19th century, it was a particular
kind: end to end, step by step, one
way only. The world outside is more
complex and less directional.
An early mainstream attack on
linearity is easily ignored: broadsheet
newspapers. Their stories were written
in cyclical chunks, each chunk fleshing
out earlier points in different detail.
This lets printers cut articles between
chunks during layout. Users grasp
multiple stories on the front page, and
selectively follow one, then another,
inside. This puts linear sequences in
their place, subject to producer and
user demands.
5. Digital documents provided writers a
technological breakthrough. Early
killer-apps, MacWrite and MS Word,
let them cut and paste, so writers
could move parts around with a mouse
click. 30 years on, word processors
look much the same, laden with added
bells and whistles. The internet took
texts back to the scroll era, but
hyperlinks open a new narrow
dimension.
Until now. Let there be Polyfoils.
Polyfoil documents fit electronic
media, the internet, knowledge
workers, and international audiences.
Cyclical, branching, helical, gear-like,
6. compound, and complex, Polyfoil
formats put linear sequences in their
place. Linearity retains an essential
function, but not a limiting one.
Communication can no longer afford it.
Media compete. The 20th century’s
rivalry between text and image media,
which ended in visual media’s favor,
has become a contest between long-
form and short-form platforms, digital
and physical documents, multi-media
and unadorned texts. Computer
generated displays changed the
document landscape, and in new
ecosystems only the fit survive.
Polyfoil documents advance the
partisan interests of those who value
7. full-bodied texts, not skinny, child-
length ones. Multi-media documents
promote text’s main competitor,
moving images. Polyfoil documents
promote text development, permitting
readers to construct text versions they
understand best, without dumbing-
down or adding distraction. Hyperlinks
take readers out of a document, to
content by different people for other
audiences. An endless cascade of
hyperlink surfing promotes bikini
knowledge: covering too much with
too little. Polyfoil documents promote
new document fashions that fit
genuine knowledge.
Polyfoils are not baby-steps in new
8. document technology. The Patent
Office finds giant leaps anathema,
because they may encourage
monopolies over new platforms. This
invention does the heavy lifting
necessary to specify its advance in
concrete terms that discourage
monopolization of future document
platforms. Entirely original, Polyfoil
documents will trigger other peoples’
imaginations, and some may find new
document sequences and production
systems that this invention has not
contemplated, illustrated, or specified.
On the other hand, without patent
protection, I lack interest to promote
an important, compelling, and
9. probably commercial idea. No one
else has come up with this, and they
possibly never will, in the immediate
future. Patentability enables important
innovations to spread, instead of
remaining dormant. Polyfoil
documents are an important
innovation that should be spread, and
needs patent protection to do so.
Brian Coyle
