Knowledge Management Principle Four of Seven (Rendering Knowledge by David Snowden)
Everything is fragmented. We evolved to handle unstructured fragmented fine granularity information objects, not highly structured documents. People will spend hours on the internet, or in casual conversation without any incentive or pressure. However creating and using structured documents requires considerably more effort and time. Our brains evolved to handle fragmented patterns not information.
I would rather say that complex structures exist just beyond the objects we handle in day to day conversation.
The structures are there, if and when we choose to look.
The problem Snowden has identified is that most systems can’t have structures “appear” when they “look” for them.
Either the objects fit into some structure or they don’t from the perspective of most systems.
Making those structures, that normally appear only when we look, explicit, is the issue.
Explicit or not, none of our objects have meaning in isolation from those structures.
To make it interesting, we all bring slightly different underlying structures to those objects.
(Making assumed or transparent structures explicit is hard. Witness the experience of markup.)