Filmmakers, composers, and playwrights carefully author the time dimension of their work. The feeling of a pregnant pause and an accelerando comes from viewers' experience of passing time. Those mediums express a few hours’ evolving experience—what about days, months, years? 👇
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Cultural institutions often author experiences that stretch over longer time scales (e.g. multi-year religious coming-of-age rituals). But mass mediums rarely do.
That’s an unfortunate limitation: mass mediums give authors enormous reach!
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Books have a longer time dimension, but it’s generally unauthored.
Books often take months to read. But they almost never have an *authored* time dimension like that of films or plays. The days and weeks are rarely specified by the author the way minutes are by a filmmaker.
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In an expert–apprentice relationship, E can introduce an idea, then watch for a few weeks as it blooms in A, maybe guiding its growth with a few well-timed references. Then E can broach some dependent idea when it’ll be most impactful—after the first idea's had time to take root.
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Learning science often fixates on how experts can better evaluate, give feedback, and personalize. But I think a lot of value comes from the way those relationships naturally curate a time component, even if there's no personalization at all.
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If an author wants to introduce both an idea and some nuanced consequence of that idea, those points can only separated by pages in a book’s spine. Occasionally authors will write notes like “don’t read this chapter until…” but this approach seems quite limp.
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Some MOOCs begin at fixed times, with students moving together in cohorts through the syllabus. The shared timelines may deeply affect students’ experiences. But as far as I’ve seen, course designers aren’t carefully authoring how that experience unfolds over weeks and months.
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They convene a group of people, then have them do mostly-time-independent things together over some period of time.
Likewise, MOOC materials often “unlock” over time, but the material doesn’t meaningfully interact with that timeline.
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It’s like an author wrote a complete book, but the publisher decided to serialize it, mailing subscribers a chapter at a time for their convenience. Sure, there’s an experience over time—yet there’s no authorial intent. This arrangement leaves much on the table.
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By contrast, consider the Aro meditation course: aromeditation.org (👋). It’s a sequence of 18+ emails, one automatically sent each week after you sign up. But the emails aren’t written like MOOC materials: the passing weeks are carefully woven into each letter.
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They leave time for concepts to sink in before elaborating later. They spiral back, refreshing earlier ideas every few weeks. They lean on the reader’s growing trust. This series of emails feels like a much more profound evolution relative to books than MOOCs relative to courses.
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's fascinating experiment over his last 6-week walk struck a similar chord. Each day of the walk, Craig sent one photo from that day's segment to subscribers. The vibe yawns over weeks, a totally different feel from a coffee table book compiling a journey in retrospect!
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Games have really figured this out.
e.g. MOOGs like WoW choreograph players’ incentives and environments to invoke an ever-expanding horizon over many months. The design elements aren’t about raw hours: they’re more about how the feel of play sessions change, week to week.
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and I have been excited about how the mnemonic medium creates a context where readers continue interacting with an author's work after the initial reading session. It's a mass medium with a weakly authored time component.
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In an upcoming mnemonic essay, we exert more authorial control over time, adding questions which evolve over weeks of review sessions. But there's much, much more to explore there!
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Can you all think of any other good examples of a mass medium with a lengthy, strongly authored time dimension?
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Another example: Execute Program (by ) offers interactive lessons for programming tools. Each course unlocks over time, as you complete and review earlier lessons. This lets each lesson's prose stay unusually focused. executeprogram.com
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