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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One of the best intro to programming books that I learned from was explicitly meant to be re-read 3 times, and there were sections explicitly marked for the reader to skip over until the 2nd or 3rd reading. Required disciple but it kind of gave the effect you’re pointing to
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That's very interesting! Do you remember the title?