Page 17 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

focus. We may also observe, however, that in spite of the exponentially in- creased quantity of data, and the greater number of people often involved in projects today, individuals still play key roles. We can still tell their personal story.
Levels of complexity also complicate comparisons between earlier and current information technologies. As technical and difficult to learn as pro- fessional writing must have been in the ancient world or the Middle Ages, or however complicated the process of medieval manuscript illumination, or hand-production of papyrus or parchment or paper, or the mechanical process of printing by movable type, these were arts that individuals or small groups, with effort and practice, could eventually master from the ground up. The computers we use today and the applications we typically run on them are so complex that their hardware and software require large teams of engineers for design and programming. In 2001 the operating system Win- dows XP contained 45 million source lines of code; I have not been able to find data regarding the size of more recent versions of Windows. Thus even though the end products, such as the HTML editor I originally used to write these essays, facilitate individual use, and an individual may still write a book that can be printed on paper, published on the web like this, or issued in eBook format for eBook readers, the development of software for electronic composition, for display on eBook readers, and the design and production of eBook readers themselves, require numbers of people and capital investment magnitudes greater than they would have prior to electronic computing, the Internet, and the development of digital books. Though the end result of programming is to simplify, or at least to facilitate operations, the size of code to attain those goals may be immense.
Other elements of complexity are the multi-media aspects and interactive features of the web relative to individual broadcast media. By broadcast media I refer to the traditional media such as print, television and radio, that transmit information from a source to a wide range of receivers: one- way transmission, as compared to social media which combine broadcasting with reader or viewer feedback and comment sharing. For example, since its
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