Ways to Organize Information

"At a basic level, there are three ways to organize the release of information, which are used across all media: narrative, exposition, and pattern. The three modes are not mutually exclusive; on the contrary, all three are present in any work, with one dominant and the other two subordinate . . . One way to construe what is happening as we pass from print apparatus to electronic apparatus would be to say that the dominant forms for organizing information in print have been narrative and exposition--splitting the functions of imagination and fact between them--with pattern predominating only in the arts, at the bottom of the hierarchy of knowledge in the relations among science, social science, and the humanities. The dominant form organizing the release of information in the new apparatus, however, is pattern, whose essential form is collage (in the way that mystery is the essential form of narrative, and propaganda is the essential form of exposition). Story and document are still operating in collage, but they are subordinated to and manipulated by the operations of pattern, which transform their signifying effects" (Gregory L. Ulmer Literacy Online 160-61).


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