Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

One of the Minicon panels was "Human Footnotes." Everyone in the audience got a piece of paper with a large asterisk, and then Graydon Saunders, Jo Walton, John M. Ford, and Teresa Nielsen Hayden talked, with occasional questions from Elise Matthesen, who moderated. Whenever one of the panelists said something that anyone was confused by, that person held up an asterisk and got an explanation. Some of the remarks were designed to elicit queries, because someone wanted us to have the footnotes--Teresa "corrected the galleys at Lepanto," Elise's "and you are our audience and I claim my five pounds"*--and others were unpredictable.

The motivation was that many of us have topics about which we know enough that we can confuse people, or images and metaphors we now take for granted but that aren't entirely common currency, whether the private language of a small group or a reference to a TV show that two people in the room didn't happen to see. Four interesting people got an hour to tell us, and each other, things--with explanations as needed.

But many things in life could use asterisks, a low-emotion way of saying "please tell me what you mean by that." It wouldn't be perfect, of course. Jo pointed out that if you have to explain X in order to explain Y, it'll work, but if you have to explain W, X, Y, and Z in order to tell someone your great new idea, you or they will get lost.

Hyperlinks try to do that, a little, but the problem is that if I dropped in a link here, it would be to what I thought you needed to know, which probably wouldn't be what actually confused you.

If you stopped people every time you needed a footnote, they'd lose track of what they were saying, and so would you. It might be fun, in a non-linear way, but I doubt it will catch on in the era of the sound-bite.

*unfortunately, I had nothing smaller than a ten-pound note; this is what comes of not having a script.