Shield’s collection of writings discusses the ideas around narrative and non-narrative rejects traditional ideals of story, narrative and collage. He chooses to write through a collection of numbered thoughts (each a sentence or three long) linked through key ideas. The most striking thing about Shield’s writing is its lack of traditional narrative flow or cause and effect as traditionally seen in narrative.

Shield’s main argument is that narrative and story are “predictable, tired, contrive and purposeless” (Shields 2011, p.116). It is clear that he aims to combat this through the idea of collage and mosaic, which he states are an “evolution beyond narrative” (Shields 2011, p.111). This idea of a postmodern story telling is an interesting idea, and Shield’s ideas of stories making sense through items being placed together, seemingly at random, is both a thought provoking and intriguing matter.

The main ideas surrounding Shield’s writing link incredibly closely to ideas that Korsakow also deals with. In particular, the ideas surrounding adjacent data and how to arrange this data are obviously problems, which people who create in Korsakow have to deal with. Two of the ideas I found most interesting where:
• Shield’s ideas about “picking through options and presenting a new arrangement” (Shields 2011, p.116) – I found this interesting as it proposes that you could take a linear story and rearrange it in Korsakow, and that through the use of keywords it would create a very interesting and engaging film for a user to view and navigate
• Shield’s ideas about “the problems of scale” and engaging the reader (Shields 2011, p.119) – Shields briefly touches on how to keep the viewers (or readers) attention beyond basic engagement – how they can “stay charmed, seduced and beguiled” (Shields 2011, p.119)