In one Connections episode, he traced how the introduction of the stirrup to Europe led to mounted knights, whose success at creaming people led to the desire for bigger horses, to ranches to breed the horses, to dukes to run the ranches, and finally to feudalism. Other programs sketch far more chaotic patterns. Unlike Connections , which unfolded in hour-long stretches, each episode of Connections 2 crams just as many links into half the time. But despite the MTV pace, Burke remains in control, slinging puns and wearing his trademark cream suit. Burke's eclectic, careening style not only anticipates the multiple connections and nonlinearity of CD-ROMs and database surfing, but it shows how such media change, er, the message.
History becomes hypertext.
To learn is to leapfrog. But despite his infectious enthusiasm for the West's chaotic feedback of science and social change, Burke has no illusions about what happens to a society driven by that great will to power that is the individual profit motive. Having made After the Warming, a fascinating, quasi-SF documentary on our environmental catastrophe, Burke knows the foul pit that many of these gizmos have led us to. In gridding the earth, we grid ourselves. Since the whole thing is a journey though this enormous web, it kind of doesn't matter where you start or where you finish, because the journey is what counts.