One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. [1] The thing abo

One of the things I did was travel around the country trying to evangelize the idea of hypertext. People loved it, but nobody got it. Nobody. [1] The thing about the "you can't tell people anything" statement is, it's a good shorthand for a certain kind of situation. In this article, it's shorthand for people not understand a situation even if they're given what to you may seem a complete logical explanation. The simplest explanation, somewhat alluded to in the text, is that the people you're explaining the thing lack the context to understand even if they understand the terms used in the abstract. It's easy to see how people wouldn't "get" hypertext in a pre-Internet era. It's easy to say how people wouldn't "get" a client-server application if they'd never been exposed to the client-server architecture previously at all. Which is to say, I think it's quite possible to tell people things - in the context of a big, difficult abstract - if you go step-by-step, verify understanding at each step, break up the explanation process if it's not working, ask questions etc. And often, when a person fall back on "you can't tell people anything", it's because they fail to do the laborious explanation process. The bureaucratic standards don't allow it, there's no time or whatever. And some people just fall on this by reflex, they're reconciled to the situation. It's very annoying when a certain type of person gives a single explanation and then responds "you just don't get it" when questioned, etc. But it's worth being clear that, in the abstract, "you can tell people things". [1] Worth nothing that in the reality is no one at all "got" hypertext or the Internet when to "get" involves a good grasp of the implications, in ways, we still don't get everything here. No one had the full context in 1980. The full context is still being created.