I think this would be improved by a short paragraph (or less) explaining what “coercive” means in this context. (I made a guess after glancing at the bullet-lists, and then looked at the linked document; my guess was not correct.)
I skimmed the linked document, and didn’t find a clear description of what these terms mean. Maybe I missed it. Could you (or someone) summarize? (Or, at least, give a page reference for where in the PDF the terms are defined?)
If I am understanding right, something is “coercive” to the extent that it doesn’t support a wide variety of ways of interacting with it in order to get whatever benefits it offers. An extreme example would be a document that starts out written in (say) English, but keeps introducing neologisms and new symbols and unorthodox grammatical constructions, so that it ends up written in a language and notation entirely of the author’s devising that you can only make sense of by starting at the beginning and working through it in order.
The examples here are all about information sources, for which “interacting with” mostly means “reading”, but I think the notion generalizes further. I suspect that the choice of a better term—I think “coercive” is bad—will be tangled up with the choice of how far (if at all) to generalize.
I expected “coercive” to mean something like “attempting to persuade and manipulate as well as inform”.
Of course this interpretation couldn’t survive a careful reading even of the bullet points, never mind the rest of your post, which is why more or less the next thing I did after making that guess was to look in the document you linked to to find out what it was actually meant to mean.
I think this would be improved by a short paragraph (or less) explaining what “coercive” means in this context. (I made a guess after glancing at the bullet-lists, and then looked at the linked document; my guess was not correct.)
I skimmed the linked document, and didn’t find a clear description of what these terms mean. Maybe I missed it. Could you (or someone) summarize? (Or, at least, give a page reference for where in the PDF the terms are defined?)
If I am understanding right, something is “coercive” to the extent that it doesn’t support a wide variety of ways of interacting with it in order to get whatever benefits it offers. An extreme example would be a document that starts out written in (say) English, but keeps introducing neologisms and new symbols and unorthodox grammatical constructions, so that it ends up written in a language and notation entirely of the author’s devising that you can only make sense of by starting at the beginning and working through it in order.
The examples here are all about information sources, for which “interacting with” mostly means “reading”, but I think the notion generalizes further. I suspect that the choice of a better term—I think “coercive” is bad—will be tangled up with the choice of how far (if at all) to generalize.
I’m curious what your guess was.
I expected “coercive” to mean something like “attempting to persuade and manipulate as well as inform”.
Of course this interpretation couldn’t survive a careful reading even of the bullet points, never mind the rest of your post, which is why more or less the next thing I did after making that guess was to look in the document you linked to to find out what it was actually meant to mean.