Imagine a wafer-thin talisman which when it is taken to a special, consecrated, place can unlock worldly riches, simply through a ritual movement of a few fingers. Well, this talisman exists. True enough, to describe a cash card being used to withdraw money from a service machine, in this way, couches the transaction in language more pious than that one would normally reserve for discussions of the banking system. Yet, this example serves to show that words not only colour our understanding of the world, but that they can also be used to define an event as either fantastical or mundane. Today's `hole in the wall' would have been a miraculous (and unusually generous) apparition only 50 years ago. Where computers are concerned, language defines not only our perception of how something works, but what technology `is'.

The machine into which I am tapping these words is called a computer simply because the first application of `computer' technology involved automating mathematical calculations previously performed by workers known as `computers'. This computational label, I would argue, with its rationalist-realist resonance, still holds a strong sway over the way we use digital media today, and the way we see its future.

The purpose of this book is to use language to build a model; to describe an architecture which I have called The Living Garden. The Garden is also a banking system, of a kind, except the assets it deals in are human memories and messages.