Class #5

Chapter 48

You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media by Stuart Moulthrop

• Vannevar Bush Memex machine helps researchers organize knowledge, designed in 1940s
• artificial intelligence researchers created the first hypertextual narrative narrative-- computer game Adenture, 1960s
• Theodor Holm Neson coins hypertext, imagines Xanadu would centralize worldwide information network
• Nelson envisioned a system that could cause social change. Douglas Engelbart and Nelson develop FRESS hypertext system in early 1970s
• 1987 Apple Computer develops HyperCard, object-oriented hypertext system
• Moulthrop argues hypertext has not caused digital revolution because other concepts like cyberspace and virtual reality stole the spotlight, enabled by a generation that always wants new things
• Page 694 discusses hyperreality, critics say it takes away social critique and clear agenda
• If the whole world is simulation then humans are simply subjects incapable of opposition
• Others disagree, contending that postmodern communication destabilizes social hierarchies
• hypertext definition, page 695: reconstructs text not as fixed series of symbols but as a variable-acccess database in which any discursive unit may possess multiple vectors of association
• Xanadu is a hypertext system
• Moulthrop says Nelson's hypertext of the future really is a longing for the past, a return to literacy and ideas, as opposed to the television stupor
• Nelson's vision turns "work" into "text" that can be shared and used as reference. Less ownership.
• Populitism- coined by Nelson, means making the deep understanding of a few available to many
• Clifford Stoll's memoir The Cuckoo's Egg highlights some of the problems with populitism-- who decides what info belongs to whom?
• Moulthrop wonders how Nelson's hypertext manifesto can translate into real world social processes on page 697
• Applying Marshall McLuhan's four Laws of Media to Hypertext
• 1) What does hypertext enhance or intensify? It enhances the capacity of pattern recognition
• 2) What does hypertext displace or render obsolete? It does not, as some may suspect, kill the book. The author contends that the television threatens the book more than the "smart machine"
• 3) What does hypertext retrieve that was previously obsolete? It could make people reacquainted with the cultural power of typographic literacy. Hypertext envisions an extension of amateur literary production. Secondary literacy and neo-chaos are also discussed as by-products of hypertext.
• 4) What does hypertext become when taken to its limit?
• Hypertext is a cool medium and when taken to the limit will become as institutionalize and conservative as broadcast media.
• Moulthrop says that the age of"post-hierarchical" information has past. The garage-born computer messiah is replaced by institutions with heavy capital and expertise
• Moulthrop also contends that we don't really need a revolution like Neslon imagines and that Nelson's utopian vision for the future is not really achievable.

Chapter 49

The End of Books by Robert Coover, 1992

• From intro: this essay says that the Golden Age of literary hypertext has ended and that it has now given way to the world wide web.
• People say that the modern age makes books obsolete
• Following this line of thought, the novel must also be obsolete
• Hypertext represents a freedom from the "tyranny of the line" in books
• Hypertext makes readers and writer co-learners or co-writers
• Fiction writers were drawn to hyperspace starting in the mid-1980s
• Hypertext proponents says books are arrogant and that hypertext is the new new thing
• Mihael Joyce published full-length hypertext fiction called Afternoon in 1987 for floppy disk
• Coover taught the Brown University Hypertext Fiction Workshop
• Writers must think as much about form as prose when writing hypertext fiction
• Coover says the results of the class have been better than ordinary undergraduate writing workshops
• Group fiction space called Hotel that anyone can add to or edit
• Coover says basic hypertext technology will stay, but the specific hardware and software will change rapidly
• These are good questions/ thoughts:
• 1) How does one judge, analyze, write about a work that never reads the same twice?
• 2) How does one resolve the conflict between reader's desire for coherence and the text's desire to evolve?
• 3) Print can be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate into print

Other notes

• On "10 Ways Jobs Changed the World": Isn't it interesting that the Hypercard isn't mentioned as one of Jobs' greatest inventions? In our textbook, it seems to have radically altered computing.
• Data visualization is the study of the visual representation of data, meaning "information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information.” Data visualization took off in art in 2008.
• Regarding "5 Best Data Visualization Projects of the Year" I'd also like to nominate http://www.xtranormal.com/ which allows anyone to express ideas through video animation very simply and easily. I see videos like this all the time now on YouTube. The technology is simple but it just goes to show how much visual information sharing is in demand.