You say you want a revolution? Hypertext and Media Laws

Partly compiled from: "You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media" (1991) by Stuart Moulthrop , the most famous contemporary American One of the hypertext novelists and theorists.

When this article first appeared two years ago, few outside of information science had heard of hypertext , a technique for creating electronic documents in which User access to information is not limited by a linear or hierarchical arrangement like books . Since hypertext has been around for so long, this obscurity has always seemed odd. Its basic concept — the creation and establishment of links between stored bits of information — originated in 1945, when President Roosevelt's science adviser Vannevar Bush wanted to build a computer named A machine for Memex that helps researchers organize different sources of knowledge. Bush's design was based on microfilm, spinning reels and photocells, which were impractical for the mechanical technology of the late 1940s. But a few years later, when electronic computers appeared in academia, Bush's predictions soon came true. In a sense, all distributed computing systems are hypertext because they deliver information dynamically according to the needs of users. In fact, artificial intelligence researchers created the first hypertextual narrative, a computer game called Adventure, in the early 1960s to experiment with interactive computing.

It was around this time that Ted Nelson , a one-time academic and an active advocate of technology, coined the term "hypertext ." Ted Nelson proposed a worldwide network of information, coordinated centrally through a linking and retrieval system he called Xanadu. In three self-published manifestos ( Computer Lib, Dream Machines, Literary Machines ), Ted Nelson outlined the "(Xanadu) structure and function, a franchise arrangement for "Silverstands", an information channel equivalent to a fast food restaurant where users can access the system. (This was long before people dreamed of owning a personal computer.) Ted Nelson's idea was seriously considered by computer scientists, especially Douglas Engelbart, one of the pioneers of user interface design. Engelbart and Ted Nelson collaborated at Brown University in the early 1970s to develop a hypertext system called FRESS , and many academic and industrial experiments followed. To a large extent, however, the idea of hypertext—both Bush and Nelson envisioned it as a dynamic, read/write system where users can manipulate and alter a textual corpus , was ignored and replaced by more rigidly organized models, such as distributed databases and electronic libraries, which operated primarily in read-only retrieval mode. For Nelson, hypertext and other forms of interactive computing represent a powerful force for social change. "Tomorrow's hypertext systems have immense political ramifications," he wrote in Literary Machines . However, no one seemed particularly interested in exploring these effects , at least until the mid-1980s when the personal computer business took off.

1987: The Miracle Year of Hypertext. Many strange and wonderful things happened in and around this year. Nelson's underground classics Computer Lib and Dream Machines were published by Microsoft Press; Nelson himself joined Autodesk, a leader in software development, ) announced plans to support Xanadu as a commercial enterprise; the Association for Computing Machinery hosted the first international conference on hypertext; and most importantly, Apple began offering to anyone with a Macintosh ( Macintosh) personal computer people, give away the object-oriented hypertext system HyperCard . HyperCard is the paragon of hypertext (Model T): relatively cheap (initially free), simple to operate (mainly an extension of the Macintosh GUI), rather crude compared to more advanced products, but still very powerful. In the late 1980s, HyperCard and other personal computer applications seemed likely to usher in a new paradigm of textual communication , from desktop publishing to fully electronic documents containing multiple expressions logical steps.

It has been six years since the advent of hypertext (1991), but there has been no such "digital revolution" yet. At one point, sources in the personal computer industry foresaw a burgeoning market for "stackware" and other hypertext organization products; but none of this came to pass. Instead, HyperCard's most commercially ambitious application in electronic publishing is Voyager's "Expanded Books" line, which is based entirely on printed books and carefully designed to replicate the look and function of traditional books. To be sure, the concept of hypertext eventually caught the attention of some humanities scholars. Jay David Bolter 's Writing Space (1991) outlines a historical view of hypertext as the successor to print technology - with Nelson's Literary Machines ) together, is the earliest hypertext research presented in the form of hypertext. George Landow 's Hypertext (1992) places the development of electronic writing in the context of poststructuralist criticism and postmodern culture. Novelist Robert Coover even raised the spectre of hypertextual fiction in the New York Times Book Review ("The End of Books"). But paradoxically (or predestined), this realization came at a time when hypertext was no longer what one of my colleagues called the "bleeding edge ." In fact, much of the charm of hypertext seems to have vanished, and hypertext has been replaced by more obscure and fascinating concepts: cyberspace, virtual reality, and the information superhighway.

This change seems to be a common danger in the field of postmodern — literally, post modo means "after the now" or the next thing ). Looking down at our desktops, laptops or PDAs - we know they're obsolete long before we pay - those of us are what Fred Pfeil calls "baby boomer professions" People in the baby-boom professionalmanagerial class are always hungry for the next thing. It's not for nothing that we upgraded Star Trek, our true space odyssey, to Next Generation. We are the next generation (and creators). At least Steve Jobs thought so, to his chagrin now. Perhaps hypertext, like Steve Jobs' sophisticated NeXT computer, represents an idea that has not yet fully entered the mainstream of postmodern culture, a precocious treasure destined to be dug up years later, known as the "strangely advanced". ” (strangely ahead of its time). Unfortunately, as Ted Nelson can attest, hypertext has gone through this process before. There seems to be some kind of circularity at work.

Perhaps the problem is not our technologies or what we want to do with them, but our misunderstanding of the history of technology. As I mentioned in this article, some of us have been saying that we need a revolution, a paradigm shift, a complete eradication of the old information order: as Robert Lowell ( An apocalyptic or "blesséd break," as Robert Lowell once called it. However, at least so far, that's not what we've got. Maybe we suffer this disappointment because we don't understand what we're asking for . What might "revolution" mean in a postmodern context? We might look for answers in Baudrillard, Lyotard, Donna Haraway or Hakim Bey; but as always, Hollywood has the most the best line. JF Lawton's screenplay for last summer's film Under Siege (1992) starring Steven Seagal, which included a CIA spy chief and a Instructive exchange between his rebel terrorist (Tommy Lee Jones). The spy scolded the terrorist, reminding him that the sixties were over and that "the Movement is dead." Jones' character replies: "Yes! Of course! Hence the name: 'Movement'. It moves a distance and then stops. Revolution gets its name because it's always in front of you. "

Maybe hypertext is just another movement. In a way, it's hard to tell the difference between hypertext, virtual reality, and next year's interactive cable systems. All three seem to be moving in the same general direction, trying to increase and enrich our consumption of information . But as Andrew Ross points out, this behavior can have huge consequences. At the very least, they may destabilize language-as-property —a possibility that does have enormous political implications. It is therefore dangerous to view hypertext as merely a local movement, as lifeless as the social agenda it partly grew out of in the 1960s. Considering the vicissitudes of hypertext history, we could indeed call it a "revolution"—if the revolution is a complete cycle, free from oppression and slaps us in the face. However, in this case, is this revolution what our culture really wants? When it comes to information technology, what do we want? Why are we going in circles? What is this image we weave, twice or three times, what wizard or magic do we hope to contain?

The original "Xanadu" (Coleridge) was called "A Vision in a Dream" and was designated as a double illusory so it was easy to simulate with our "operational" "(operational simulation) era, in this era, strawberry fields, nothing is "real" in the first place, because no place is really "first" (first) ). But all great dreams need revision, and now we find ourselves forever reinventing ourselves. So here is a new "Xanadu", a universal hypertext system by Ted Nelson - a vision unlike its legendary predecessor that could not be incorporated into the hyperreal dream park. We are told that hyperreality is a place of collapse or implosion, where the referential or "grounded" discourse becomes self-referential It is no different from imaginary. Instead of constructing our representational systems in terms of serial relations to undisputed "real" phenomena, we construct our representational systems in a recursive and multiple parallel fashion, "mapped to different coordinate systems" (mapping on to different coordinate systems). The map is not from the territory, but from the previous map-making enterprise: the whole world is simulated.

This implosion of reality has serious ideological consequences because, some would say, it invalidates the "master narratives" of modernity's message , leaving us with incompatible discourses and approaches. Proliferation. Some argue that this unchecked variation deprives society of a clear agenda for critique. Hyperreality has no absolute or decisive discursive privilege; critique becomes another form of paralogy, a countermeasure in language games, the techno-social construction of reality reality). There's one problem with this all-encompassing game. As Linda Hutcheon put it, "The ideology of postmodernism is contradictory because it relies on, and draws strength from, what it questions. Not really radical; not really antagonistic (the ideology of postmodernism is paradoxical, for it depends upon and draws its power from that which it contests. It is not truly radical; nor is it truly oppositional).

This issue of complicity becomes especially acute in the case of media and technology. Hyperreality is both a question of textual theory and writing practice: as Michael Heim pointed out, "in magnetic code there is no source code" there are no originals) . Electronic information can be rapidly copied, transmitted, and combined into new knowledge structures. From word processing to interactive multimedia, postmodern communication systems emphasize what Ihab Hassan calls "immanence" or "the intertextuality of all life". In the face of this infinitely complex discourse system, we risk falling into a state of technological backwardness, a feeling of being hopelessly abandoned in simulation. If the entire world is simulated, then we are nothing more than subjects looping through various iterations, unable to take any "radical" or "opposite" action to alter the techno-social matrix. As Andrew Ross has observed, even so-called resistance attitudes like “cyberpunk” can gradually evolve into cynical episodes in which the rules of the game are not questioned.

Of course, such a pessimistic or defeatist view is hardly universal. We are more likely to hear technology described as a tool of change or a tool of liberation. Postmodern modes of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text linking systems) destabilize social hierarchies and promote broader definitions of authority in the information workplace. Under the influence of these technologies, "psychic life will be redefined" . But if postmodernism is considered to be non-antagonistic, how will this restoration of order and authority work? How and by whom will spiritual life - and more importantly political life - be redefined?

These issues must ultimately be resolved in practice, not theory; that's what Ted Nelson's new "Xanadu" is all about. In Xanadu, Nelson denies the exclusion of technology, proposing a millennial vision of an unabashed technological revival in which systems will set us free. In its ambitions, Xanadu transcends the surreal. It's not an opiate vision, but something stranger, a business plan to develop what Barthes calls "the social space of writing," a reconfigure culture A practical attempt to literate culture). Xanadu is the most ambitious hypertext or "non-sequential writing" project ever undertaken. Hypertext systems take advantage of the interactive potential of computers to reconstruct text, not as a series of fixed symbols, but as a variable-access database in which any discursive unit can has multiple associated vectors. Hypertext is a complex network of textual elements. It consists of units or "lexias", which may be similar to pages, paragraphs, chapters or volumes. The 'lexias' are linked together by 'links', which, like dynamic footnotes, can automatically retrieve the material they refer to. Because it is no longer bound by books, hypertext utterances may be arbitrarily modified as readers/authors establish new links within and between documents. This collection of linked texts, which Nelson calls the "docuverse," could potentially expand indefinitely.

As Nelson foresaw, Xanadu would embody this textual universe. The system will provide a central repository and distribution network for all writing : it will be the publishing house, the medium of communication, and the great hypertextual Library of Babel . Yet despite its radical ambitions, Nelson's designs retain familiar traditions . Xanadu's local outlet will be "Silverstands", retail access and advice centres modeled after fast food franchises, thus integrating with the current information exchange economy. Xanadu will protect intellectual property through copyright. Users will pay per bytes accessed, and royalties will be paid when others gain access to proprietary material they publish in the system. The problems and complexities of this plan are enormous, and at present, Xanadu, which has been realized, is still a "2020 Vision", an exploration of the relatively near future. But it is a compelling and significant future for the postmodern present.

Disney and Spielberg tell us that the future is a place we have to "back." America's Tomorrow will be the heyday of nostalgia, an intense pursuit of "lost" or "forgotten" values. Xanadu is no exception: Ted Nelson sees the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of revival. To a skeptical observer, this vision of Xanadu may suggest another realm of postmodern theme parks. Gentle readers, welcome to Literacyland!

But on the other hand, the vision might be more than a sideshow attraction. Nelson foresaw the renewal of culture, the unification of discourse, a paradise for readers and writers, where all writing was a way of commerce of ideas . In this world, all "work" becomes "text", not substance but reference, not containment but connection. The magnitude of change implied here is enormous. But what is the political significance of this change? What community of interpretation does this intertextual world postulate—and beyond that, what social order? In the belief of a truly Enlightenment, Nelson envisions "a new populitism that will make the deep understanding of the few finally available to the many".

What is populitism? — Another notorious neologism of Nelson, in this case a combination of “populism” and “elite.” The term alludes to the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, and in this writing In space, traces of authority exist only as local and contingent effects that are socially equivalent to the deconstructed author function. The 'populite' culture may mark the first step towards the realization of Jean-François Lyotard's 'game of perfect information', in which all people can Equal access to the world of data, and "to have equal capacity (no longer in acquiring knowledge, but in producing knowledge), in the final analysis, the additional performativity relies on 'imagination', which makes one either do A new move, or a game changer." This is the utopia of information-in-process, the ultimate dream of intellectuals: discourse is converted into capital with 100% efficiency, and the mechanism of this magical process is nomology or rule-making. — Admittedly, this is a rather specialized form of "imagination".

There are at least two problems lurking in this paradise. First, the prospect of a social/literal order will belong not to many, but to a very few; more importantly, these few will fail to recognize the conditions of their brilliant isolation. Consider the case of computer-reluctant Clifford Stoll , whose memoir "Cuckoo's Egg" illustrates these issues well. Stoll denounced "cyberpunks," the open-ended electronic saboteurs who abused the scientific computing environment. Their unethical behavior disrupts the information game, requiring burdensome restrictions on the free flow of data. But Stoll's definition of "freedom" of information is vague at best. He repeatedly referred to the host system he was monitoring as "his" computer, likening a network intrusion to a burglary. Stoll argues that digital information is strictly analogous to material and private property.

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Nelson's "populitism" idea, as far-sighted and problematic as it may seem, has much to recommend, not the least of which is that it requires us to think more carefully about what advanced communication systems might bring. social impact. In fact, hypertext is likely to herald social change, a fundamental reshaping of text production and reception. The ultimate goal of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in the truest sense of the word: local self-government based on consensus, limited by the relentless collapse of global authority. Now that information is now almost equivalent to capital, and since textuality is the most powerful way we shape information, Xanadu may indeed change the world. But to repeat a key question, how will this change be achieved? What actual social process could translate the pragmatics of Nelson's business plan into the activism of a hypertext manifesto?

The full answer is in future history. In one respect, Ted Nelson's insistence on making Xanadu an economically viable business is a model. Only when we build, manage and work within the hypertext community, starting from the constraints of existing information capitalism, will we discover the full meaning of this technology. But while we wait for history, we can try prophecy. And that's where Marshall McLuhan 's last work, the voice of a particularly important ancestor, can be heard from him. At the time of his death, McLuhan left notes on a mysterious final project: the four-sided "Laws of Media" that frame the semiotics of technology. The law starts with four basic questions that can be asked about any invention:

• What does it enhance or reinforce? (What does it enhance or intensify?)
• What does it make obsolete or supersede? (What does it render obsolete or displace?)
• It restores what was previously eliminated? (What does it retrieve that was previously obsolete?)
• What does it produce or become when taken to its limit?

These questions are especially instructive when applied to critical or transformative technologies such as print or broadcast, as McLuhan demonstrates. They aim to discover the ways in which information systems affect social texts, rearrange sense ratios, and rewrite theories of cultural values. They reveal the nature of the basic statement, 'uttering or 'outering', which underlies the mechanical extension of human abilities. If we put Xanadu and hypertext on this set of questions, we may discover more about the potential and limitations of hypertext as a medium for change.

1. What does hypertext enhance or intensify?

According to McLuhan's standard analysis, communication media adjust the balance or "proportion" of the senses by prioritizing one channel of perception. Print promotes sight rather than hearing, giving us an objective, perspective, symbolic world: 'an eye for an ear'. But this approach needs to be modified for our purposes. Hypertext differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all, but a return or recursion (later) of an earlier form of symbolic discourse (ie, print). Therefore, the influence of hypertext does not fall only on the sensory channel, but on the further cognitive chain. As Vannevar Bush pointed out in his first thoughts on informational linking techniques, these mechanisms enhance the basic capabilities of pattern recognition.

Hypertext is about connections, linkages, and affiliations. In hypertext systems, this spirit of connection is achieved through technology: instead of passively rehearsing or receiving utterances, users explore and construct links. In the core of hypertext concepts, there are the ideas of association, correspondence and resonance. At this point, as Nelson has argued from the outset, hypertext is nothing more than an extension of literature all the way through, a temporally extended web of relationships that is constantly being built and broken by generations of readers and writers.

2. What has hypertext replaced or made obsolete?

While it might be tempting to answer yes -- books, this answer is disqualified. In fact, our information ecology is likely to retain a mix of print and electronic media for at least the next century. In the long run, however, the outlook for books is not rosy. The cost of paper will rise dramatically as the economic and ecological impact of the dwindling forests becomes apparent. At the same time, the acid corrosion of existing books will greatly increase the maintenance cost of the library. Given these factors, the shift to electronic storage seems inevitable.

However, this change in print media has not worried some cultural conservatives, or even that the decline of books might end print's cultural dominance. In answer to McLuhan's second question - what has hypertext made obsolete? The best answer is not literacy, but post-literacy. As Nelson foresaw, the development of hypertext systems meant a revival of typographic culture (albeit in a dynamic, truly paperless environment). This prediction may seem naive or hollow, but it is likely to be valid. Hypertext means the end of literary death.

In fact, if Xanadu becomes a text-only system (which is not intended), its prospects in the long run will be bleak. However, there are other prospects for interactive textuality—not just hypertext, but another term coined by Nelson, "hypermedia ." When trying to imagine the future of hypertext culture, we must also consider interactive multimedia "text", which combines speech, music, animated graphics and video, and alphabetic scripts. Hypertext is about connections—promiscuous, pervasive, polymorphic abnormal connections. It's a writing practice that's perfect for irregular, deviant, and carnival writing. Culturally speaking, hypertext is disorganized and has no boundaries of form, format, or cultural hierarchy.

Hypertext does have the power to restore print culture—though not in the way Nelson envisioned; which leads to McLuhan's third question:

3. Hypertext restores what was previously obsolete?

Xanadu and similar projects can rediscover the cultural power of typographic literacy for many. To assert this is to break McLuhan's understanding of media history. McLuhan clearly saw the transformative impact of "electronic" technology, but perhaps because he had not lived through the arrival of the personal computer boom, he did not recognize the next step - through the fusion medium of hypertext, recursion to A new phase in typographic culture.

Distinguishing recursion from return or simple repetition is crucial because this difference answers the objection that print literacy will be lost or suppressed in multimedia texts. Recursion is self-referencing with the possibility of incremental self-modification. Given its recursive potential, "writing" has a completely different meaning in linked interactive compositions than it does in transcripts or even traditional electronic documents. Hypertext literacy encompasses two domains: the general grammatical, rhetorical, and tropological spaces, which we now call "literature," and the second domain, formally Tighter, but greater in the ability to shape interactive discourse. This second area is called "writing space"; one might argue that it also represents what cyberspace really is.

Walter Benjamin noted with regret that by the 1930s any literate European could become a writer, at least by publishing a letter or an article in a newspaper. Ted Nelson, with no regrets at all, envisions a similar extension of amateur literary creation in Xanadu, where all readers of the system have the potential to become writers, or at least Editors and critics. Nelson pointed out that the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech is an individual freedom: anyone can publish (publish), and in Xanadu, everyone can. Nelson's prediction of revived literacy rests on a commitment to a widely popular publishing franchise. This vision is limited in one key respect. Nelson's use of print as the basic content of his system is a rather narrow view. In describing Xanadu as a more or less transparent medium of transmission of text, Nelson ignores the fact that the letter or alphanumeric representation also defines the form of Xanadu, In fact also defines the form of any hypertext system. This neglect is consistent with the broader focus of Nelson's vision, which led him to treat the details of user interface design as "front-end functions" that are handled by the user.

According to McLuhan, television and radio introduced "secondary oralality" , a reproduction of the "audile space" of language and cognition in non-printed forms . By analogy, hypertext and hypermedia seem to have the potential to inspire a kind of secondary literacy—“secondary” because this method of reading and writing involves The self-consciousness of the technical mediation of these acts, the sensitivity to the texts-below-the-text that constitutes another order behind the visible text. This secondary literacy involves both rhetoric and technicals: reading at the hypotextual level is paragnostically designing the system; writing at this level is reprogramming , modify the work of the first creator. This secondary literacy thus opens up to its readers a cyberspace in the truest sense, a place of command and control, where words have the power to reshape appearances.

4. What happens when hypertext reaches its limits?

Orthodox McLuhanism holds that "every form, pushed to the limit of its potential, reverses its characteristics".

Hypertext and hypermedia are highly interactive, so from this analysis, we can conclude that they will experience a similar implosion, becoming as institutionalized and conservative as broadcast networks.

In Xanadu, paths and connections between texts will be created on demand. According to Nelson's plan so far, only the most basic "back end" conventions will be rigidly defined: users are free to customize the "front end" system to get as much or as little information as they want. .