I have been bad. I am sorry. I gave two people I like unfair treatment. My good friend Espen, and Mark Bernstein, who I've only met once, and I have great respect for. I am writing this in his program Tinderbox, which he let me test and enjoy for months, and which I now don't want to work without.
In an earlier posting, I claimed Mark don't write hypertext. Quite stupid and unfair, as long as I have put his wonderfully fluent hypertext Hypertext Gardens on the reading list of my own course in Web analysis. The students like it.
As for Espen, I quoted parts of a personal conversation, and it didn't look to good out of context.
Here is Espen's own writing, anno 2002. About the functionality of hypertext:
Hypertext (link-node structures) does work well for many purposes. I realized that as early as 1987, when I encountered HyperCard's insanely great documentation and help system. Who needed the printed manual?However, it is not clear to me that hypertext works better than sequential formats for complex, structured, argumentative texts, or even fiction. So far, it seems to work much less well, but Mark is right that changes take time, and we might have to wait a while yet before we judge. However, the fact that hypertext scientists tend not to use the format for their own writing, is a very bad sign. If they don't find it more useful, who will? (Aarseth, Espen J. "Blogging, Fire and Dangerous Things". E-mail to the author. March 17 2002).
And about the ideology, from an article to appear in: Liestøl, Gunnar; Andrew Morrison and Terje Rasmussen. Digital Media Reconsidered. Cambridge: MIT P, forthcoming.:
What is believed by many to be a concrete technology, is really an ideological perspective on the larger sector of text technology in general, a vision that blinds us to the fact that it is both unclear and unlimited, not specific or material. Hypertext ideology tries to make us believe that the link will solve many of our textual and cognitive problems, while at the same time holding the door open to both advanced textual automanipulation and to ”spatialisation”, features that in no way is required by the initial vision, but must be included in the paradigm, unless it be left behind by technological progress. Like interactivity, the meaning of ”hypertext” seems to be fluid and changing, always focused on, or hinting at, the next, better solution.
I stand corrected.
Now, this ontology of hypertext. Technology, ideology, or genre? Espen is quite right that hypertext is at least all three. Definitions vary greatly. According to some, the Web is not hypertext.
Nelson originally defined hypertext as "a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be represented or represented on paper". (Nelson, Theodore Holm. "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Indeterminate". ACM 20th National Conference Proceedings. 1965. 96.). Paper is the only technology mentioned. 29 years later, Landow defines it as "an information technology consisting of individual blocks of text, or lexias, and the electronic links that join them" (Landow, Geroge P. "Whats a Critic to Do". Hyper/Text/Theory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1994. 1—48.) Espen himself hints at a similar understanding in the above paragraph ("link-node structure"). To me, this seems to be a more technolgy-centred understanding than Nelson's of 1965.
When I wrote (clumsily) about a style of writing. Not linked to computers or any other technology. I look for texts where upon reading, there are points where the text sets up at least two equally valid (or logical, or inviting, I am looking for a good word) places to continue. From this perspective, the Perseus hypertext version of Aristotle's Rhetoric is less of a hypertext. Or let us say less interesting as a hypertext. Oh well. I need a better vocabulary, I guess. What I am trying to say is that the Rhetoric is the same, written as one well-formed sequence. In the hypertext version, the reader gets better index, annotation and other means of text control, not to mention the availability through the Web. But the text is sequentially written. From my perspective, Mark Bernsteins frequently updated homepage, is also less hypertextual, I think. Less than Hypertext Gardens anyway.
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think everything on the Web should be hypertextual, nonlinear, multicursal, intertwingled. Just parts of it. Maybe a little more than is the case today.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Samuel Beckett).
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