Hype or Text?

By Frank Bond

A book about hypertext is an oxymoron. Although George P. Landow's 1992 book, Hypertext: The Convergence of Critical Theory and Technology, appears to be a comprehensive overview of the convergence of critical theory with the evolution of digital technology, it fails to convey the importance of that development. It fails not only because of its academic, jargonistic style, but because it is not written in the medium Landow extols, a medium that would have make it accessible to non-academics.

I didn't read the entire book (recommended text for English 290: Computer Mediated Communication) because it was delayed in shipment and then cancelled. So this essay is only a critique of the first chapter, or rather, the online version of chapter one: a website promoting the sale of the book.

The sample chapter uses hypertext, but does not take full advantage of the medium. For example, the jargon words and phrases (paradigm shift, deconstructionist, poststructuralist, intertextuality, multivocality, memex, signifiers and signifieds) were not hypertexted. Moreover, clicking on the hypertexted citations takes the reader to a conventional page of bibliography in about the same time as it would have taken to load the original documents. And the bibliography itself is a dead-end, containing no hyperlinks.

Because the hyperlinks do not really enhance the reading experience, I decided to download the text and avoid the expense (and eye strain) of reading it online. The web site, however, is organized in such a way to make that difficult and time consuming.

The text is fragmented into 1-3 page sections with unnumbered, mostly unintelligible titles which have to be loaded separately along with all their redundant headers and footers. Related articles that could have been hyperlinked in the main document are appended to the bottom of the contents page without any accompanying context, leaving the reader little choice but to scroll through everything sequentially.

My impatience notwithstanding, I found the subject fascinating. Landow's collected quotes shed light on the question of why humans, who have always been infatuated with text, are suddenly so in love with hypertext. One such insight is Michael Heim's observation that "Text derives originally from the Latin word for weaving and for interwoven material, and it has come to have extraordinary accuracy of meaning in the case of word processing."

Perhaps the most illuminating source is Vannevar Bush on the subject of "memex," which Landow gets around to explaining near the end of the chapter. As Landow merely quotes the article, and as the hyperlinks don't seem to fully load, I suggest going directly to Bush's 1945 article in The Atlantic Monthly, "As We May Think".

There, Bush proposed a desktop data storage and retrieval system that allows the "growing mountain of research" coming out of World War II to "be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility [as] an enlarged intimate supplement to...memory."

Bush's "memex" consisted of "a desk...with slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading...a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers." Its essential feature was its ability to link items the way the mind operates, "with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain."

Bush rightly foresaw the future need for computers to aid scientists, researchers, lawyers, doctors and academics: "There will always be plenty of things to compute in the detailed affairs of millions of people doing complicated things." He also felt the hope that devotees of the information age feel today:

Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his record more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursion may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
Compare that with Landow's densely written section in Chapter One called "Predictions":
The evidence of hypertext, in other words, historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, thereby forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology rooted in specific times and places. In making available these points, hypertext has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida's emphasis on de-centering and with Barthes's conception of the readerly versus the writerly text. In fact, hypertext creates an almost embarrassingly literal embodiment of both concepts, one that in turn raises questions about them and their interesting combination of prescience and historical relations (or embeddedness).
Despite Landow's turgid style, he has compiled an abundance of information that presents an overview to the history of this significant crossroads in human communication. His bibliography of printed materials provides a good starting point for that time-honoured practice of searching for blocks of text that relate to the subject, here the theory of hypertext.

The concept of hypertext--to allow readers easy access to what they want to know--is very simple, and the advantages of the ease and speed in making those connections to other blocks of text (or graphics, audio and video on the World Wide Web) are best appreciated by direct experience.

In this incipient phase of the information revolution, masses of people are surfing the internet, visiting sites with high frequency, but perhaps with only shallow understanding, merely satisfying themselves that the information is accessible. The next stage may very well be when this emerging class catches the desire to learn. They will outnumber the old academic class and demand their information faster and more direct.

Perhaps in anticipation of this emerging class, Landow has created a post-WWW version: Hypertext in Hypertext. He promotes it as "a powerful electronic book" that can be read "from the 'Critical Theory' or 'Hypertext' overviews and experience[d]...as networked assemblage of lexias." The book has also been appended with reviews (of itself) and comments by his students.

Clicking on "electronic book," however, merely loads a gif file displaying the layout of the first page of the hyperdocument - an advertisement for buying it.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$


E-mail author

All rights remain with the author.