3. Feeling Old
Last semester, I asked students in my information architecture course if they knew what "hypertext" was. Most of them looked at me blankly, a few raised their hands. One said, "It's the Web." (Notably, the Usenet group on hypertext that I used to participate in during the 1990s collapsed with the advent of the Web, as new users began posting innumerable technical questions about HTML.)
I suppose I should be glad for the Web. But it leaves me wondering, as Jay Bolter did: What happened to hypertext?
Here are some very brief suggestions, then a rough map for where we might go next.
1. Although many of the early (and late) claims for hypertext were way overhyped, one thing seems clear: Hypertext offered something that people wanted: Power over the structure of text.
2. "Power" in text is an odd thing, though, illusory. It's a mutual construction, not something that's simply *taken* or *given*.
3. Michael Joyce made an early and often quoted distinction between hypertext that invited exploration and one that invited active reader participation in the construction of new links and nodes. We've built such an enormous amount of the first type (exploratory) that we've almost completely forgotten about the second (constructive). Sure, we can all build new web sites, but the private ownership model (inherent to some extent in the file structure of most operating systems) keeps those sites separate.
4. The point isn't merely that we need new models of ownership (although we do). It's not that we need to start building more constructive, collaborative spaces (although we do). The point is that "hypetext" as a concept and a practice was only an ANALOGY for the things that we were practicing. It's a boundary condition between linear print and something as yet unnamed: it's the illusion of freedom, not necessarily in an evil, repressive way, but in a We HOPED So Hard That It Was TRUE That We Started To BELIEVE It Was TRUE sort of way.
5. Hypertext, as a practice and concept, was simultaneously too powerful and too widely applicable.
6. Here's another way of thinking about all of this:
Hypertext was merely a metaphor, a set of suggestions for thinking about communication.
Without degenerating into teleological argument about Perfecting True Textual Practices, I want to suggest that hypertext was just a set of training wheels, a choreographer's chart, a libretto. We were supposed to be doing something *with* those suggestions, not merely going through the motions.johndan johnson-eilola | http://www.clarkson.edu/~johndan/ | johndan@clarkson.edu