Hypertext

One of the written texts you might be using for your second essay is a hypertext work: Shelley Jackson's "My Body: A Wunderkammer." So this post is to help familiarize you a bit with some of the history of this digital format and its use as a creative medium.

Hypertext, the ability of html code to render online text with embedded links to other texts, images, or other kinds of data files, is ubiquitous throughout the internet. I don't know where you could look online and not be looking at some use of it. I'm sure everyone in class is by now used to seeing words and phrases highlighted in different colours that you "click" on to take you to somewhere else: a different web page, a definition of a term, an email address, and so on. Its pretty much what the internet was set up to do.

Hypertext was invented as a means to provide an easy interface for information retrieval, a way to organize and cross-reference both the knowledge of the past and the vast amounts of data being generated by digital technology itself. In short, a solution to the 20th Century problem of information overload. Any history of hypertext usually begins with reference to Vannevar Bush's prescient essay, "As We May Think," published in 1945. In it he imagines an electronic device he calls a "Memex." This "mechanized file and library" would be produced for individual use and take the form of a screen-topped desk and keyboard. Though Bush's "Memex" is not exactly like a PC hooked up to the internet, the basic idea---a means for individuals to have virtual access to a meta-archive---is there. That's why Bush's essay was the inspiration for the men generally credited with hypertext's invention, Ted Nelson and Douglas Engelbart.

What is interesting about Bush's predictions for later creative and artistic uses of hypertext and hypermedia are these comments that follow his criticism of the conventional ways information is indexed:

"The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. 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. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Mankind cannot hope fully to duplicate this mental process artificially, but ... [t]he first idea, however, to be drawn from the analogy concerns selection. Selection by association, rather than indexing, may yet be mechanized. One cannot hope thus to equal the speed and flexibility with which the mind follows an associative trail, but it should be possible to beat the mind decisively in regard to the permanence and clarity of the items resurrected from storage."

Yes, that's right. The non-linear associative function of memory is here imagined as the ultimate organizing methodology for categorizing everything. This should give pause to those readers who find the nonlinear "confusing," "annoying," or "stupid."

Because hypertext is a way of organizing material that attempts to overcome the inherent limitations of the linearity of traditional text its easy to see why it would be a medium that invited creative uses. And it changes things on a very fundamental level. The narrative experience, no matter what the structure or medium, has always been an experience of finite duration. The final page is turned, or the credits roll and the lights go up, and its over. With hypertext, the reader's overwhelming question might be, "How do you know when to stop?"