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10/20/2004 Archived Entry: "Hypertext"

Hypertext
Lots of talk regarding hypertext and (some) hypertext history over here. The short piece takes us back to Ted Nelson. Ok. But doesn't this stuff take Nelson a little too much to heart (notice the debate in the comments)? Nelson imagined a lot of things regarding hypertext; few materialized. Where are our "thinkertoys" and have we gone beyond the "paperdigm"? This Grand Text Auto take on hypertext is a bit odd because its concerns are all situated within print understandings of concepts: definition (what is hypertext) and categorization (hyperfilm, hypermedia, hypertext). Ok. But once you do all this, then what? And doesn't definition and categorization speak against what Nelson attempts to perform in books like Computer Lib?
What seems missing in this break down is the question of writing. Nelson is quoted as equating hypertext with writing, but the Grand Text Auto folks don't catch that or highlight that. The revolutionary idea Nelson came up with was less about linking or branching or whatever. Nelson, like contemporaries he didn't have contact with (McLuhan/Burroughs) was rethinking writing in terms of media. That's the big news. Like McLuhan's work, the reason Computer Lib looks the way it does is because Nelson is trying to perform his ideas. Wardrip-Fruin concludes by "suggesting this view of hypertext opens a direction for the hypertext community to focus on types of new media for which text is central." Still not sure what "this view" refers to (Nelson's view? It's more realized then even he believes). And why just "text." That's a limited gesture. Hypertext as text...sure. But hypertext involves the images, code, and incorporation of other media (this is where Coover went wrong years ago when he called hypertext dead). If you're going back to the source of Nelson, then you can't limit it to "text" b/c Nelson is integrating a lot more than text into his writing and his demonstration of what a new kind of writing entails.