12.11.1990

"whenever I read anything about the web rewiring our brains, foretelling immanent disaster, I've always thought, geez, people -- we live in cities! Our species has evolved to survive in every climate and environment on dry land. Our brains can handle it!" >> http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2009/01/10/the-metropolis-and-mental-life/

"open-ended, emergent texts … constitute the great unexplored terrain of computer interactivity. … Robbed of contingent, dynamic consequence, the token interactivity of the hypertext novel is a thin veil over the deathly rigid structure. … each click reinforces the rigid authority of the author, any sense of play reduced to acquiescence. The hypertext form is nonlinear, yes, but stillborn. … if your ambition is to fulfil the unfulfilled promise of “new media,” to hack the contours of new digital forms, to deconstruct and reconstruct culture and its codes, you are best served to look beyond writing, beyond poetry, beyond hypertext. So look to what? There are plenty of examples. An ecosystem. Traffic. A dance club floor. A river. A network. The movement of dust. A cocktail party. A tennis game. The stock market. A brain. A riot. This book set on fire, its curling, blazing pages blackening to ash, blowing suddenly away in the wind."

http://twitter.com/adactio/statuses/20470534348 : "The earliest document ever published on the web is *almost* valid HTML5"

"Since the early 1990s, both medievalists & electronic media theorists have pointed to the hypertexted quality of medieval illuminated manuscripts … there were a lot of “distractions” built into a medieval book. … Add to these distractions the fact that medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. … They were mash-ups … “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative that contributed to Enlightenment understandings of the “focused” mind of the individual thinker. … the physical format of medieval books is not the only way in which they seem familiar to many contemporary users of digital media. Medieval reading as a practice was deeply social. … long after the invention of the printing press, until rather late in the 18th century, reading was a communal affair, with a group of hearers gathering around a reader to engage a book, letter, or other textual production."

http://www.w3.org/Talks/9510_Bush/Abstract.html: "We must do more than empower the individual. We must allow people and machines interacting together to behave in new ways as a mass. Now that we can make trails though our information, we must create a substrate in which these trails will grow into an increasingly meaningful whole, rather than a tangled mass. We and our documents are capable of operating together as a large machine but not as a large mind. Groups of all sizes must acquire gifts of intuition, correlation and invention which we associate normally with people rather than machines, before we can rise to Bush's challenge to mankind to "grow in the wisdom of race experience", rather than "perish in conflict"."

nice take on 1968 and all that …

Michael Buckland

"This document assembles summaries of a number of other documents, available on the web [see below], concerning the "secret history" of hypertext -- the basis for what is now the World Wide Web."

"the book is an obsolete mediation between two different hypertext systems. For everything essential is found on the del.icio.us page of the researcher who writes it, and the reader who studies it assimilates it into his or her own blog"

"it uses so little of my body. You’re just sitting there & it’s quite boring ... this stupid little mouse that requires one hand & your eyes. That’s it. What about the rest of you? No African would stand for a computer like that. It’s imprisoning"

"there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can't convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we've been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change."

I like this, very much.

the full transcript

(purchase needed) "Let me introduce the word "hypertext"***~ to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper."

"if screens were going to be everywhere & if storage was cheap ... put the content on the screen. 4 walls of paper are ... a prison ... every idea wants to spring out in all directions - everything is connected with everything else ... hypertext"

Frode's webiste

"Others imitate paper (Word, Acrobat) and the constant 3D world we live in ("Virtual Reality"). Our system instead tries to create documents better than paper in a space better than reality."

"The change from paper-based text to electronic text is one of those elementary shifts -- like the change from manuscript to print -- that is so revolutionary we can only glimpse at this point what it entails."

"Adventures in film narrative"; see http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/02/12872.html

hypertext films; see http://www.kottke.org/remainder/07/02/12872.html

Broadcast in 1990 on BBC2. Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, MIT Media Lab ... the road to the future

"paper documents have continued to survive & proliferate in the electronics age. Ted Nelson has described today's hypermedia as "tangled & limited" & that it has "no deep structure" & has "brought us interconnection but not understanding""

"In Doug Engelbart's 1968 demo … of the computer as a personal tool … we see outlines, word processing, copy-and-paste, domain specific languages & hyperlinks. The demo has been so prescient … We still have a lot to learn from what they made."