Do you think there is some possible use of the idea of hypertext, the idea of this kind of linking and putting in relation different scattered pieces of information outside the field of literature, of writing? Do you think hypertext can also be seen as a kind of model or metaphor in other fields?
David Kolb - I think so. If you think about hypertext as linkage which is non-linear and also non-hierarchical - although you can build a hypertext which is hierarchical, you can build a hypertext which is purely linear, the problem is that you cannot keep it that way, it is going to have other links, it is going to move out - if you think about that image of non-linear, non-hierarchical linking, and forms that can be created but which cannot dominate the field of writing because other forms could be created out of the same pieces of text, that idea can be transferred. Here’s an example. Many people complain, especially in American but I think also increasingly in Europe, about suburbs and suburban sprawl. We tend to think that we have a very concentrated historical city core surrounded by a flat area which has houses and factories and malls just kind of scattered about with no order. This lack of order is felt to be somehow inappropriate. But you might try reading the suburbs as a hypertext.
You might say: Do not try to impose on the suburbs the old hierarchical kind of order, look for linkages, see the economic links that go among pieces of the suburbs, see how people make lives, especially in America, by using their car to make links from one activity to another. See how a community is created which is not a community of people who live in the same neighbourhood but a community of people who are linked by car, by telephone, by e-mail. A disconnected, discontinuous community but nonetheless a community.
So this idea of linkage without hierarchy and linkage that has many possible patterns at the same time may be a useful way to think about the kind of physical civilisation which tends to be growing up in a dispersed fashion rather than the concentrated, hierarchical city.
Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -
No comments:
Post a Comment