Hypertext detractors

The second half of this century has seen the rise of three modes of electronic performance that happen to be short: the sitcom, the music video, and the sound bite.

New forms always attract critics, and these three have never lacked for detractors. Many have argued that these forms are debased by their brevity, and that electronic media are responsible for shortening our attention spans. In some quarters. These popular genres are dismissed as superficial spectacles that titillate and numb the debased tastes of the masses.

In the same vein, New Media -- notably hypermedia -- are widely assumed to appeal to the same demands for spectacle and brevity. Multimedia edutainment, for example, is praised by its supporters for its appeal to the "MTV generation" while detractors decry youth's loss of immersion in the pages of a good book.

But cultural observers always decry the debased tastes of youth. Our grandparents and great-grandparents fought for jazz and Joyce and D.H. Lawrence against the sneers of their elders. Young Romans flocked to hear Catullus and Ovid even as senators declared their poetry a threat to the commonwealth.

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Complex textual structure of the Real

Even the most conservatively narrative history is filled with complex textual structure, discursion, and linkage. T

This fact does not depend on postmodern analysis or literary theoretic argument, nor does is derive from a novel philosophical or methodological stance; the structures we have discussed all appear, for example, in Thucydides' opening chapters. We need not fear that hypertext will slash apart or cherished narrative simplicity, for this narrative simplicity never existed.

Letting go our irrational fears of electronic writing and leaving aside nostalgia for an imaginary literary past, we can explore afresh the opportunities hypertext offers. Linearity was never an option for historical writing; hypertextuality can make complex structure concrete, clear and responsive to both the author and reader.

It is a shame that too much of the popular perspective on hypertext does not yet recognize this, and that hypertext punditry so often caters to fear and nostalgia.

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Hypertext and its teeth

Like Barthes, Derrida conceives of text as constituted by discrete reading units.

Derrida's conception of text relates to his "methodology of decomposition" that might transgress the limits of philosophy. "The organ of this new philosopheme," as Gregory Ulmer points out, "is the mouth, the mouth that bites, chews, tastes. . . . The first step of decomposition is the bite".

Derrida, who describes text in terms of something close to Barthes's lexias, explains in Glas that "the object of the present work, its style too, is the 'morceau,' " which Ulmer translates as "bit, piece, morsel, fragment; musical composition; snack, mouthful." This morceau , adds Derrida, "is always detached, as its name indicates and so you do not forget it, with the teeth," and these teeth, Ulmer explains, refer to "quotation marks, brackets, parentheses: when language is cited (put between quotation marks), the effect is that of releasing the grasp or hold of a controlling context".

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Misunderstanding of narrative

Fear of incoherent hypertext arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative.

The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.

The misunderstanding of narrative, the naive belief that narrative is linear, is both pervasive and wrong-headed. Let us consider, for a moment, that most seemingly-linear of forms, historical narrative in the tradition of Thucydides, Gibbon, McCauley, Henry Adams, Bury, and Shelby Foote. Moreover, let us focus exclusively on the historian's traditional audience of colleagues, advanced students, and serious adult readers; we will ignore any aspirations to address mass markets, children, distant cultures, the MTV generation, or any of the other peripheral strengths at which hypertext writing is believed to excel.

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Incoherent hypertexts

People who aren't very familiar with hypertext writing, but who nonetheless want to impress you with their knowledge, often claim that hypertexts are incoherent, that they lack the structure and rigor of conventional, linear prose. For example, Sven Birkerts writes in his Gutenberg Elegies that

Humanistic knowledge . . . ultimately seeks to fashion a comphrensible narrative. It is, in other words, about the creation and expansion of meaningful contents. Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anti-contextual. They open the field to new widths. . .

The danger should be obvious: The horizon, the limit that have definition to the parts of the narrative, will disappear.

Others simply fear that there is no place for links within a coherent narrative, that hypertext is the exclusive province of technical manuals on the one hand and incoherent postmodernism on the other.

This fear arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative. The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.


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Kind of artist

The creators of digital works will need to be a new kind of artist , or team, with a distinct mix of expertise in at least three areas – the specific subject matter and associated critical and analytical techniques, technical computing processes, and principles of content selection and organization...


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