All of the talk in this and last weeks’ readings about hypertext had got me to realize how much I underestimated its power and significance. Yes, I’m slow, shut up. I don’t mean that I thought hyperlinks and forking paths were useless and I never needed them, but at the same time it had become so ingrained and ‘natural’ in my activities that I didn’t notice how big of a change it was to the playing field.

Adrian likes to mention hypertext a lot and how he was one of the people to be working on it early on. For a long time I just thought, “cool story”. I actually wondered what was so amazing about it. Links and choose your own adventures? Meh.

After the readings though, starting with Nelson’s last week and then Landow’s this, there’s a bit more of an understanding.

Hypertext presented the possibilities of a fundamentally different way of reading, and in turn a different way of writing. While I still find actual Choose Your Own Adventure books kind of tacky, the ability to leave whatever text you were reading and navigate to something else to continue your line of thought is invaluable. A common and somewhat mundane analogue counterpart would be looking at an encyclopedia or dictionary entry and being told to SEE [DIFFERENT ENTRY]. If you were interested, you’d flick to that entry and keep on reading.

Now, the problem with that example is that it requires tremendous and time-consuming amounts of physical exertion to turn the page (looking back on this blog post I realise that the sarcasm didn’t translate to the page all that well), which is something that hypertext in its digital form skirts around. Also, hypertext connection isn’t limited to within the text itself, and can possibly link to an infinite set of other texts. This would be the same as reading an encyclopedia whilst having a possibly infinite library of other texts to look at if you wish.

In analogue form, this can prove a bit difficult, but with digitalization the possibilities are endless. A reader isn’t tasked with reading the text from start to finish. They are able to have a degree of agency and decide where their interest takes them, depending on what the author permits.

Sometimes I think it’d be good if this was how our readings were presented. Instead of giving students a wall of text to just chew through, maybe give them a starting point that tackles the main point or kernel of the topic, and then link out to other material so that students can gather and build information in a way that feels more intuitive and engaging.

Wikipedia (and other encyclopedia sites too, I guess?) does this extremely well. For example, if two users went to the hypertext entry on there (the one I linked to at the start of this post), they could peruse the text in different ways. Say one person comes across the term ‘HTML’ and wants to find out what the hell that actually means. They click it and the site starts them on their own separate journey to the second user, who already knows what HTML is, but is wondering what the hell some guy in 1945 is doing speculating about hypertext. Already, their paths have forked, their search for information has taken them in directions that they have chosen, not the author.

I was going to talk about another example, the evil black hole of procrastination that is TV Tropes, but I’m about to get off the train and I can’t figure out how to save drafts on my phone. Hopefully anyone reading this can see the power that links have with SUCKING THE LIFE OUT OF FOOLS LIKE ME WHO ARE CURIOUS ABOUT UNIMPORTANT CRAP. All the entries their are sinisterly constructed, bombarding you with links to keep you reading their site. It’s Landow’s network in its most insidious form.

Here’s a beautiful and romantic picture of Donald Glover/Childish Gambino/Troy Barnes because I need an image for this entry and I love using this photo everywhere I can. You can’t tame me, world.