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.

The first set reading, an interview with sci-fi writer and proponent of design fiction Bruce Sterling, helped in clarifying my understanding of design fiction and its place in the world. As Joshua Tanenbaum also explains on Quora.com, design fiction involves the use of imagined scenarios in order to explore actual design possibilities in the future. From my understanding, DF differs from science fiction in its focus on the actual design and viability of the technologies and materials present in the fictional world. Whilst sci-fi creators simply use these things to propel their narrative, DF is actually more concerned with the gadgets and machines, and explores how they would actually be implemented in the real world.

Sterling provides two videos pertaining to design fiction that particularly interest him. The second video, from Corning, depicts a world in which a new glass technology has become part of virtually every aspect of the society’s everyday life. It is suggested that this kind of technology is capable of integrating communication of information pretty much anywhere. You can send messages from your bathroom mirror, look up recipes on the kitchen bench, and link your smartphone (now made entirely of glass) with a table for even more features.

While part of me was thinking “whoa, cool!” every time a new bit of gadgetry came up in the video, another part of me just kept thinking back to sci-fi films like Minority Report, in which the technology has become so pervasive that surveillance and privacy are a very big problem. As I was reflecting on the possible implications of technology being embedded in your bathroom mirror, I did notice that it brought me back to the difference between design and science fiction. Whilst films like Minority Report used things such as shops tracking individuals’ identities in order to push thematic ideas and notions about institutional control and privacy, the Corning video is not concerned with that. Instead, its approach is reversed. It shows the technology, and it is clear that it cares more about how the technology is actually designed and how it works.

Science fiction uses futuristic technology to draw parallels with abstract or thematic concepts in the real world. Design fiction uses futuristic technology to draw parallels with design possibilities in the real world.

Does that make videos like Corning’s world of glass innocent and free of ideology? Perhaps not. As Sterling stated, there is always a degree of overlap possible between design and science fiction. The way we speculate about tomorrow is a clear sign of what’s wrong with us today, but I’m probably going off on a tangent.

EDIT: I’m reading through the second text and it totally brings up ideology in relation to design. I’ll bring that up in the next post. Screw you, tangent.

One more thing to do with the relationship between design and science fiction that I found interesting was the concept of lightsabers, the iconic weapon from the Star Wars franchise. More specifically, I find it intriguing how the lightsaber has become so famous, despite being so technologically unpractical. In his series, ‘Sci Fi Science’, Dr. Michio Kaku explores how one could actually go about creating such a weapon using materials and technologies available to us now.

The video jumps between Kaku searching for physically possible ways to construct a lightsaber and sci fi fans’ beliefs of what a lightsaber should be. When you unpack what the fans are saying, you begin to realise how impossible a “true” lightsaber is. A lot of it is explained away with space magic, with the fans suggesting that there’s just technology that we haven’t discovered yet that can allow us to make lasers that stop in midair and can cut through any material except another laser.

Nevertheless, Kaku persists, examining the fictional device’s properties and capabilities, and eventually ends up with a design which, though still improbable and overly expensive, is much more possible than the one that exists in the Star Wars universe.

Okay, I was going to end this behemoth of a blog post with something witty or poignant but it’s 2:30pm and I want lunch. Adios.