Hypertext | Nathan Santamaria

Today hypertext media seems ubiquitous. I’m surrounded my interactive screens all vying to win my incredibly short attention span. However when I try to imagine a hypertext culture without an electronic medium, I struggle. So then I try and remember if I had any kind of hypertextual print when I was a kid, before I became submerged in my screens.

The first thing I settled on was Goosebumps. Now if you were like me and abused your primary school library, not for textbooks or non-fiction research, but rather for the Where’s Wally and the odd HP read when you could get your hands on one – you will definitely remember Goosebumps. They were an awesome series of short, easy to read horror stories and the ones that i read the most were the ‘Chose Your Own Story’ editions. These had an obscene amount of endings an plot twists, and the reader got to decide all of them. Once you finished a chapter you were presented with a series of scenarios; a) Go up the stair of the haunted house b) Check the back yard for your friend c) go back to your car, etc. These wouldn’t just affect the ending but the whole story, the characters you encountered, how your character developed. This was the first time I can remember a book not being restricted by sequence; in one book you would jump back and forwards in pages and the end could be in the middle of the book.

These editions of Goosebumps could be considered hypertextual in the way they are non-sequential. They branch off and allow choices to the reader.

I’ll end on a fun Goosebumps fact: Stine deliberately omitted any kind of drugs, depravity and violence in his books. There are also never any deaths in the stories.

The Internet has come a long way since the dial up days of AOL. Wifi and 3G are commonplace now and hardlines are used now only for a greater bandwidth. We can now download an upload almost anywhere in the world from our pockets.

This is the result of the Internet and the World Wide Web, and although now the notion of this kind of interconnectivity is commonplace, 30 years ago it seemed a space-age prospect. When Ted Nelson was sharing his thoughts on hypertext culture and ‘Project Xanadu’ (essentially a prototype Internet), he was also confessing his skepticism that humanity would even survive to see his predictions realized.

Hypertext is “non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen” (Nelson). Nelson highlighted this mode of information sharing as the way of the future. He outlined a world in which offices, businesses, and even homes may be paper-less, instead they would be filled with compters.

Nelson praised computers as instruments to simplify human life (simplification was something that he pushed in many different cases pertaining to computers) and the way to do this was to connect them, making information transfer almost seamless. This vision was realised, in a way, through the Internet.

References: Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 91.1: The Report On, and Of, Project Xanadu Concerning Word Processing, Electronic Publishing, Hypertext, Thinkertoys, Tomorrow’s Intellectual Revolution, And Certain Other Topics Including Knowledge, Education and Freedom. Sausalito: Mindful Press, 1992. Print.