Ted Nelson is a prodigious computing talent, we’ll probably talk more about him when the time comes, but Stefan’s connection to Burroughs is very relevant. Not sure they knew each other, but Nelson would certainly know of Burrough’s writing and both are very strong connections to San Fran counter culture politics. Mia is impressed by Nelson’s prescience. You should be. He’s still arguing that the Web is broken and the wrong idea. Kiralee is less sure, though in relation to libraries, they’re no longer book centred (that happened about 15 years ago), I don’t think the degree is even called librarianship or similar anymore, (found one, but has to be done with ‘corporate information management’), and while books on paper remain a declining delivery format, no one, and I mean no one (aside from artists) uses anything but electronic media to write, edit, design and print a book. The only time it isn’t digital is at the end. Xanadu and yes, not so very long ago the Internet was only science fiction. Carli makes a nice connection between Ted Nelson and Doug Englebart (they were friends, and Nelson’s eulogy for Englebart is justly famous), and yes, there is a deep passion to make things better here. Ellen on Clouds, Olivia Newton John (yes there’s a connection), and what could have been. Louisa is also impressed, and yes, the idea of neural nets was present to Nelson in his conception of hypertext (a term he invented – along with thinkertoy, intertwingled, transclusion). Cassandra meanwhile discovers the joy of intertwingle (as I said in the symposium on network literacy, things don’t live in boxes, it’s all just soupy stuff that some temporary patterns are made in), and the possibilities and strange difference that hypertext could really offer (if only we stopped trying to make it like books).