In my previous post I dealt with the issues around technological communication and human technologies and their relationship with art and culture.
Another area from the symposium that interested me (although confused me at the same time), was the idea of an alternate interweb. Ted Nelson is an American philosopher and sociologist who is a pioneer in the set up and structure of communication technology. In 1960, he founded Project Xanadu and in turn came to question the future validity and currency of the World Wide Web. He challenged the concept behind the World Wide Web under the following reasoning:
“Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivialises our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.”
Although he’s getting on a bit now, his theories and thought processes are still incredibly current and (despite us thinking we have a fluid and flexible internet), have yet to penetrate the rigid information technology of today.
Ted envisioned a two-way or multi-way online network and actually came up with an alternative interweb. Even though we do not use his concept, it is interesting to analyse what makes his point so innovative in the world of information technology.
Ted looked into creating a “docuverse”, which stored all data once, without deletions and where all information was accessible via a link from anywhere else. He believed that the linear representation of linking and finding connecting information on the web interrupted how we find this content, and that it followed the footsteps of how we view a book, rather than an interactive hypertext web network. He envisioned a network which was non-linear, which depended on an individual’s choice of links, rather than a specific pathway in which to find this information.
His developments continued to form what is now referred to as a “high-performance hypertext system” which ensures the identity of references to objects and solves configuration management and copyright governance issues.