“40 Years from now (if the human species survives), their will be hundreds of thousands of file servers – machines storing and dishing out materials. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, able to read from billions of stored documents, with trillions of links among them…”

Theodore Nelson’s ‘Literary Machines’ is probably one of my favorite readings I have been assigned in university so far. Written in the 80s in non-sequential order, Nelson hypothesizes on an endless stream of data made up of hypertext, that he believes will revolutionize communication as he knew it. He was of course alluding to the Internet, however, given the context, it’s amazing how accurate his visions were. The reason I think I was so interested in this reading is that, as crazy as it sounds, it reminded me of William Burroughs’, ‘Naked Lunch’. Written in the 50s, by a junkie beat writer, this piece too is written in non-sequential order, and is basically just a collection of memories from all over the globe at different points within Burroughs’ life. As Adrian mentioned in the symposium, the Internet has no first page, and no last, and I suppose the same may be said about both of these written works. Whilst Nelson’s piece offers a very sobering, researched theory, Burroughs also hypothesizes on the state of technological advances, from an earlier, less sober perspective, stating; “The study of thinking machines teaches us more about the brain than we can learn by introspective methods. Western man is externalizing himself in the form of gadgets.”