Why are all these readings on networked media from, like, ten, twenty years ago? Adrian himself has said that the stuff we should be learning in this subject will be obsolete by the time we graduate, so why are we focusing so much on the old stuff? I’m serious! I want to hear about what we think the internet will look like in twenty years, rather than what we thought it would look like in twenty years twenty years ago.

Yes, it’s wonderful that the authors we’ve explored have predicted the internet fairly closely. It’s great they’ve devised some complex theories and methodologies for using the internet as both an information database, storage system and alternate path for narrative. That’s awesome, I’m happy for them, but seriously… ten-year olds know that stuff. They may not know that it was thought of by modern philosophers before the internet was in public use, or that there was even a period of time in which the internet was not around (so… why didn’t the Spanish Armada just check the BOM?), but why should a subject based around using the internet focus so much on how the internet was perceived in the past?

Ok, I’m explaining the concept to myself a bit as I go. Something we don’t really grasp about the internet is the very thing that makes it so interesting to these writers: it’s non-chronological. Perhaps doing a blog is a weird way of using the web as an educational tool, when this vast hypertext extravaganza should allow us to post a million things that relate to a million other things without any kind of chronology or order. We read by order of associations, this leads us to this which leads us to that which leads us to that which leads us back to this and then back to that.

Theodor Holm Nelson was almost desperate in his pleas to make us take up the theories of hypertext and Xanadu, proclaiming that we need to band together to ‘save mankind from an almost certain doom through the application, expansion and dissemination of intelligence. Not artificial, but the human kind.’ Yup, OK. I’m hoping there was a bit of dramaticism and irony there that I didn’t pick up on. Maybe if I’d actually been paying attention as he’d explained in great detail why WIKIPEDIA IS SO AWESOME then I would know.

There is something to be said for the interactive narrative. Sure, it’s a bit clunkier than an interactive reference source (we don’t really read dictionaries or encyclopedias front-to-back), but it’s an interesting concept that deserves to be dissected. Once or twice, anyway. A few of the readings have mentioned Aristotle’s ideas of narrative, and for the most part I agree with him. Stories have beginnings and endings, that’s kind of a what a story is, in my mind. It’s about one aspect, or one idea or concept, at one point, and how it gets to another. No one ever comes out of a story exactly the same, something has to change, but to really track that change a specific starting and finishing point are chosen. I guess that’s me saying I doubt that a hypertext narrative would ever reach the heights of a linear one.