...... and did some assignments
xanadu v. xanadu
WARNING: CONTENTS ARE SLIGHTLY DISJOINTED
In “You Say You Want a Revolution?,” Stuart Moulthrop looks at Hypertext through the lens of Marshall McLuhan's “Four Laws of Media.” But that's not the most interesting thing about the essay. What is interesting is that Moulthrop also takes a little time to predict the future, accurately, for the most part. He brings up interesting issues about the monetization and control of Hypertext. Even though it was written nearly twenty years ago, it still feels astoundingly relevant. That, combined with the entertaining style that Moulthrop writes in, makes it a very nice essay.
First, the major problem I had with this article. The problem is that Moulthrop expressed worry that Hypertext might be displaced from the public view by different constructs like cyberspace and the Information Superhighway. Instead, Hypertext has been incorporated into the larger Internet via the Web, thereby becoming one of the most commonly used interfaces for the Internet. Hypertext has become the vitally important HT in HTML.
Aside from the one exception presented above, Moulthrop was amazingly prescient in his essay. He manages to predict Web 2.0, and advances the idea that the Internet could work like a fantastic, worldwide, synthetic brain, constantly rewiring synapses when it learns new things (695). Of course, he doesn't say so in so many words. He also makes mention of “the social space of writing” (695), which makes me think that he should be blogging (as far as I can tell, he doesn't, but his website is quite nice). Moulthrop also emphasizes the importance of multimedia over text only, which is something that becomes truer as time passes.
Moulthrop is also a man of many fine sound bites. Best bite in the entire essay: “Hypertext means the end of the death of literature” (698). Fantastic. Moulthrop, quite early on in the essay, advances the idea, originated by Vannevar Bush and Theodore Holm Nelson that Hypertext represents a form of read/write culture, as compared to the read only culture of downloadable databases and eBooks (692). Of course, by the time this article was written in 1991, Michael Hart had been working on eBooks and Project Gutenberg for twenty years (gutenberg.org). Today, even eBooks, as long as they aren't damaged by DRM, can be called a read/write format. Because the Project Gutenberg texts are in the public domain, and because they are available in easy to modify formats, they do provide for user interaction. Which brings me to some of the more distressing ideas presented in the essay. All of these distressing ideas originate from Theodore Nelson and Clifford Stoll, and Moulthrop seems to take issue with them. Chief among these issues is Nelson's idea that Hypertext should be fully monetized by companies and deployed at pay-per-use kiosks with $/byte rates (695). That, combined with Stoll's idea that specialized information should only be accessed by professionals (696), paints a very unsettling image of the information systems dreamed up pre-1990. Moulthrop, of course, gleefully pokes holes in these arguments.
What makes this essay so profoundly readable is the way it is written. Moulthrop seems to take great joy in likening Nelson's Xanadu system to its namesake. He shamelessly paraphrases Coleridge at every turn. It reminds me very strongly of the Douglas Adams documentary, Hyperland, which again pays attention to the Coleridge connection. While an idealist may see “sunny pleasure domes with caves of ice”* and “fertile ground”* in Nelson's Xanadu, cynic that I am, I can't help but expect the “ancestral voices prophesying war”* that are bound to result from monetizing information to the degree that Nelson posited. Moulthrop seems to agree.
I can't help but notice, though, that there has been a revolution. Hypertext has won out. The Web, which is so strongly based on Hypertext, is the format of choice for accessing the Internet. While our contemporary, Hypertext influenced Internet may have “ceaseless turmoil seething,”* I have the hope that it will be hard to take away, to fully monetize, to traffic shape and to spy on, because we've had the benefit of over a decade of that most incongruous “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.”* Nelson couldn't have picked a better name, because we're all Kubla, now. To anyone who tries to change that, “Beware! Beware!”*
*Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Kubla Khan.” First published: 1816