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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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December 6th marked the 30th anniversary of the ill-fated concert at the Bay Area’s Altamont Speedway where, during a free rock-n-roll event attended by 300,000 fans, four people died. Among them was Meredith Hunter, an eighteen-year-old African-American who was stabbed to death by a group of Hell’s Angels directly in front of the stage. For many, the murder at Altamont marked the symbolic end of the '60s – not the end of the turbulence, for the struggles continued –signaleing the passing of the decade’s spirit of hopeful activism, its idealistic faith in love and peace.
The anniversary passed with nary a word from the national news media, hardly a surprise since journalism is not a medium of memory (and besides, there was the pressing issue of what to say about Seattle.) But if Altamont has passed from national consciousness, at least that consciousness reflected in the twitchy mirror of the news media, who or what remembers? This brings me to the twin imperatives of historical writing (and to this essay's topic, hypertext): "Tell me a story" and "Tell me the truth." How to tell it? What form suits best? I submit that it’s this counterpoint of history and memory, factual truth and the narrative organization that lends stories their coherence and intelligibility. Regardless, it's precisely this counterpoint that is evoked so bravely and un-nostalgically, by Sunshine ‘69, the "Web’s first interactive novel" by Robert Arellano, a.k.a. Bobby Rabyd, Internet fabulist and teacher of creative writing at Brown University.
What is Hypertext?
But before getting to the fable of Sunshine ‘69, I’d better backtrack to engage a different fable, one that will provide a context for what follows and some definitions. I am sure many of you are wondering, "what is hypertext?" What is a hypertext? My answers, I admit, are partial and subjective, for hypertext means different things to different people. There is a great deal of academic debate, much of it admittedly a mere pissing contest, about who did what, and when, and who should be awarded credit, and perhaps – who knows? – a tenured position.
So let us leave the academics aside for the moment (and hope to be forgiven later). The word "hypertext" may be used to refer to a constellation of things. It is at once a medium, an ideal, a technology, an imaginative point of reference, and an imaginary machine that computer scientists have used to project very interesting pictures of the future of reading, writing, annotation, indexing, and many other useful things. To paraphrase Sherry Turkle, hypertext is good to think with.
In the 1940s, hypertext was the imaginary machine of Vannevar Bush, who conceived of the memex as an ideal system for information storage and retrieval, kind of like a huge Rolodex, in his Atlantic Monthly article "As We May Think." In the 1960s, hypertext was the result of an imaginary machine of Ted Nelson, who imagined a computer system for producing hypertext as "non-sequential writing – text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen…a series of text chunks connected by pathways," as he explained in Literary Machines . In the 1980s, hypertexts were first published on floppy disks by visionary publishers. Michael Joyce’s afternoon, a story was published by Eastgate Systems in 1987, to be followed by Stuart Moulthrop’s Victory Garden, John McDaid’s Uncle Buddy’s Phantom Funhouse, Sarah Smith’s King of Space, and many others. By the mid-1990s, hypertext was a bona fide academic subject. Astute critics and writers like George Landow and Robert Coover, quick to recognize the potential of this technology, formed what might be called the vanguard of a new art form.
Practically speaking, hypertext is a way of ordering and arranging chunks of information. A variety of software programs are available for this purpose, including Eastgate’s Storyspace, Macromedia’s Director, and a host of Web-authoring tools. (You can also do it with a stack of index cards and some tape, but the result might prove difficult to distribute.) But, technology aside, what is most interesting about these textual experiments is that, by breaking pages of text into chunks and using links to recombine the chunks, hypertext, as both a real technology and an imaginary possibility, expands our usual notions of textual organization (e.g. "narrative" or "argument") to include stories with multiple pathways and endings, and arguments with a non-linear or digressive structure.
Although hypertext refers only to textual information, the fact that any kind of media – images, sounds, video – may be digitized, chunked, and linked, requires the introduction of another new term: hypermedia. Both hypertext and hypermedia add value to the chunks they incorporate, for link structures are more than ornaments or substitutes for other kinds of transitions. Linking styles and link structures generate meaning in themselves. That is, the "hyper" part of "hypertext" and "hypermedia" is not just hype, for it refers to a way of creating substantive connections between chunks of information.
Like early cinematography, hypertext is a complex art form with an emerging set of rules and conventions. These conventions are so new they defy most attempts to exhaustively describe them, but by now it seems evident that the rules have something to do with conventions also present in other media, including techniques derived not only from writing but also from film, music and visual art (including, for instance, montage and juxtaposition).
