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1. Hypertext and Its Anachronisms
- University of Minnesota Press
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1 1 HYPERTEXT AND ITS ANACHRONISMS It is as though I had lost my way & asked someone the way home. He says he will show me and walks with me along a nice smooth path. This suddenly comes to an end. And now my friend says: All you have to do now is to find the rest of the way home from here. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains the transition from analog to digital media is perhaps too readily understood as a shift from continuity to fragmentation, from narration to archeology.1 One might instead view it as a process of translation, because what is completely untranslatable into new media will disappear as fast as what is utterly translatable.2 Such threats of disappearance tend to lead to symptomatic cultural formations in a network culture that Tiziana Terranova describes as “characterized by an unprecedented abundance of information output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics,” a dynamic she describes as “the relation between noise and signal, including fluctuation and microvariations, entropic emergencies and negentropic emergences, positive feedback and chaotic processes.”3 As a consequence, new media studies can be portrayed as organized around a distinction between information and meaning. Moreover, the implications of digitalization for learning and pedagogy are the topic of numerous scholarly efforts; the most widely used hypertextual systems seemed to bear witness to the creation of a “new economy.” But whereas some saw the Internet conquering the world and hoped for complete, 2 HYPERTEXT AND ITS ANACHRONISMS encyclopedic fulfillment of meaning, others saw only total noise and formed their neo-Luddite resistance against the overload. Their discontent concerned not so much the machine as its purported effects. Curiously, the news media are constantly abuzz with reports of cyberslacking and other forms of corporate employee ambivalence but without much critical reflection along the lines of what Michel de Certeau analyzed as “la perruque.”4 Both positions pivot on the same unquestioned assumption: that something irreversibly, incontrovertibly new is intruding on the turf of textual production and reception.5 Hypertext is the popular form of computer-mediated communication that has raised perhaps the highest expectations for a transformation of culture.6 It has been hailed as a new form of literature, a new encyclopedia, a universal library, and a metamedium that would ingest and replace all older media. Theodor Nelson, who coined the term in 1963, proposed considering hypertext a “generalized footnote,” and other media theorists such as Jacob Nielsen, Norbert Bolz, and Friedrich Kittler have followed him in this respect.7 However, the footnote is still for the most part coextensive with the technology of the printing press, even as it expresses a certain strain against the linearity of narrative conventions.8 More than constituting an extension of annotation and gloss, hypertext draws on processes of subverting, inverting, and exploding the apparent linearity of the page, in self-referential ways modern literature has already exploited. (A radicalization of general self-annotation is playfully illustrated by Heath Bunting’s readme.html, where every word is a hypertext link.9 ) But broader acceptance of hypertext in and as culture will be achieved only partly by way of improved technical concepts.10 Therefore, we need an attentive reading both of the promises that throw historical caution to the winds of mass distraction and of the quick assimilations that tend to reduce the complexity of any new situation to something already known. Thus, if one were to maintain a truly innovative character of hypertext, a more promising model might be the database.11 Indeed, new media art no longer presents itself as narrative; its forms have no beginning or end, no predetermined sequence. Consequently, information theory can assign various probabilities to a set of possible messages. These and related observations about the symbolic form of computer-age fiction, cinema, games, art, and literature may or may not carry the full weight [3.85.63.190] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:03 GMT) HYPERTEXT AND ITS ANACHRONISMS 3 of the hype with which an absolute innovation was heralded. The point of the present argument will be to test, as a selective probe in the genealogy of media, whether claims of an absolute departure are justified. If the following paragraphs focus mostly on hypertext (before subsequent chapters focus on the visual tactics of hacktivism, the recuperation of glitches in sound art, electronica, and games, and finally machinima as an emergent new media practice), it is because the widespread...