This is not a flaw in the medium, though; it’s a failure of craft. With two exceptions (Shelley Jackson and Geoff Ryman, whose hypertexts “Patchwork Girl” and “253,” respectively, may be the first classics of the genre, both for the quality of their prose and because they found ways to make their fragmentary forms feel purposeful), the early hypertextualists just weren’t good enough writers to carry off such a difficult form.
.. At the same time, it’s impossibly hard to create, one of the only modes of fiction I know of which is more demanding than the novel. (And then add to that the need to create a user interface, and maybe a content-management system, and is it going to be an app?
Suddenly your antidepressants aren’t nearly strong enough to get you out of bed.)
Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story
It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s just that the blocks of text turned out to be written by different authors, publishing on different sites.
.. Hypertext turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection of linear stories or arguments written by different people.
.. Each reading of the story could follow a different combination of nodes; “closure,” in this new form, was as obsolete as the printed page. “When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths,” Joyce wrote in the introduction, “the experience of reading it ends.”
.. Multiple print tomes appeared evangelizing hypertext storytelling, and a few even warned of the threat it posed to traditional narrative. The literary/philosophical world had been musing about the death of the author and fragmented, reader-centric text since the late 1960s, but suddenly all those abstract ideas were grounded in technological reality.
.. That future never happened. It turned out that nonlinear reading spaces had a problem: They were incredibly difficult to write.
Xanadu: Browser Demo Released!
At a Chapman University Event, Ted Nelson announced the release of Xanadu:
Instructions
Now before you click on the “Read More” link:
- Realize that it loads slowly. Just wait. It’s just a demo so the performance hasn’t been optimized.
- The user interface isn’t always intuitive (it uses keyboard shortcuts)
Background:
- The main content is visible in the middle and the related content is displayed in parallel on the side
- The connections between the different sources are displayed with colored lines between the documents
- To see the related source, click on it with your mouse. To get back to the prior source, click on it.
About the document:
- The document, written by Moe Justes, is a compilation of different sources.
- I haven’t read all the content; but though Ted Nelson has said he himself is an atheist, Juste’s method of intertextually invoking other sources is actually quite biblical.
- At this point, it probably isn’t easy to duplicate something like this with your own content, but I wonder how biblical criticism could benefit from this form of parallel writing.
The Joy and Scourge of Dating David Foster Wallace Boys
It’s also easier to spot DFW boys in the wild than it is to spot, say, Jeffrey Eugenides boys. Reading Infinite Jest requires you to lug it around for a pretty long time, and I have found that a copy of Infinite Jest is dog- or baby-like in its capacity to make people just come up and talk to you. People on the train. People at work.