Hyperreality, implosion or collapse

Hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse or implosion where referential or "grounded" utterance becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the imaginary.
The American tomorrow will be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of "lost" or "forgotten" values.  Xanadu is no exception: Ted Nelson sees the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of recovery.  His "grand hope" lies in "a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new Renaissance of ideas and generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not lose the details which are the final substance of everything" 


From word processing to interactive multimedia, postmodern communication systems accentuate what Ihab Hassan calls "immanence" or "the intertextuality of all life. A patina of thought, of signifiers, of 'connections,' now lies on everything the mind touches in its gnostic (noo)sphere. . . ." (172).
It is not an opium vision but something stranger still, a business plan for the development of what Barthes called "the %social% space of writing" (81), a practical attempt to reconfigure literate culture.
We are far more likely to hear technology described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for liberation.  Bolter (1991), Drexler (1987), McCorduck (1985), and Zuboff (1988) all contend that postmodern modes of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies and promote broader definitions of authority in the informational workplace.
The American tomorrow will be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of "lost" or "forgotten" values.  Xanadu is no exception: Ted Nelson sees the history of writing in the 21st century as an epic of recovery.  His "grand hope" lies in "a return to literacy, a cure for television stupor, a new Renaissance of ideas and generalist understanding, a grand posterity that does not lose the details which are the final substance of everything"
The magnitude of the change implied here is enormous.  But what about the politics of that change?  What community of interpretation-- and beyond that, what social order--does this intertextual world presume?


Hypertext differs from earlier media in that it is not a new thing at all but a return or recursion (of which more later) to an earlier form of symbolic discourse, i.e., print.  The effect of hypertext thus falls not simply upon the sense channels but farther along the cognitive chain.  As Vannevar Bush pointed out in the very first speculation on informational linking technologies, these mechanisms enhance the fundamental capacity of %pattern recognition% ("As We May Think," qtd. in _Literary Machines_ 1/50).


In hypertext systems, this ethos of connection is realized in technics: users do not passively rehearse or receive discourse, they explore and construct links (Joyce 12).
The word suggests the society-of-text envisioned by theorists like Shoshana Zuboff and Jay David Bolter, a writing space in which traces of authority persist only as local and contingent effects, the social equivalent of the deconstructed author-function.
hypertext is nothing more than an extension of what literature has always been (at least since "Tradition and the Individual Talent")--a temporally extended network of relations which successive generations of readers and writers 20) http://roguereader.blogspot.com/2010/11/some-rough-notes-on-stuart-moulthrops.html


Perverse though it may seem, hypertext does accentuate the agonistic element of reading.  Early experience with hypertext narrative suggests that its readers may actually be more concerned with prior authority and design than readers of conventional writing.
 

David Foster Wallace: expansive footnotes

His writing featured self-generated abbreviations and acronyms, long multi-clause sentences, and a notable use of explanatory footnotes and endnotes—often nearly as expansive as the text proper. He used endnotes extensively in Infinite Jest and footnotes in “Octet” as well as in the great majority of his nonfiction after 1996. On the Charlie Rose show in 1997, Wallace claimed that the notes were used to disrupt the linearity of the narrative, to reflect his perception of reality without jumbling the entire structure. He suggested that he could have instead jumbled up the sentences, “but then no one would read it”

Dense Linking: in two weeks of blood and fire

In two weeks of blood and fire, one of the greatest intellectual and cultural legacies the world had ever seen came to an end. Crushed under the hooves of a mighty foe (in one case literally), a dynasty, an empire, a city, and a library all disappeared. It was perhaps the swiftest and most complete collapse of a civilization ever, still felt to this day. Now, how about for some context?