Xanadu’s shortcomings (from Swedish)

The developments took this turn is at least partly to attribute the shortcomings and idiosyncrasies that characterized Xanaduprojektet:

  • A widespread amateurism among employees (Nelson himself included).
  • An inability to identify a clear target group that would take the system in use and popularize it (Nelson and his hacker colleagues have pushed imagine themselves Xanadu users as a collection of self-taught programmers).
  • A monumental disinterest in computer programming ring “front end”, that is, the side facing the user, and is colloquially become known as the interface or user interface.
  • An excessive preoccupation with copyright issues (Nelson’s Xanadu would operate as a commercial network, much like a traditional phone companies, which would pay for each time quotes conditioned (see transclusion) a document. This carefree cut-and-pasting (cut -and-paste ) that have come to characterize much of the WWW , in other words, would not be allowed.
  • A strong fixation on text media on auditory and visual media expense (Nelson’s continued aversion to non-textual media, evidenced by his various writings on the web).

David Shenk: The Problem with Hypertext (NPR 1997)

Until then, we are all stuck in a linear world. We can dabble in hyper-fiction and so-called dense TV as forms of entertainment and as thought experiments, but let us not forget that our brains are wired to read the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Time Magazine.

.. If Jane Austen could see what her book Pride and Prejudice has become on the World Wide Web, she would faint dead away. In the first five sentences, there are four invitations to go elsewhere.

.. For all of its advantages, hyper-text has no whole. As the Web becomes integrated into the fabric of our lives, mostly to our great benefit, we should employ hyper-linking as a useful tool, but be careful not to let it govern the way we think.

McLuhan: Understanding Media

Intensity or high definition engenders specialism and fragmentation in living as in entertainment, which explains why any intense experience must be “forgotten,” “censored,” and reduced to a very cool state before it can be “learned” or assimilated.

..Were we to accept fully and directly every shock to our various structures of awareness, we would soon be nervous wrecks, doing double-takes and pressing panic buttons every minute.

..   And as for the cool war and the hot bomb scare, the cultural strategy that is desperately needed is humor and play. It is play that cools off the hot situations of actual life by miming them. Competitive sports between Russia and the West will hardly serve that purpose of relaxation. Such sports are inflammatory, it is plain. And what we consider entertainment or fun in our media inevitably appears as violent political agitation to a cool culture.

Page 1

..  a chicken was an egg’s idea for getting more eggs.

Cubism, by seizing on instant total awareness, suddenly announced that the medium is the message.

.. Mental breakdown of varying degrees is the very common result of uprooting and inundation with new information and endless new patterns of information.

Page 3 .. The present chapter is concerned with showing that in any medium or structure there is what Kenneth Boulding calls a “break boundary at which the system suddenly changes into another or passes some point of no return in its dynamic processes.” Several such “break boundaries” will be discussed later, including the one from stasis to motion, and from the mechanical to the organic in the pictorial world

.. One of the most common causes of breaks in any system is the cross-fertilization with another system, such as happened to print with the steam press, or with radio and movies (that yielded the talkies).