On the hypertext revoution

"In "Hypertext, Hypermedia and Literary Studies: The State of the Art", Landow and Delany suggest that “hypertext can be expected to have important institutional as well as intellectual effects, for it is at the same time a form of electronic text, a radically new information technology, a mode of publication, and a resource for collaborative work… Hypertext historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology and historical era. We can be sure that a new era of computerized textuality has begun; but what it will be like we are just beginning to imagine."

This passage was written in 1991, at a time when hypertext systems were available in somewhat limited forms such as Hypercard and Intermedia, use of the Internet was largely confined to academic institutions, and the term “World Wide Web” had only just been coined. Now, 15 years later, comment and reflect upon the impact hypertext has had on the world."

Well. I can only vaguely remember when it was 1991, and I was probably in the middle of some elaborate colouring job when my brother might call me over to this monstrous computer to watch him play that ancient magenta-cyan alley cat game. And lots of navigating by DOS. So that's as much as I can remember of the days when W3 was not mainstream.

Growing up, the internet was probably an integral part of my life, so it's hard to imagine what an uproar there was when this whole hypertext revolution began.

I suppose like how TV and radio began as a mass media revolution, the transmission of information to the masses, propaganda, education, knowledge sharing and such. So it is with the internet and its interconnected cyberhighways.

However, unlike static media like TV and radio, the user of the W3 is given more control over what he views. Also, with the ease of creating new logs and the accessibility to all these logs, there is not only more information at your fingertips, but almost anyone can have a presence and share information. The user gains more control in these two aspects.

Certainly, as with the media revolution of the 60s, commercialism played a large role not only in its development, but also in determining what is distributed to the masses. While commercialisation of the internet is true, as what we discussed in class on Tuesday, there are less boundaries and rules to stick by on the internet.

The audience is more diverse and there is no official governing body to police cyberspace. Thus, commercial potential of the internet is definitely more lucrative than on other broadcasting media like TV.

Perhaps most noteworthy is that the internet is speeding things up a lot. Developments in technology and academia in particular, would have proceeded at much slower paces if not for the bridging of geographical boundaries among like-minded people and information. However, these very properties of the internet can bring about problems of its own, like eradicating the sense of ownership, not only in copyright, but also in the lax in taking responsibility for one's behavior in cyberspace.

It is thus not the most original thing to say, but our value system has yet to catch up with this whole web thing (like many other things.). While Landow seems to have somewhat exaggerated a little bit about the revolution (IMO), we do realise that like with previous revolutions, people are seldom ready to behave, or rather, respond with reason. I think it is really important to mentally and socially prepare people, but I'm not quite sure how we're going to go about it.