What socio-cultural factors may have motivated the development of hypertext?
The proliferation of communication technology in the 20th century has created a more permanent record of individual citizens and enabled a growing number of those citizens with the ability “to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual”. (Bush, 1945) The growth of these data records has led to an information economy dependent on hyperlinkages, and so as economies must grow so does the volume of records. I am impressed at how prescient Vannebar Bush in visioning the future and am surprised that I had not read of him before, I am sure that I will be working this into future humanities lessons.
Taking up the McLuhan thesis, what message is best suited to this medium?
If “the content of any new medium is an older medium” then the message best suited to hypertext is everything that has come before. All that was print should find a digital iteration. I have purchased certain records four times; from vinyl to 8-track and cassette to compact disc. Will only the popular works from times past find digital iterations in the future? And, if digital content is remediating print content then it would follow that digital literacy would be remediating print literacy. My literacy originated in print traditions and I had to learn digital literacy over time. My literacy was based in the printed text; printing for primary pupils and cursive in senior students. Over time I have watched as young people graduate from one level of systemic instruction to another and during each epoch the young person’s print literacy diminishes. As their print literacy diminishes so does their agency for that student is becoming dependent on this technology that was supposed to be liberating.
Bolter observes that hypertext is remediating print. Is hypertext a more “natural” technology for writing and reading (cf. Bolter 42-43)?
There is an easy comparison to be made with the human brain and the hypertexted world wide web. The individual sites that make up the internet are akin to synapses and the millions of miles of transmission media akin to the neural pathways. This does not mean that hypertext is a more ‘natural’ technology for writing and reading. Bolter quotes Ted Nelson in saying that “the structure of ideas is never sequential”. (Bolter, 2001, p. 42) How people think, and how people think using hypertext, is very much an exercise of remembering. Like hypertext, people’s memory operates on more than associations. People use mnemonic tools to remember long bits of important information and people chunk bits of data into larger constructs when the mind is operating. Ong (Ong, 2002, p. 33) suggests that recall is an important feature of knowledge. I am not sure that an expanding hypertext culture is championing greater recall of what we know; instead I see more people knowing where to locate information that information, is this knowledge?
Sources:
Bolter, J. D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Bush, V. (1945, July). The Atlantic. Retrieved from As we may thing: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
Ong, W. (2002). Orality and Literacy. London: Routledge.
