ETEC540: The changing spaces of reading and writing.

Douglas Adams’s 1990 BBC documentary on hypertext

by jdmiller

I haven’t had a chance to watch the full movie version of Hyperland closely yet (available as of today on Google Video), but what I’ve seen convinces me that this will be a nice complement to our study of hypertext later on in the semester for ETEC540. It covers much of the same history we will be reading — Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Xanadu, the Media Lab… And based on previous iterations of the course, I’m willing to wager we have at least a couple of rabid Douglas Adams fans in our cohort.

Gestating off-screen, adding an ironic sheen to the proceedings, is the yet-to-be-realized World Wide Web, which would both embody and explode the vision of hypertext under consideration.

Update: Oook rightfully points to Hyperland’s Wikipedia entry for useful context.

(Via Boing Boing. Cross-posted to Abject Learning.)