What the Geeks Know:
Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy
Stuart Moulthrop
smoulthrop@ubalt.edu
CATEGORIES & SUBJECT DESCRIPTORS
Hypertext/hypermedia:
user issues.
GENERAL TERMS
Human factors. Theory.
ABSTRACT
Recent theories of hypertext usefully emphasize continuity with earlier
media; but in the general social environment, this continuity is not well
understood, and may even be opposed in some quarters. The paper argues that we
should define hypertext as the basis for a new version of general literacy and
place greater emphasis on teaching in our agenda for applications and research.
KEYWORDS
Theory, remediation, archive, literacy, pedagogy.
1. CATCHING WAVES
He conocido lo que ignoran
los griegos: la incertidumbre. [5]
Following Dalgaard [6] and Liestøl
[19], we can identify three waves in the history of hypertext so far. In the first
instance, pioneers like Nelson, Engelbart, and Van
Dam originated the concept and built the first experimental systems. A second
wave, beginning with the introduction of personal computers and running through
the popularization of the Internet, produced widely distributed systems and the
first examination of their uses and implications. The arrival of the World Wide
Web opened a third phase, characterized less by wild experimentation and
utopian ideas than refinement of existing technologies. In many respects, the
third wave represents the oft cited transition from digital immigrants to
digital natives, driven largely by researchers who have had access to advanced
technologies from the start of their careers.
The third wave concerns itself with hypertext as reality, not novelty:
with what Dalgaard calls the "archive," a
communication environment in which virtually all texts are exposed to automated
search, retrieval, and hypertextual reference. The
term is general in scope, referring to no particular system, and might thus
stand for any application of hypertext. Still, Dalgaard
restricts himself to scholarly discourse, speaking of "the scholarly
archive". This paper broadens the concept to include all areas of
communication, a shift in focus that could have significant implications for
hypertext research and development.
There is much to admire in the third wave, even among those earlier
surfers on whom it tends to break. Much of the recent criticism is productive.
As Dalgaard says, early accounts of hypertext
emphasized the rejection of linear presentation in ways that sometimes limited
both our understanding of hypertext's other properties, and our awareness of
what others have called "remediation" [4], the co-evolution of older
and newer media. Approaching hypertext not as a negation of previous practice,
but as a medium in its own right, facilitates connections with related,
parallel developments such as the emerging concept of "new media"
[20] or Aarseth's more precise and useful notion of
"cybertext" [1]. It also permits us to
think about forms of hypertext that depart from the metaphor of pages or
screens [33]. There can be no doubt that third-generation ideas, particularly
the concept of the archive, are essential to further progress in this field.
However, as we situate the archive in relation to other media, and
within areas of communication beyond academia, it appears that the integrative,
"remediating" approach that marks the third wave may fail to address
certain aspects of social reality. Thus the post-millennial revision of
hypertext theory may itself benefit from critique. To some extent we may need
to reassert or re-examine earlier positions, particularly the difference
between hypertext and what has been called print culture. Yet the aim here is
not to refute the third wave, but rather to temper and strengthen its doctrine.
We must indeed understand reading, writing, and participation in the context of
the archive, but we must first recognize that in some sectors of society, the
archive, and digital media generally, have yet to establish legitimacy.
2.
MISREADING
This last claim may seem dubious, if not outrageous. Technologies based
on personal computing and Internet Protocol are generally acknowledged as
leading factors in the long awaited productivity gains of the 1990s. The World
Wide Web continues its global expansion, making hypertext, or at least
information retrieval from hypertextual networks, a
regular experience for hundreds of millions. Home pages proliferate, and the
"blogosphere" has become a rising force in political, social, and
personal life [25].
Yet for some, these developments seem either invisible, or worse,
ominous. Recently the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a
lugubrious report called "
The electronic archive, whether
in Dalgaard's special, scholarly view or in the more
general sense used here, does not feature in the NEA's account of reading,
which the authors explicitly confine to books, and beyond that, inexplicably,
to fiction, poetry, and some drama. Weblogs do not exist in the NEA's world,
nor do USENET groups, WIKIs, or MUDs
and MOOs. Even audio books are left out. We are told
that "[p]rint culture affords irreplaceable
forms of focused attention and contemplation that make complex communications
and insights possible." Yet the report has nothing to say about electronic
delivery of conventional texts, such as print on demand, even though at least
one leading figure in the book trade calls this approach the salvation of literary
publishing [11].
Where electronic media figure in the NEA report, they appear as threats.
Television promotes passivity; computer games and the Internet "foster
shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification." The report's
recommendations for further research begin with this question: "How does
literature, particularly serious literary work, compete with the Internet,
popular entertainment, and other increased demands on leisure time?" The
question is of course very heavily loaded in favor of
the negative. Books, we are told, are fighting a losing battle against the
forces of cultural decay.
For many in the present community, this pessimism probably misses pathos
on its way to absurdity. As one critic put it, the question about competition
"seems to be staring up at me from a puddle of its own drool" [23].
Indeed, the NEA document may seem largely dismissable.
The executive summary misrepresents its research data more than once. Its
strongest claim, concerning literary reading and civic participation, rests
entirely on a correlation, and may demonstrate not the decline of reading so
much as the demise of a middle class with appreciable leisure time. Finally,
there is the source to consider: a peripheral agency in a notably doctrinaire
administration, whose focus on literature and the arts absolves it from
thinking about more general forms of literacy.
Many may decide, reasonably enough, to regard this complaint as a
tempest in someone else's teapot. The "two cultures" of literature
and science seem as distinct today as when Snow described them in 1959 [29].
Since poets and novelists are not scientists or engineers, the latter may care
little if the former reject forms of communication essential to scientific
work. Scientists may even be inclined to respect the sentiments of the poets,
however dubious, so long as they keep to their side of the campus.
However, this may be a particularly bad time for scientists, engineers,
and humanist fellow travelers to look politely the
other way. At the very least, the NEA report demonstrates dismaying ignorance
about digital technologies and a failure to understand the electronic archive
as a site where literacy continues to evolve. Evolution is of course something of a
fighting word here. The report issues from an administration that regularly
scores points with its base by goading the scientific establishment, pursuing a
self-described culture war against science and secular materialism. Though
still at the simmering stage, this conflict has already produced some ominous
eruptions. In one instance, a professor of biology was placed under federal
investigation for requiring that students accept a scientific account of the
origin of species in order to receive recommendations for graduate study [31].
Fortunately, the causes of science and advanced communication are not
confined to the decidedly irrational sphere of
In this there is a kind of convergence. If they agree on nothing else,
fundamentalists of all sects share an investment in closed systems of truth
embodied in immutable texts. Both, at their most extreme, define reading even
more narrowly than the NEA: not simply as an encounter with books, but as the
study of a single, absolute book -- an entity about as far removed from the hypertextual archive as it is possible to conceive. The
archive must seem to them at best illegitimate, at worst an abomination. Facing
these facts, we may want to think more carefully about the situation of
hypertext in a world that seems, paradoxically, to grow more contentious and
reactionary even as its lines of communication grow and improve. To find our
way through this eminently hazardous predicament, we may need to rethink both
our theory and our practical agenda.
3.
WHAT THE GEEKS KNOW
Remediation and other integrative approaches highlight successful or at
least viable outcomes, such as the mutual influence of Web design on tabloid
newspapers, and vice versa. However, as Bolter and Grusin
point out, the process that creates these products is neither smooth nor neatly
deterministic. Encounters between old and new media are inherently adversarial
and never assured of balanced resolution. Innovation in communication seems
inescapably problematic. When Apple's advertising declares: "Rip. Mix.
Burn. It's your music," it invites users to break laws that benefit owners
of older media [17]. Music publishers have responded with several attempts to
curtail technical development. There is little new in this stragegy.
As an earlier theorist observed: "Monopoly capitalism develops the
consciousness-shaping industry more quickly and more extensively than any other
sectors of production; it must at the same time fetter it" [10].
Writing at the end of the 1960s, Enzensberger
saw popular, participatory media, such as audio and video recording, as likely
means to overcome repression. That prediction proved both right and wrong.
Cassettes stoked revolutions in
Miles observes that hypertext
belongs not to an economy of scarcity, but to a mode of excess [22]. Hence one
reason students of this technology might puzzle at the NEA's attention anxiety:
the archive does not know sufficiency, only surfeit. With trillions of
documents almost instantly available, there is too much of nearly anything, so
attention must always be elective. The epistemology of electronic text differs
radically from that of conventional writing. As Bernstein observes [3],
repetition in hypertext is not a vice; nor is it really the same thing as
repetition in earlier modes, since our return to the same item belongs to a
process of navigation that cannot be separated from the meaning of the text.
Certainly, as
As noted earlier, however, the aim here is not simply to reassert these
insights, but to combine them productively with later thinking. Dalgaard warns correctly about the dangers of dwelling on hypertextual difference: any approach based on excess will
of course go too far. The analog experience of
digital culture is just Zeno's paradox in modern dress, and what do we gain by
this rehearsal? Unless we are careful, perhaps not much. Portraying the archive
simply as the oceanic limit to any continent of totalizing discourse risks the
sort of facile relativism that makes much postmodern thinking odious. Perhaps
in some sense hypertext operationalizes the
deconstruction of writing, but as Landow crucially
observed, we must now test this innovation not as theory, but as practical
implementation [16]. Whether we can describe it or not, semantic space is
regularly traversed, or opened for access, by a sizeable portion of humanity.
"The archive" may be an abstract term, but it proceeds from actual
structures such as HTTP, XML, and so forth.
The concept of a "universal without totality" [18] offers a
promising way to unify theory and practice in thinking about the archive. Lévy contends that postmodernism erred by discarding both
totality (claims to absolute truth) and universality (discourses or methods
available to all). This mistake led to the notoriously bad relationship between
postmodern theory and science, as demonstrated in the Social Text hoax [30]. To move beyond
postmodernism, Lévy suggests, we must rescue the
universal under the aspect of practice or know-how. Lévy
specifically cites the textual systems of the Internet -- the archive, either
in Dalgaard's sense or mine -- as a primary instance
of the universal without totality.
The contents of the World Wide Web, for example, cannot be constrained
by any singular dogma. Many countries legally forbid criticism of the ruling
party, yet such sentiments regularly appear on Web sites. Less happily, the
German prohibition of fascist symbolism does not keep extremists in other
countries from posting swastikas on their pages, and while those pages can be
partly suppressed within national boundaries, they cannot be completely
banished from the system. Censorship seems impossible on the Web, and if Dillon
is right about semantic space, we can no more summarize the Web than we could
the Spanish language (natural languages being another good illustration of
universal without totality).
At the same time, the absence of totality does not preclude
universality. If not in strict terms ubiquitous, the Web is at least highly
extensible. We could locate some place, group, or discourse not presently
connected, but there is nothing inherent to the technology that keeps us from
making a connection. Obstacles of politics and logistics, while no doubt
substantial, seem unlikely to last forever. Moreover, this extensibility
proceeds from protocols arrived at by international consensus, which are thus
assured both of broad technical support, and more important, of maximal access.
It is when we turn to this last feature -- access -- that we may begin to grasp
the importance of what we know as a community of technologists, and how we can
best apply our knowledge to practice.
4.
LITERACY IN
The archive is certainly not at odds with print culture in general, just
with its more extreme or bigoted varieties. In fact, we might still learn a few
things from a famous librarian. In 1941, Borges published a story called
"The Lottery in
Considered in historical context, this story probably has much to do
with 20th century physics, filtered through contemporary philosophy. "I
have known that which the Greeks do not know," the narrator declares,
"incertitude." He defines his momentary existence as the aggregate
resolution of multiple possibilities, or as we might also say, a cascading
collapse of state vectors. It is easy enough to read "Lottery in
Today, though, we might understand Borges' incertidumbre in a somewhat different sense: as
the main feature of an episteme founded on the universal without totality -- or
to put this more usefully, as a foundation for modern literacy. In place of
quantum uncertainty (and bearing no detailed technical resemblance), we have
the undefinable extent of semantic space that
surrounds any data presently at hand, always implying a way to move from
particular data presently at hand to other tokens or locations somewhere in the
network. The transition from local to remote is usually described as navigation, but that term, with its antique
sense of seafaring, seems less useful than Aarseth's ergodics or pathwork -- deliberate use of a system,
cybernetic or otherwise, to select one line of discursive development from a
range of alternatives [1]. The term applies as easily to programming,
simulations, and video games as it does to the Web, and thus seems to have
broad importance for the ways we currently communicate.
What would it mean to argue for a new definition of literacy founded on pathwork in the hypertextual
archive? At minimum, a move in this direction might counter various tendencies
we have criticized: ignoring digital systems altogether, relegating them only
to scholars, or assigning them to one side of the two-culture
boundary. We long ago passed the
point at which literacy could be ceded to print culture alone [15]. Scholars
now regularly invoke cultural literacy, visual literacy, media literacy, even
in one recent case, video game literacy [12]. In this postmodern soup of
divergent definitions, the concept of a general literacy of pathwork,
universal but not total, could significantly advance both understanding and
practice.
Constructing a new basis for literacy in the archive might permit us to
move beyond distinctions between production and reception (writing and reading,
in the old idiom) that seem increasingly inappropriate today. In terms of
hypertext research, it might encourage further development of a thread that
still seems somewhat neglected in our field: descriptive and ethnographic
studies of user populations, especially in contexts that include production as
well as reception (e.g., [28], [21]). As Dillon notes, present studies of usability
in electronic text tend to fragment across various theoretical approaches and
thus do not offer a "broad picture" [8]. If we think of the digital
archive not as a component of other tasks but as a primary site of textual
engagement, this unified view might begin to emerge. In our own recent
research, we have found Druin's concept of
intergenerational design partnership a particularly promising approach to this
problem [9].
Finally, putting forth hypertext as a basic foundation for literacy
would take our community into a domain where it has almost never gone before,
but where others have been preparing the ground for many years. I refer to
studies of education and pedagogy. While few in our field are specialists in
this area, the converse is not necessarily true. As Dalgaard
points out, the scholarly archive makes most academics very familiar with the
hypertext paradigm, if not with underlying theory or aspects of system design.
This was not true in the earlier days of our research, but times have changed.
Many notable figures in writing pedagogy and technical communication are well
acquainted with hypertext research [14] or are expanding the study of literacy
in ways that bear substantially on our concerns [27]. Closer integration of our
work with those of literacy educators, and especially with those who prepare
them, could make a crucial contribution to the greater problem of educational
reform.
If these suggestions seem impossibly utopian, remember that in Snow's
account of the two cultures, it was the scientists who seemed more responsible
to the world's pressing problems, and more optimistic about solutions. History
bore out Snow's assessment. As biologists and economists in the last century
met the challenge of feeding an exploding population, we might take up the work
of reinventing literacy for a world increasingly beset by ignorance. No doubt a
change in agenda by any particular group of academics will not in itself
correct the widespread misunderstanding of media, let alone combat vast global
threats like the rejection of modernity. Yet as all in this community know,
ideas that start here -- e.g., the World Wide Web -- have tended to exceed
initial expectations.
5.
REFERENCES
1. Aarseth, E., Cybertext:
Perspectives on Ergodic Literature.
2. Barber,
B., Fear's
Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy.
3.
Bernstein, M., Patterns
of hypertext, in Proceedings
of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia,
4. Bolter,
J. and R. Grusin., Remediation:
Understanding New Media,
5. Borges,
J.L., Ficciones,
6. Dalgaard, R., Hhypertext
and the scholarly archive: intertexts, paratexts, and metatexts at work, in Proceedings of the 12th
ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia,
7. Dillon,
A., C. McKnight, and J. Richardson, Space -- the final chapter or why physical
representations are not semantic intentions, in C. McKnight, A. Dillion, and C. Richardson (eds.), Hypertext: A
Psychological Perspective, pp. 169-91, Ellis Horwood,
1993.
8. Dillon,
A., Designing
Usable Electronic Text: Ergonomic Aspects of Human Information Usage, 2nd Edition,
9. Druin, A., The role of children in the design of new technology, Behaviour and
Information 21(1), pp.
1-25.
10. Enzensberger, H.M., Constituents of a
theory of the media, in N. Wardrip-Fruin and N. Montfort (eds), The New Media Reader, Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003.
11. Epstein,
J. Book
Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future,
12. Gee, J.,
What
video games have to teach us about learning and literacy,
13. Gioia, D. Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary
14. Johnson-Eilola, J., Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext
Writing,
15. Kress,
G. Literacy
in the New Media Age,
16. Landow, G., Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical
Theory and Technology,
17. Lessig, L., The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World,
18. Lévy, P., Cyberculture,
19. Liestøl, G., A. Morrison, and T. Rasmussen, Introduction,
in G. Liestøl, A. Morrison, and T. Rasmussen (eds.), Digital
Media Revisited,
20. Manovich, L., The Language of New Media,
21.
Marshall, C., Toward
an ecology of hypertext annotation, in Proceedings of the Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext
and Hypermedia,
23. Montfort, N.,
24. Moulthrop, S. The analog
experience of digital culture, in R. Koskimaa and M. Eskelinen (eds.), Cybertext
Yearbook 2000.
25. Nardi, B., D. Schiano,
M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz, Why we blog, Communications of the
ACM, December,
2004, pp. 41-45.
26. Rosenberg, J. The structure of hypertext activity, in Proceedings of the
Seventh ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia,
27. Selfe, C. and G. Hawisher,
Literate
Lives in the Information Age: Narratives on Literacy from the
28. Shipman,
F., R. Furuta, D. Brenner, C. Chung, H. Hsieh, Using
paths in the classroom: experiences and adaptations, in Proceedings of the
Ninth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia, Pittsburgh: ACM Press, 1998,
pp. 267-70.
29. Snow,
C.P., The
Two Cultures,
30. Sokal, A., A physicist experiments with cultural studies, Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, pp. 62-64.
31. United
States Department of Justice, Justice Department closes religious discrimination inquiry
at
32. Walker,
J. Links
and power: the political economy of linking on the Web, in Proceedings of the
Twelfth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia,
33. Wardrip-Fruin, N. What hypertext is, in Proceedings of the
Fifteenth ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia,
URL: http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/essays/whatTheGeeks.pdf