As We May Think Response

“The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades. He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article, leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item. When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own. Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to him.” I was amazed at how similar this sounds to Wikipedia, especially the part in which a person “inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own.” It is this network of information that the owner of memex has access to that is extremely similar to the internet and its capabilities. It appears Bush believes that the sharing of information through the memex is a community of users that build each others’ experiences when inputting personal analysis and information. This really does not feel too different from what we have now. Obviously Bush would not have perfectly predicted the aesthetics of current technology, but the general concept still exists. I like how he refers to these connections of information as “trails” in which data and sources can be “linked into the more general trail.”

Reading On Our Own Terms

The idea of hypertext that Stuart Moulthrop brings up in “You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media” was very interesting to me, especially after doing the Patchwork Girl lab. At first, I didn’t know what to do with Patchwork Girl, but as I got more involved in the story, I found that I wasn’t thinking where was this going, but instead, I was letting the story take me where it wanted. By knowing that my clicking was the only reason the story was progressing, I not only felt empowered, but also I was further engaged into the story.

Our active role in reading Patchwork Girl brings us back to Ted Nelson’s “grand hope [of our] return to literacy” (Moulthrop p. 3.) When reading hypertext we are not simply, as Barthes states in “S/Z”, “commercial[ly]…’throw[ing] away’ the story once it has been consumed” (p. 15,) but instead we are becoming closer to the text by reading it on our own terms and drawing “the text out of its internal chronology…[which] recaptures a mythic time (without before or after)” (p. 16.)

But it’s not just Patchwork Girl and hypertext fiction that recapture this sense of mythic time and a return to literacy where we are not just consumers but active and engaged participants, it’s any other collaborative or user driven text that engages us with the text. One example of this shift is this blog. I can read and comment on entries when and how I want to. I also know that whoever is reading and commenting on this post isn’t just reading it to then throw away, but is (hopefully) as engaged in their reading as I am in my writing, thus linking us by Nelson’s “new Renaissance of ideas” (Moulthrop p. 3.)

As We May Think and Ted Nelson. Future Technologies

I found Monica’s post (below) to be interesting and it struck a chord with me. I would like to expand upon her thoughts and add some questions of my own. In Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think,” I found it interesting how many (if not all) of the technologies that he spoke of, we have acquired. As I read the article, I was struck by how primitive I thought many of his imagined technologies are. For example, the entire description of the “great department store” was astonishing to me. It seemed like such a complicated process that people had to go through before the digital age. Now, it never even crosses my mind all of the things that happen when I swipe my card at the department store.

Since all of Bush’s imagined technologies are so commonplace, it truly makes me wonder, what will our civilization acquire in the next fifty years? Monica included a quote from Bush explaining how scientists will never be satisfied, and she brought up the question, will we ever produce the ultimate machine? As science progresses, will we ever create the “perfect” machine? I think that reading Bush’s piece from a modern-day perspective helps to answer these questions.

Many of our technological imaginations today-such as nanotechnology, space tourism, artificial intelligence, alternatively powered cars and alternative energy- may very well be commonplace fifty years in the future. If our society progresses as it has since World War II, around the time that Bush wrote this article, I would not be surprised if all of these technologies were cheap and readily available. I found it very interesting to read this article along with Ted Nelson’s due to the fact that it shows the vast majority of visions of what we know today as the World Wide Web. Nelson brings a much more complicated and more thought-out vision of storage possibility than Bush does. His idea for an ELF seems much more similar to our computing systems than Bush’s does. Today, we have many ideas and visions of futuristic technology. Of all of our visions, what will be the next new media or technology? Will it be, as Monica suggests, the “perfect machine?” Or can we not replicate the human brain (per artificial intelligence)?

The contradiction of erasure in the internet

I was particularly interested in the relationship between new media and the concept of "erasure" that is addressed in Cornelia Vismann's "Out of File, Out of mind." With the widespread use of computer systems to store information, which have the ability to copy and backup data, it would seem to be the case that information is safer than it has ever been. Burning down a library might once have caused certain texts to be irretrievably lost. However, destroying information in the age of the internet is a much more difficult task. Gchat conversations that a few years ago might have taken place over the phone are now permanently stored in google's data base. The glance over at a classmate that would have gone unnoticed is now saved in facebook's database of profiles you visited.

But there is also a lack of permanence in the information that we view on the internet. An article that we read in the New York Times might revised, with no indication that a change had taken place. There is no public record of the earlier version of the article as there would have been if it were printed on paper. Thus some element of the story is erased through its revision.

The internet has seemingly endless potential for data storage and preservation, but the dynamic nature of digital information presents new forms of erasure and deletion.

As We May Think... We Create

"The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it” (pg 2). Since “As We May Think” was published 65 years ago, it is fascinating to consider that some of the things Bush imagined would be revolutionary have occurred and are now taken for granted (for example, we now enjoy the ability to take digital photographs.) The piece put into perspective how privileged of a world/society I live in.

This ubiquity of new technology is what Bush calls compression – a process that works to make things easier. The first thing that leapt to mind was how this would also affect the compression of time. When younger, I remember learning about history in eras – the era of the steam engine, the era of the automobile, and more recently, the era of the computer. However, as technology improves at a more rapid pace, the amount of time before the next “revolutionary” technology is introduced becomes smaller. Nowadays it seems that we are living in mini-eras (say the era of the iPod and the iPhone) and with so much technology at our disposal, it is hard to pick THE one that defines our generation.

Finally, there was this quote that struck a chord: "But even this new machine will not take the scientist where he needs to go” (pg 5). It brings up this idea that no matter how much technology we create, and how much we simplify our lives, we are never satisfied. What then is the ultimate machine? Can we actually ever produce the perfect machine or does it already exist (i.e. the human brain)?

Undermining Expectation

My experience in reading Patchwork Girl was difficult to separate from the expectations and preconceptions of hypertext that I developed during my reading of “STITCH BITCH.” I was especially aware of the experience in terms of linearity, since rigid linearity was one of the qualities of traditional narrative that Jackson renounced in her article. Initially, I found the departure from linear progression extremely unnerving as I made my way through Patchwork Girl, and I found it difficult to free myself from worrying about “missing” something or somehow moving through the text boxes in the “wrong” way. It was difficult to resist the impulse to glance at other people’s computer screens to check if they’d found something that had somehow eluded me.

After reading for a while, however, I found myself really engaged in the narrative and I began to appreciate the control I was given over my own experience with the text and to pay more attention to the spatial arrangement of the links on the screen. Many portions of the piece actually could be navigated somewhat linearly, by pressing the forward button on the navigator to reach the “next” text box but, just as this became too predictable, I noticed that the program was looping me back over texts I’d already read, imbuing them with new meaning each time. In an interesting way, this exposed the role of context in my interpretations of those texts, and it drew my attention onto my own expectations and the way that I was reading. It completely undermined the standard code of reference in literature, since words that had referenced one person or idea on the first reading came to represent totally different things upon the second or third. This would have been very difficult to achieve in a conventional linear narrative, and it revealed some of the enhanced capabilities of hypertext as a medium to play with the reader’s expectations in a very appealing way.

Adaptivity of Hypertext

The idea of hypertext contains a cozy idea of how one may use it just as one wishes, and draw out of it just what one desires. The multiplicity of paths in hypertext plays with your desires like the old Goosebumps books where you could make your own choices. But the true possibility in hypertext is not just a few "alternate endings". Rather, it is the ability for a hypertext to adapt to your choices in addition to just fulfilling them. To understand this idea, think about Google search. It always begins in the same place: the search bar. From there, one can search for Web, Pictures, Videos, Shopping etc. Following the path that the user desires, by surfing from link to link, the user can eventually find what they want. Similarly, in a hypertext the reader can follow from the many paths available. He/she is following a hierarchical structure and draws from a body of knowledge, just as the web surfer.

However, this idea alone is not intriguing. Furthermore, Google does not make money by providing links alone. It is the adaptivity of Google that makes it powerful. Every search made is saved. After looking for a new plasma TV, you can be sure that all advertisements appearing on the side will be for consumer electronics for time to come. If hypertext can employ a similar tactic, tracking and understanding the choices made by the reader, codes can be used to further customize the hypertext experience. Through new codes that not only allow diversity but ensure it, the hypertext can approach the idea of "writerly text". As the user experiences the hypertext, the hypertext is changing and morphing into what the user imagines. In this way, the internet is already manifesting the possibilities of hypertext. But the areas in which this has not been tapped into are copious.

DO NOT DELETE

Cornelia Vismann, in her essay “Out of File, Out of Mind,” discusses the status of erasures in digital data storage, marking a shift where the act of script cancellation was itself canceled and the desire for total documentation became an obsession in digital data collecting and archiving. Thus, the archive was situated as “borderline-institutions of the imaginary,” where the ability and desire to preserve was perhaps fueled by the fear of the destruction of 'important' files or files that would one day be useful, for what electronic data deletion brings the threat of is information that is “irretrievably lost”. This desire to preserve provided the archive as an imagined means of a complete, ful and perfected memory.

Yet, as much as one might fear the deletion of one’s iTunes library or digital photo albums, Vismann posits a hope in deletion, a “prerequisite for salvation,” offering an escape from what might be seen as a an debilitating, perpetual need to archive. Vismann writes:

“Deliverance means – in a bureaucratic as well as in a religious context – forgetting or deleting what has been recorded in the files or accordingly in the book of life. In other and more profane words: out of file, out of the world contains a promise of salvation, however unfullfilable it will be in the end” (104).

In section, I would like to explore the potential of digital “wastepaper,” whose expulsion fails to facilitate language within the symbolic (Vismann 100). What potential can be found in the "void of the symbolic order"? It would seem that Vismann is parallelling the saving power of file deletion to the dreams that would characterize the very possibilities of archiving, highlighting the tension or "void" between the two. For what is important to the status of the files marked as wastepaper is its relation to the archive. If the archive can be thought of as alluding to a promise (the storage of data for a future unknown moment of necessity), then in what ways does the deletion complicate these promises? How can we think of the archive as not only freezing time in many ways, but also as always pointing to a future that will perhaps never come and how can we then make sense of Vismann's hope of a salvation through the potentiality of deletion?

Monica

Hypertexts are a growing part of the way that we interact with the internet, and with people around us. My original introduction to the concept of a hypertext – was not with this course – but with a hypertextual adaptation of The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. The text was set up in the hypertext so that it could be read both as a traditional linear text, and also in a reordered and restructured manner – that was more conducive to understanding the text as a whole – as opposed to the way that it is presented normally. However, this is a vast understatement of the power of a hypertext to change the way that we look at things. Because of its inherent non-linearity, the hypertext forces us to look at things in a new way – it forces us to make us think of things outside of our regular linear thought processes. The Stitch Bitch hypertext is a key example of one of the ways that the hypertext changes the way that we interact with new ideas and new material. Everyone’s experience with the hypertext was the same – but different. Although we all had access to the exact same physical construct – it was influenced by the paths that we chose through the information and the way that the order of our experiences colored the way that we experienced the text. Hypertexts are an interesting way to look at new media – in that they challenge what we have as preconceived ideas of both text and dynamism.

The challenge that I see with attempting to create hypertexts or to think critically about their contents – is that we will force them into a linear scheme that better approximates the way we think – as opposed to leaving them in their networked and more complex form.

RR #1

Borges' “On Exactitude in Science,” alluded to by Beaudrillard, illustrates the apparent futility of striving for accuracy in its account of a map indistinguishable from the empire it depicted. Cartography is a field that, like other disciplines, has evolved throughout time, including in accuracy. Presently, the most comprehensive, representationally accurate map most of us have access to is Google Earth, which allows us to visualize the earth using photographic satellite images. Other options such as “map” and “terrain” inform us about the planet using their own systems of organizing information.

As we progress in our ability to produce accurate maps (maps that are representative of how we perceive the world) what we are doing is accumulating, arranging, and storing increasing amounts of information. In order to avoid containing outdated information, the map would be constantly changing at the rate of which information could be acquired and applied, a monumental task dependent upon the kind of interdisciplinary, interpersonal cooperation and sharing of ideas glorified by Bush in the aftermath of World War II. Ultimately, however, it would not just be enough to collect data; in order to reproduce changes in the map as quickly as possible, it would be necessary to somehow try to predict what changes would need to happen. Prediction is one of the uses we have for models. Paradoxically, then, is the most accurate map of the world is also the best at predicting its future, and thus the type of model accurate enough to ensure its own existence?

Another thing Bush comments on is how overwhelming it is to pore through the vast amounts of peer research available to scientists. At a certain point before it is even close to being done, the vast amount of data housed within the map itself would exceed the capacity of the human mind to gather and analyze it. We lack the cognitive ability, for instance, to both visually perceive large groups of objects and assign them a cardinal number without counting, a process which is at times unfeasible or impossible. This would appear reaffirm Borges' idea that pursuit of accuracy is useless. It is possible, however, that our capacity to process information is greater than we think, as is suggested in the cases of savants who far exceed normal mental processing power in certain areas such as numerosity and memory. The phenomenon is still a mystery that continues to be studied, including at the genetic level with the development of that field. DNA, the substance that comprises genes, is often alluded to as a sort of language, blue print, or code of life. If we can read DNA, the next reasonable step is to write with it. The field of synthetic biology deals with “programming” DNA, designing and creating new genetic and living material for specific purposes using the instructions and rules contained within them. Right now the field is incredibly new, and it is difficult to comment on the kind of role this new programming language could potentially play in the future of information archiving and retrieval, let alone all other areas of impact. It is interesting however to note that J. Craig Venter, who founded one of the earliest organizations devoted to research into synthetic biology and its applications, was interviewed at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2007. Perhaps this field truly will influence technology such as the internet; it is also possible that synthetic biology could look to the computer industry and the internet as models for development.

Hypertext, Barthes, Memory

After reading Shelly Jackson's "Stitch Bitch" and her description of hypertext, I was left wondering how Barthes would respond to hypertext given the values of readerly and writerly. On the one hand, hypertext is read and consumed like any other text (readerly). But on the other hand, the introduction of choice allows the reader to play more than a passive role: the reader selects links as s/he progresses through the text, creating an original text through the link selection. A linear text is predetermined but "Hypertext doesn't know where it's going" (Jackson). The act of reading becomes a mode of production (writerly). However, the reading-product of hypertext does not exist externally to the reader (e.g. a book), but internally as a product of memory.

I was especially aware of the place of memory during the Patchwork Girl lab tonight. As I was clicking through the links and exploring all the boxes, I noted that the Patchwork Girl I was constructing could not be easily shared with another as the sequence of text and images existed only in my memory as a blurred recollection. If my moves has been recorded and a history collected, I could have replayed the text as I experienced it, but at that point it would cease to be a hypertext and merely a linear text produced from one.

The Memex functions in this way: first an experience of free association and then a recorded linear experience that can be replayed at will. Drawing on a present day example, web browsers also have this feature, allowing the user to freely move about the Web but recording each move as part of a linear history. This recording allows users to "pleasurably forget" where they have been as this burden is passed on to the machine.

By contrast, the experience of Patchwork Girl is not a pleasurable forgetting: it is an anxious forgetting. With no recorded history, the user is disoriented. S/he is not sure where s/he has been or if s/he has been here before.

Introducing the word "hypertext"

I am interested in discussing readings of "Patwork Girl" by everyone in section. My experience with "Patchwork Girl" was one of the first times I realized the dynamic of a project that exists purely in HTML. It is important to see the genealogy of hypertext returning to the theoretical roots of this term as introduced by Nelson in "The File Structure for the Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate." Nelson states,

Let me introduce the word "hypertext" to mean a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper. It may contain summaries, or maps of its contents and their interrelations: it may contain annotations, additions and footnotes from scholars who have examined it. Let me suggest that such a nobject and system, properly designed and administered, could have great potential for education, increasingthe student's range of choices, his sense of freedom, his motivation, and his intellectual grasp. Such a system could grow indefinitely, gradually including more and more of the world;'s written knowledge.

(Nelson, 96).

It is surprising to see how foundational this text is for the modern architecture of the internet. It is also amazing to look beyond the form of the World Wide Web and consider coding languages as medium onto themselves. I am interested in what people have to say in regards to this and "Patchwork Girl." In addition, I wonder if others enjoyed the exaggerated if not hyper-intertextuality of especially in the "quilt" portion of the text.

I found Nelson's discussion of the nature of writing very intriguing, especially noting the time that has passed since its publication, and its ideological and chronological similarities with Poststructuralism. Nelson posits a written text as something in which meaning "gradually takes place" (87) and subverts the notion of the author as a central authority of the text by changing his position to "one of rearrangement and reprocessing" (87), merely two years before Roland Barthes would proclaim the "death" of the author.

Furthermore, Nelson's discussion of the supposed origin of a written text, the outline, seems to display the theme of mimetic reversal pertinent to deconstructionist thought. That what was supposed to produce the writing, the outline, is created "after the fact" is provocative.

Repetition and Meaning

As Professor Chun mentioned in class, Bush seems to imply that repetition is the mark of knowledge and that through repetition knowledge is disseminated. Thus repetition is central to creative thought and not outside of it. Professor Chun noted that through the repetition of signs, for example, we have language.

Yet, isn’t it through repetition that meaning is lost as well? Like a game of telephone where one person starts with one idea and by the end of the chain of repetitions the idea has transformed into an entirely different sentiment that is now unrecognizable? Even in language itself, we tend to reuse words or phrases so often that they begin to lose their meaning. Take for instance the word “love.” This word has been repeated so much so that it has become a cliché; its meaning is rooted in a tradition. Through the reproduction of the phrase “I love you” in movies, novels, and popular culture, the word “love” has begun to lose much of its sustenance and power. Is this evidence of the death of creative thought through repetition? I see the logic in Baudrillard’s argument when he claims that reality no longer exists. People are nostalgic for primitive meaning, before repetition and recycling destroyed language’s significance.

The privilege of forgetting, then, is not really a privilege at all in the mind of Baudrillard, and I tend to agree. Instead, isn’t the real privilege the privilege of association, which Bush seems to allude to earlier on in her piece? That words can take on new meanings and that language can grow strikes me as more of a privilege that that of forgetting.

Hypertext Blog Post

In the selection from S/Z we read, Barthes describes the way in which we read a text according to five voices in order to navigate the the lexia, or units of reading, of any given text in order to achieve a step-by-step, "gradual analysis of a single text" (12) which "avoids structuring the text excessively" (13). In this way, I understand Barthes to be generating a mechanism for analyzing the structure of any text, which should be universally applicable. Each voice is commensurate with a certain kind of code, the five of which Barthes gives us form the categories to which any textual signifier may belong.

I am interested in the way in which he uses the word "code here not in the sense of a list, a paradigm that must be reconstituted. The code is a perspective of quotations, a mirage of structures…the code is the wake of that already [-written]" (20). How can we understand this use of code? He goes on to describe the code as "one of the forces that can take over the text…, one of the voices out of which the text is woven" (21).

Are these codes structures? Probably not, as Barthes does not want to cement meaning in the same way that a code-as-rule/principle might. How then can we understand them? And how might a textual analysis be complicated when using Barthes' schema in relation to hypertext as foundational of the perceived textual object?

Blog posting #1

When I first read Vannevar Bush’s paper, As We May Think, the first thing I noticed was that it was written in 1945, 65 years ago. In his paper, he described technological and scientific advances at the time, making sure to pepper the pages with questions about the future. What is interesting about these inquiries is that, for the most part, many of them have been fulfilled to some degree. Bush’s depiction of the future of photography has come true and in a sense, there is potential for a memex in the making. I wonder if Bush, himself, foresaw all of this. It wouldn’t be surprising to find out that, indeed, Bush was writing this in preparation of the technological advances that would simplify and assist the human race.

Perhaps, even, it wasn’t technology that inspired Bush to write his paper, but Bush that inspired technology to grow in such a way that came to match Bush’s expectations and predictions. There is a sociological phenomenon called the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ in which a prediction directly or indirectly causes itself to come true. Perhaps Bush and his memex is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the future. Being such an influential man as he is, it wouldn’t be surprising if this were the case.

One other thing I would like to bring up is the paradox of the purpose for files. As said in class by Professor Chun, files have not only become a way to organize our life, but also a way to forget it. Since files are omnipresent, and if there is such a library like Bush’s memex, then perhaps, in the near future, there may not be a need to remember. We may simply have to tap a few buttons and our week’s agenda, our month’s agenda, maybe even our life’s agenda would pop up. Of course, this is the stuff of science fiction, but sci-fi is oftentimes social commentary, so this thought cannot be ignored.

Assignment #1

While going through the readings I came to a screeching halt on the first section of Shelley Jackson’s Stich Bitch. I had to read it several times before and after the main text to get anything meaningfull out of it. It continues to intrigue me and I hope we can discuss it in section to see how other’s reacted to it. (this is the part of the text in question below)

“It has come to my attention that a young woman claiming to be the author of my being has been making appearances under the name of Shelley Jackson. It seems you have even invited her to speak tonight, under the misapprehension that she exists, that she is something besides a parasite, a sort of engorged and loathsome tick hanging off my side. May I say that I find this an extraordinary impertinence, and that if she would like to come forward, we shall soon see who is the author of whom.
Well? Well?
Very well.
I expect there are some of you who still think I am Shelley Jackson, author of a hypertext about an imaginary monster, the patchwork girl Mary Shelley made after her first-born ran amok. No, I am the monster herself, and it is Shelley Jackson who is imaginary, or so it would appear, since she always vanishes when I turn up. You can call me Shelley Shelley if you like, daughter of Mary Shelley, author of the following, entitled: Stitch Bitch: or, Shelley Jackson, that imposter, I'm going to get her.
I have pilfered her notes, you see, and I don't mind reading them, but I have shuffled the pages. I expect what comes of it will be more to my liking, might even sound like something I would say. Whoever Shelley Jackson may be, if she wants me to mouth her words, she can expect them to come out a little changed. I'm not who she says I am.”
--Shelley Jackson, Stich Bitch

When I first read this, and still now, I ask myself, “what is she trying to say?”Who Is Shelley Jackson? The Body or the Monster? Real or imaginary? Which is the subject and which is the reference. Is the Shelley Jackson the imposter, the ‘banished body”, the “magical body” that has actually turned on her and begun to speak, to accuse? Or is that Shelley Shelley, the body bag, treasure trove, telling stories she has never told? Is Shelley Jackson the linear one, and Shelley Shelley the tangental shuffler of notes? What is the Monster? Is it the Shelley that was born in hypertext, in cyperspace, through fiction? Or is that Shelley, birthed in hypertext, actually the banished body as she postulates later in the text? Just when I think I have it all worked out in my mind I read on and find that what I thought was the subject was in fact the reference. But maybe that is the point, that hypertext has made everything both a subject and a reference in a loop that can be endlessly traveled, the schizophrenia of hypertext that Jackson discusses later on. But is this all she is trying to say here or is there more? What is she trying to say about herself, the mind and body, hypertext, about anything? What does this prelude mean?

Blog for section on 2/10/10

Nelson's "A File Structure for The Complex, The Changing and the Indeterminate" presents a file storage system, called the ELF, that self-labels and organizes files. In doing so without human ambition or guidance, the ELF changes the role of the individual. No longer would we be needed to interact with material in order to understand it.

Unique thoughts and beliefs differentiate one person from another. These different opinions help make the world of education an exciting place to learn new topics as well as come to understand others' perspectives.If the ELF makes it possible to "incorporate, in a body of information filed in the ELF, various levels of index, summary, explanation, and commentary," will we still need to process any information on our own? Will we have different viewpoints than the next person in class if broad concepts and associations are made for us? How would the role of discussion-based classes change, and how could they stay the same?

Blog Post #1

Before I go into any of the readings, I wanted to discuss a thought that occurred to me during lecture on the topic of archiving. We discussed the internet archive as a manner by which web pages and the information they contain enter a realm of the "undead," in which they are preserved but not pushed to the forefront, accessible but easily avoidable; an archiving system allows us to forget facts because we know that, should we wish to remember them, the information contained in the archive can be easily consulted. And yet, I think that inherent to the idea of an archive is the capacity for permanent loss. A system of determining the value of the respective ideas or objects to be archived must be used to decide what becomes part of the archive and what is left out, unless the archive is so advanced as to possess the potential to contain everything. Even in this case, it would seem to me that a loss is needed to spur the creation of an archive. Something must have been created before the archive, since the archive relies on the existence of other objects to have a purpose; an archive without anything to archive is superfluous. But in the time between the creation of the first object and the creation of the archive of which the object will be a part, something is lost. One of the first objects may itself be lost, or, at least, the independence of the object is lost. It becomes a simulation of itself when placed into the archive - the real can no longer be separated from its archived form, the object in use inseparable from the object as history.

Switching focus, I now want to touch on the Moulthrop text and its discussion of the relation between hypertext and literacy. He mentions the possibility that when taken to the extreme, hypertext will bring about the end of the death of literacy. He separates primary and secondary literacy, placing focus on the unique knowledge of formatting and/or coding, the hypotextual, as the secondary literacy needed in the sphere of the hypertextual. With the abundance of textual information and the interactivity allowed by hypertext, Moulthrop seems to think that such factors promote a person's engagement and literacy in this online world; culture in a hypertextual world is not only the product of the author, but of the everyman. I, however, am wary of the deterioration of traditional notions of literacy that could result from an over-reliance on hypertext. As seen with websites such as Wikipedia, the mutability of hypertext can lead to the proliferation of fallacies and oversimplifications. Children growing up in a hypertextual world may be more literate than their parents in the secondary sense Moulthrop discusses, but to equate (or even promote) secondary literacy with primary literacy strikes me as misguided. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that one can satisfactorily interact with a text by simply thinking about it rather than transforming its essence. Paperbacks, to me, are greater than Kindle. No matter how ironic it may seem to profess such a belief through a hypertextual medium like a blog, it's something I believe.

Assignment 1: Wikipedia in 3D?

As I read Bush's paper "As We May Think", I couldn't help but notice how similar his ideas were to the modern internet. In particular, I think his memex concept was essentially what Wikipedia is to us today: a giant encyclopedia, with articles linked to each other in useful places, marked and edited as it is used. This wouldn't have been such an achievement if he hadn't written it in 1945, when most people had never even seen a computer before. Imagine conceiving a world-changing, future medium a half-century before its creation. We can make our own predictions now about what new media will be used in the future, but given the rise to normalcy of such original methods of communication as the Facebook and Twitter, it seems almost in vain. If anyone had described the Twitter protocol to me 10 years ago (heck, even 2 years ago), I wouldn't have bothered to listen. It's too obscure a concept. It doesn't follow the same logic as the communication I'm used to.

Bush describes the contemporary method of research requiring multi-level searches followed by entirely new multi-level searches. He notes that the mind doesn't work like that. Instead, "with one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the
brain." This instantly returned my thoughts to Wikipedia, the internet's dangerously conveniently linked hurricane of articles. Here a user enters at "Napoleon Bonaparte" and lands 3 clicks later at "Gossip Girl" (try it). Overlooking the new problems for the easily-distracted, there's no doubt that this method of linking is progressive to research. How did Bush realize such a revolutionary system so long before it was possible?

Nelson builds on this concept 20 years later with his paper "A File Structure for The Complex". By this point, computers are a relatively commonplace concept, even though they are not yet a layman's tool. Nelson has an understanding of computers and their inevitable fate of commonplaceness, so for him to recognize Bush's idea as realistic is not as impressive. However, he builds on it in a very scientific way (Bush's paper is more conceptual). Nelson lays the foundation of the very HTML that would change the world--he even uses the same word: hypertext.

I found both of these papers to be a revealing look into the past. But I was also intrigued by the possibility that new concepts have true potential. It seems every week there's a new human interface proposed, but they're all so different from what we're used to that I don't bother to give any of them honest credit. Considering the leap from bound encyclopedias to the internet, I'm interested in what new forms of information sharing we'll have to adapt to in the future. Or perhaps, if Bush gets his way, new technologies will be such that they adapt to us.