On Hypertext

-Hypertext (and its media specificity and its potential for vuser interaction) was birthed from itself: we, as vusers, are able to think in a free-associative, connection-making way that hypertext both requires of us and allows us because of our exposure to and interaction with technology: our access to hypertext is both digitally born and bred.

-Self-reflexiveness: Why is electronic literature traditionally self-reflexive? Books do not always reference the page, television does not necessarily reference the screen. Is it because the form is so new in comparison? Will this tradition change? Or is it because there is such an emphasis on form (coding and interface) that it cannot be separated from content?

-Hypertext is a perfect illustration of the notion of the death of the author: once completed (if ever completable), the author turns over his/her work to the vusers. Their exploration changes depending on each person, their own way and order of accessing a piece. Hypertext lends itself to this theory more than any analog text could, rivaled only possibly by the 'Choose your own adventure' stories of childhood.

-Breeding geniuses: Humans evolved tremendously with the advent of handtools in prehistoric times. What will the incorporation of technology yield? A species of geniuses? A truly universal language?

-Patchwork Girl: Self-reference - different parts from diverse sources of anatomy sewn (linked) together - the needle and thread is analogous to the coding generated by Storyspace, which, in turn, is analogous to our DNA. Jackson's piece also brings up the relationship between body and machine, humans and creation.

Moultrhop and Hyptertext Culture

Stuart Moulthrop in “You Say You Want a Revolution?” makes me think of hypertext in ways that I find truly interesting. More specifically, the most intriguing portion of the text was the one that addressed the question, “What does hyptertext displace or render obsolete?” In short, his answer is that hypertext signifies the end of the death of literature. He explains that the “development of hypertext systems implies a revival of typographic culture (albeit it in a dynamic, truly paperless environment.)”

While I agree that it does indeed imply the creation of a digital typographic culture, I don’t understand or agree with the argument that literature was on its deathbed before hypertext. Moulthrop explains that the “death of literature” refers to the end of the “cultural dominance of print” and that common culture today regrettably comes “largely from television.” For me, that does not describe the end of literature. It sounds more like a description of the decay of culture.

In the rest of this section, Moulthrop goes on to imagine the future of hypertext culture. He describes hypermedia as “interactive multimedia ‘texts’ that incorporate voice, music, animated graphics, and video along with alphabetic script.” I found this concept particularly intriguing because I don’t think this exists yet. This makes me think of a future where it’s possible to watch a movie on my computer and I can click on different parts of any given scene. A click on a shirt could take me to a website that sells that particular item. A click might even take me to a previous scene that a character just alluded to. In other words, it makes me envision a new media that is truly interconnected, pervasive, and limitless.

Cyberspace: a Cartesian territory?

Moulthrop starts his paper with an optimistic analyzation of hypertext. In his envision, with the power of techniques, hypertext allows users to “explore and construct links,” instead of “passively rehearsing or receiving discourse.” (6, Moulthrop)

Moulthrop brings the voice of the skeptic into notice later. “A revival of literacy?” “Not in a million years.” We too often don’t know the technologies we ourselves invented and become controlled by the Frankenstein of our own creation. The enslavement of modern people to mass media is a good example and a prophecy. “Radio, for instance, begins in interactive orality (two-way transceiving) but decays into the hegemony of commercial broadcasting, where "talk radio" lingers as a reminder of how open the airwaves are not. Television too starts by shattering the rigid hierarchies of the Gutenberg nation-state, promising to bring anyplace into our living rooms; but its version of Global Village turns out to be homogenous and hegemonic, a planetary empire of signs.” (Moulthrop, 12)

Levi actually made this prophecy in his Multimedia: “Interactive multimedia must inevitably decay to its lowest common denominator, ‘hyper-MTV”. Moulthrop analyzes that “According to this analysis, the linear and objectifying tendencies of any print content in a multimedium text would be overwhelmed by the subjective, irrational, and emotive influence of audio/ video. This being the case, hypertext could hardly claim to represent "a cure for television stupor." (Moulthrop, 9)

According to what the worldwide web illustrates now, however, the ultimate homogeneity of the content of hypertext is rooted in its very nature of “connection, linkage, and affiliation” (Moulthrop, 6), rather than the possible audio/video domination of hypertext. The convenience brought by the instant external linkage comes side by side with the homogenized source of information. The “new politics of knowledge and expression” must come side by side with the pervasive influence of public opinion on individual thinking. The “information franchise” (Moulthrop, 12) will not necessarily change the people from passive recipients of information into active participants; this “digital revolution” (Moulthrop) might end with the control of those who are in possess of the power of discourse. As Gibson describes in Neuromancer, cyberspace is a “consensual infosphere (Moulthrop, 13)”. “ ‘They control the vertical, ‘they’ control the horizontal (Moulthrop, 13)”, yet we have no idea who “they” are. “Cyberspace as Gibson and others define it is a Cartesian territory where scientists of control define boundaries and power lines.” We are subject to “social reality” without being conscious of it, and that is a more dangerous kind of hyperreal.

It seems that Nelson’s ambition that Xanadu transcends hyperreal is not easy to be realized after all.

At the end of his paper, Moulthrop proposes a question:

“Well, you know…
we all want to change your head.

The question remains: which heads do the changing, and which get the change?”

hypertext and reality

As I read through Patchwork Girl, I couldn't help but think about the way hypertext (this one in particular) allows readers/users to craft their own reality. Sure, they don't necessarily have the chance to directly alter the narrative, but the means by which they controlled the progression of the non-linear story was intriguing. Essentially, it allowed the readers to piece things together as they pleased, making the story much more interactive than a traditional text narrative. It may have started off as a wholly confusing and disorienting experience, but eventually it developed into one that was deep and rewarding.

Furthermore, as I read the hypertext, I was constantly reminded of Christopher Nolan's film Memento. The connection was drawn in my mind for several reasons. First of all, I've seen the movie more than half a dozen times and find ways to make it relevant in almost any discussion. Additionally, the way the nonlinear narrative of both pieces initially frustrated readers/viewers but progressed to become logical, rewarding, and key to the interpretation of the work caught my attention. Finally, I had already been thinking about how Memento fits in with our prior readings and our screening of the Matrix because of its depiction of the real. Memento's conflict with what is real and what is not stems from human error, memory and desire rather than some computer program or AI. I won't ruin the film for those of you who haven't seen it but I will recommend watching it and thinking about how it fits in with what we've read and watched thus far in class (and just enjoying it as a great movie).

The question of truth and authorship in the face of wikipedia and hypertext

While reading, “You Say You Want A Revolution?”, the question of hypertext as a tool of liberation struck my interest, less out of what it means for the laws of media, but what it means for the complicated question of authorship.

As Moulthrop wrote, “Hyperreality privileges no discourse as absolute or definitive; critique becomes just another form of paralogy, a countermove in the language game that is techno-social construction of reality. The game is all- encompassing, and therein lies a problem.” I see a distinct parallel between this statement and that of Foucault in What is an Author?, when he wrote “Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence. The work, which once had the duty of providing immortality, now possesses the right to kill, to be its author's murderer, as in the cases of Flaubert, Proust, and Kafka. That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.”

In short, Foucault argues that once a text is written, the will of its author no longer matters, as he has been superseded by his creation. As Barthes puts it in the conclusion of The Death of The Author, “the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.”

To return to Moulthrop, “We are far more likely to hear technology described as an instrumentality of change or a tool for liberation. Bolter (1991), Drexler (1987), McCorduck (1985), and Zuboff (1988) all contend that postmodern mode of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies and promote broader definitions of authority in the informational workplace.”

With the creation of hypertext, this death of the author does not occur. The hyperreal text is not an immutable entity that stands apart from its creator’s intention, but as with the example of Wikipedia, a democratic confluence in which the line between writer and reader is blurred: anyone may add their own content and voice to an always editable page. Whereas before, a text’s meaning was separate from its author’s intent and was left to each reader’s interpretation, the meaning of every topic is subject only to the number of people/ users/ readers/editors/authors one can get to agree with them.

As Moulthrop writes, “With Xanadu, Nelson invalidates technological abjection, advancing an unabashedly millenarian vision of technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free. In its extensive ambitions Xanadu transcends the hyperreal. It is not an opium vision but something stranger still, a business plan for the development of what Barthes called "the “social” space of writing" (81), a practical attempt to reconfigure literate culture. Xanadu is the most ambitious project ever proposed for hypertext or "non-sequential writing" (_Dream Machines_ 29; _Literary Machines_ 5/2)… Because it is no longer book-bounded, hypertextual discourse may be modified at will as reader/writers forge new links within and among documents. Potentially this collectivity of linked text, which Nelson calls the "docuverse," can expand without limit.”

To continue with the discussion of Wikipedia, the idea of truth has never been more of a simulation, if only because the information read on the site is based only what the most people agree on and its community of users write for themselves. There is no voice of the individual, god-like author nor of the text and no real from which it derives, there is only the “society” of author-readers and the mark they choose to leave.

Why I'd Marry Patchwork Girl

While reading Moulthrop's You Say You Want A Revolution? Hypertext and the Laws of Media, I was struck by how fitting Moulthrop's language is to describe Patchwork Girl.

    "Hyperreality, we are told, is a site of collapse
   or implosion where referential or "grounded" utterance
   becomes indistinguishable from the self-referential and the
   imaginary.  We construct our representational systems not in
   serial relation to indisputably "real" phenomena, but rather
   in recursive and multiple parallel, "mapping on to different
   co-ordinate systems" (Pynchon 159)."

Challenging the dominant narratives of society is a concept that underscores Pathwork Girl and- more generally- Hypertext. The 'indisputably "real" phenomena' are only real if we accept them as such; Patchwork Girl's very essence is recursive, and indeed it stands in stark contrast to what is commonly accepted as a textual representation of life. If we accept Patchwork Girl as a 'real' text, then classic textual representations reduce to simple, one dimensional works that could just as easily be labeled 'unreal.'

In challenging dominant narratives of society, Patchwork Girl (and Hypertext) challenge the very people who create these narratives: the scientists, social scientists, and humanists. Moulthrop writes:

    "the hypertext concept in general challenge humanists and
   information scientists to reconsider fundamental assumptions
   about the social space of writing."

Vannevar Bush's As We May Think does just that; it's a call to scientists to reorient their work around opening up the massive stores of information at our fingertips today. If not the end to the means; The Internet undoubtedly serves as a means to that end, whereby every single person would have the beautiful but dangerous capability of unlimited access.

Roland Barth

Of all the readings, Roland Barthe's caught my attention because I was able to see most clearly how it relates to the real world. In the same vein of Tom Friedman "The World is Flat", the internet has become the great equalizer. It has allowed people with only a laptop to make a profound impact globally. Barthes sums this up nicely, writing "Bolter, Drexler, McCorduck, and Zuboff all contend that postmodern mode of communication (electronic writing, computer networks, text-linking systems) can destabilize social hierarchies." Like Professor Chun said in lecture, the internet is a massive force unable to be regulated by traditional higher-ups such as the government or big business.
Barthes continues revering the new power of the internet, writing "Electronic information may be rapidly duplicated, transmitted, and assembled into new knowledge structures." The same way traditional hierarchies will be re-assembled, knowledge structures will undergo the same transformation. The most important aspect of this transformation is who supplies the information. No longer will intellectuals and academics be responsible for assembling our collective knowledge, but anybody who mearly has a blog, has edited a Wikipedia page, or uploaded a picture to Flickr.

Hypertext and Personhood

As I read Shelley Jackson's Stitch Bitch, I was most fascinated by the analogy of hypertext to the self, which we also discussed a little in class. In addition to the comparisons Jackson makes between the physical body and hypertext (the body not experienced as a whole, the body as a patchwork), Jackson addresses the mind, with its "almost catatonic obsession with stasis, centrality, and unity." Just as Stuart Moulthrop posits the ways in which hypertext (Xanadu) can bring about social change with a form of Nelson's "new populitism", Jackson seems to envision a new form of the self closely related to/based on hypertext. Jackson says that she would like to “invent a new kind of self which doesn't fetishize so much, grounding itself in the dearly-loved signs and stuff of personhood, but has poise and a sense of humor, changes new directions easily, sheds parts and assimilates new ones.” At this point I’d like to make a little digression and think through my use of “personhood” in the title of this post, which I did not realize might not have been the most apt choice until now. I don’t think that Jackson is saying that “personhood” isn’t valid, however… Perhaps what she is challenging are the ways in which we construct ourselves as people. I would really like to explore this concept of inventing ourselves in the vision of hypertext, if this is indeed what Jackson is calling for.

Jackson’s hypertext is liberating. “In the no-place of hypertext,” she writes, “there’s finally room to move around…” Her hypertext novel allowed her to write the way that she thinks; it is a novel “shaped a little more like [her own] thoughts.” Jackson draws an analogy between the confining nature of the traditional novel and life with this anecdote:

I can’t help seeing an analogy between the editorial advice I have often received to weed out the inessentials and lop off the divergent story lines, and the life advice I’ve received just as often to focus, choose specialize.

The hypertext novel is divergent. It is filled with what inessentials. Jackson implies that the editorial advice and the life advice are somehow confining; if we accept the inclusive no-space expanse of hypertext, which allows for those inessentials, is it also okay to live the life of “roving focus”?

How can hypertext reconsider our valuation of individuality? Hypertext is about connection; Jackson is interested in “relationships, juxtapositions, apparitions and interpolations.” If hypertext becomes life, will we begin to value ourselves more as dividuals, made up of our relationships to others?

Free to be Confined?

In Moulthrop’s “You Say You Want A Revolution…,” the ideas of public versus private, control, closed, and open are explored. Most of the discussions of hypertext, cyberspace, and new media revolve around the concept of destroying limitations and expanding potentials. Mouthrop says the “creator” of Xanadu, Theodor Nelson, believes we are on the edge of a “technological renaissance in which the system shall set us free.” But doesn’t he consider the possibility that the system will confine us instead?

In “The Matrix,” the system is a “prison for your mind.” It has become so advanced, so adaptable, that it has surpassed humans and enslaved them inside their own heads. When showing Neo the post-apocalyptic world that (presumably) exists as a result of war between human and machine, Morpheus calls it the “desert of the real.” A desert may seem to be vastly open and infinite, like the Internet and cyberspace, but really it is a cage, enclosing you with your own thoughts and abilities. A desert is an empty, bare, labyrinth, inaccessible to all but those specially equipped and properly trained to handle it.

New media may revolutionize the way we work, publish, and think, but only for the people able to understand it/ the average person, the person firmly tied to his books and “readerly” texts, may be “hopelessly abandoned to simulation, lost in ‘the technico-luminous cinematic space of total spatio-dynamic theatre’ (Baudrillard)” (Moulthrop). All of this newfound freedom is a very daunting prospect for the not-quite-so rebellious commoner. People like rules, organization, guidelines, and hierarchy; that is why formal control structures have mostly always been a staple of human history. People may feel trapped within their increased free will, dragged along by the current of new technology, “incapable of any ‘radical’ or ‘oppositional’ action that would transform the techno-social matrix” (Moulthrop). Or worse yet, they might not even realize the changes taking place around them and become victims of the future, like the humans being used in “The Matrix.”

Some of the concepts in this article also brought up ideas of communism and elitism. It seems that men like Nelson envision a world where everyone’s ideas are out in the open, to be shared, used again, and connected. If you replace “ideas” with “money and property,” you are left with the definition of communism. And as we know, what usually happens with communism is a small group emerges that is above the rest, ruining the ideally egalitarian society. This is similar to Nelson’s “populitism,” which has the very real problems that “social/textual order will devolve not unto the many but only to only a very few; and more important, that those few will fail to recognize the terms of their splendid isolation” (Moulthrop). I’m not in any way saying that the Internet and new media are an evil institution that will only end up controlling us all, just that people shouldn’t neglect the very real dangers of a social and intellectual hierarchy emerging from this supposedly not-hierarchical technology.

new storytelling

I was particularly struck by Patchwork Girl, not so much by the story and writing itself but by the idea of a free-flowing network of text that lacked a beginning, middle and end. At first my reaction to Jackson's work was of confusion and frustration but as I continued to read, I found myself immersed in the well written and captivating journey that is Patchwork Girl. To fully enjoy it, the reader must let go of his pre-existing notions of what a story is and instead think of it as a pool of available information.

This idea of a user-driven experience holds many parallels with the internet as a whole. Like Patchwork Girl, users have access to a finite amount of information with which they can use or not use as they please. This dichotomy makes me wonder why we are so used to looking at the internet and story telling in such different ways. Internet users are never surprised or confused by the apparent lack of order yet I believe that it is safe to assume that many other readers shared my initial reaction to Patchwork Girl. Is this because hypertexts like Patchwork Girl are a relatively scarce and new phenomenon?

Lexias, Plurality, and Hypertext

In Barthes’ essay, “S/Z,” I was particularly struck by the concept of lexias, that which “stars the text” and which Barthes describes as “certain zones of reading [through which we can trace] the migration of meanings, the outcropping of codes, the passage of citations” [14]. Lexias establish the plurality of the text, indicating the ways in which a “writerly” text can open networks and provide multiple entrances for approaching and interpreting it.

How does hypertext fit into this equation of the “writerly” text? By Barthes’ standards, is every text (in a way) a hypertext, in that it can be approached from “a thousand entrances” [12] and is inherently plural; in that it perpetually connotes and signifies (as opposed to denoting and being signified)? Does Bush’s Memex tie Barthes’ “writerly” text to hypertext or does it distinguish them? (If the Memex allows users to “pleasurably forget,” this is presumably because the machine can remember for them; if there is a linear narrative stored within this machine, with which we as users can remember what might have been “pleasurably forgotten,” then does this linearity collide with Barthes’ assertion of the plurality of text and/or with the nonlinearity of hypertexts like Shelley Jackson's?)

An Unwarranted Creation

At first, upon divulging into the hyper-text creation of Shelley Jackson, "Stitch Bitch," I wasn't completely cognizant of what was happening. Though the ideas were discussed in class and through the readings, notably Ted Nelson's, "A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing and the Intermediate," I still didn't quite understand the concept behind the hypertext and the "truth" in the simulacrum that it created. To be frank, I first found the exercise to be ridiculous, but-the great verbal eraser-upon further exploration I found how intricate and brilliant it was. The fact that my experience with this simulation was different from anyone else's experience really struck me; it was the nonlinear structure of the medium, the order in which I read the text was so drastically different from my neighbors, and my interpretation of the text thus followed. It also comprised the idea in the beauty and privilege of forgetting, or remembering when warranted.

I suppose there were two things that really stuck out to me in "Stitch Bitch." The first, I should say, is Jackson's application of creating a parable between the literary work/genius of Mary Shelley and the world of the internet-machine-human memory; the balance that exists in both situations between the real and the non-real. The second count derives itself from this literary reworking, when the patchwork girl, the created monster says how she never wanted to be created, she never wanted to be born from the limbs or ideas of everyone else, but there she was, sewn together by the desires of another. I suppose I also found this o be the most challenging idea, to reconstruct my ideas on the literal and the metaphor. Perhaps a kind of longing for perfection that can never be achieved-the description of being a monster, a design that was meant to be superb, but in actuality is filled with flaws, and has the undesirable task of constantly having pieces of herself forgotten and reupholstered by fleeting whims.

Body and Mind

I was particularly interested by the ideas brought up in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. He calls into question to what extent we can consider ourselves a uniform consciousness and therefore a uniform life form. Ever since I took Biology in high school I have wondered at the complexity of each individual organ inside the body. How did these things evolve to perform such a specific task so efficiently? Breaking the body down further into even smaller constituents one arrives at cells. The infinite complexity of every cell within the body is astounding. Trillions of tasks are carried out by these cells and organs all without requiring a second’s conscious thought to do so. Shelley Jackson marvels at the phenomenon of life in the human body

It's run by committee, a loose aggregate of entities we can't really call human, but which have what look like lives of a sort; though they lack the brains to nominate themselves part of the animal kingdom, yet they are certainly not what we think of as objects, nor are they simple appendages, directly responsible to the conscious brain. Watch white blood cells surround an invader, watch a cell divide. What we see is not thinking exactly, but it is "intelligent," or at least ordered, responsive, purposeful. We can feel a sort of camaraderie with those rudimentary machinic minds, but not identity.

Even activities that we do using our conscious mind are limited in how much of them we actually control. One of the best examples I think is playing a sport or simply going for a run. When you tell your mind to take you to a new position in space all you do is give the order, and then your brain does everything else for you. It contracts your muscles the appropriate amount to exert the necessary force to move at the desired speed, it quickens your breath to provide the necessary increase in oxygen required by your muscles, it even makes you sweat to cool you off, and it increases your heart rate the get more blood to the places it is needed. It is almost as if we are guests in our own body, granted the ability to experience what the body experiences but never really in control. To take it to an extreme, our consciousness is almost equivalent to the simstim concept from Neuromancer. Our consciousness as it were is merely along for the body’s ride. The counter point to this would be when Morpheus says in the Matrix when asked whether if you die in the Matrix you die in the real world and he replies, "The body cannot live without the mind." So while the body performs so much without the help of the conscious mind, it still depends on the mind. As studied in high school biology, the relationship seems to be similar to the symbiotic relationship between two organisms in nature.

Hypertext: Permanent or Not?

Computers and the infinite space of the internet have allowed us to archive anything from pictures to music to literary works. Our information is backed up and in our hands. What was once only available to a few privileged can now be easily distributed. In this time of day, Google can find Edgar Allen Poe poems in German in under 0.29 seconds. Something that was once rare is just seconds away from me.

Hypertext allows us to become active and engaged participants of the documents we find online. We can reconstruct the text or read it in the traditional linear text. Whatever we choose, we have the ability of perceiving the information we received in an untraditional way. However, as permanent and as active as hypertext seems to be, how permanent is it in our minds and our hard drives?

Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half blind as the entire text is within reach but because of myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I see only the part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest. When I open a book I know where I am which is restful. My reading is spatial and even volumetric. I tell myself, I am a third of the way down through a rectangular solid, I am quarter of the way down the page, I am here on the page, here on this line, here, here, here. But where am I now? I am in a here and a present moment that has no history and no expectations for the future.

Or rather, history is only a haphazard hopscotch through other present moments. How I got from one to the other is unclear. Though I could list my past moments, they would remain discrete( and recombinant in potential if not in fact), hence without shape, without end, without story. Or as many stories as I care to put together."

As we can see in this text from Patchwork Girl, we don't have a solid grip on what we read in hypertext. In some cases we cannot retrace our steps and see how one sentence relates to the other. We only see what is immediately in front of us. Not only that but revisions to text in the internet can happen without leaving a trace. We lose information that could help us understand change in history. It is not as permanent as it could have been written on a piece of paper.

Also information can be perfectly stored in the internet, but where exactly is it? We have no sense of its location. Yes, Google was capable of handing me information that I may have never been lucky to find, but in the way that Google presents it to me, I only see the first few options. No one ever checks the last search results. Google could simply delete that information without us ever noticing. In fact, if we don't know where it is located, did it really ever exist? We are more likely to see a room full of books missing than most of the information we believe is so well stored online.

Reflection on hypertext specifically Patchwork Girl

Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl I believe serves as a perfect example of what was addressed in class, this idea of hypertext allowing a person to take in the text as a personal experience. In the article Stitch Bitch Shelley, the monster states, “we shall soon see who is the author of whom.” Furthering this idea that the identity of the author is person in fact clicking on the mouse. While the chain of text is there, the viewer becomes the author of his or her own Patchwork girl thus taking advantage of hypertext. Patchwork Girl is a work in which not every viewers “path” is the same. In all actuality it is more likely that not a single person in my lab section had the exact same experience as me. The uniqueness of my Patchwork Girl experience is how I interpreted what hypertext was. Fittingly, connecting my own experience to a definition. However, the mind’s tendency, “To make something orderly and consecutive out of the divergent fragments that come naturally feels like forcing myself through a Klein bottle.” In my case it had me confused for the first 30 minutes of lab.

Arising from the midst of initial confusion, Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl became a unique digital adventure that furthered the concept of my personal embodiment of hypertext. The monster backs this statement up by saying, “ But the statue doesn't exist except in the mind, a hard kernel like a tumor, set up in the portal to the body, blocking the light. The project of writing, the project of life, even, is to dissolve that tumor. To dismantle the project is the project.” So it seems that a personal adventure is the initial intention of the author. However I think that this understanding of the text as a reader/ viewer doesn’t come across as such until a person steps back from the work and all of it. For me the adventure continued after reading the article online and viewing Patchwork Girl on the computer. As I sit here writing this blog I find myself understanding. Therefore it is through an almost lifelong adventure that this body of hypertexts comes into being, “dismantl[ing] the project” becomes “the project”.

Barthes

Barthes starts his text by comparing some analyses of narrative to Buddhists ascetic practices: both are trying to find a universal model that would simplify all the complexity of the world in one, and the text in the other case to one universal scheme. As the word ascetic implies, such schemes are merely skeletons of the ideas they are trying to embody. We cannot really see the world in a bean, simply because we are not aware of everything at every moment. Scio me nihil scire - claiming the opposite would mean being unaware of one's own unawareness.

So far Barthes seems to advocate the "writerly" - complexity of the text and the idea that the process of reading is or should be the process of "writing". We construct the text as we read it, Barthes explains. Then he offers a topos, or a convention, of how we "write" a particular text as we read it. He offers us five codes for that. He explains the system of associations that help us understand what we read. There is only one problem with the theory of five codes - it seems to be fairly ascetic.

Barthes' five codes operate within boundaries of our logic, expectations and, arguably, Jungian "collective unconscious". For example, hermeneutic code directly depends on logic that forms our expectations - we do not ask questions that we do not find logical because they do not seem necessary or even probable to us. Similarly to that, symbolic code operates within the boundaries of the archetypal or "collective unconscious" - certain symbols have preset meanings according to which they are deciphered. Now, knowing that we only have five codes and that every code operates by the already existent rules, it seems that there is no way out of a bean. We have a nice little scheme that allows explosion of meanings only within its own limits. However, claiming absolute understanding of the principles of text equals claiming that we can see the world in a bean. Yet, it is what we often do. Adopting Barthes' rules themselves means limiting his text to a mere scheme because we are simply choosing denotative meaning of his text over every other.

It is also significant that, to prove his point about the five codes, Barthes uses Balzac's story. Balzac is also often called the "father of the Realist novel" and his prose is a textbook example of social criticism in literature. Bearing that in mind, we are not very likely to expect that Barthes would use Balzac's story to prove that the process of reading is actually the process of "writing" as Balzac's intent was to capture and portray social problems of his time as they were. However, the fact that Barthes still chooses Balzac suggests that literally everything is a process of "writing" and projecting our own views onto something else. Hence, text as a system of references is not something characteristic only of our time and in that sense post-modernism is not revolutionary.

Evolutionary files: an impossibility?

In his formulation of the Evolutionary List File, Nelson foresees the need for a file format that can adapt to users' needs. ELF allows for writers to create and navigate through everything from poems to slideshows. The ultimate goal of the ELF is to be able to adapt to anything the user may want to use it for. In order to meet this goal, the ELF has been designed to be extremely general, so that it can accommodate almost any different purpose that it might need to be applied to. In the end, the file format only specifies a few key elements, for example that it should use zippered lists. The strength of the ELF lies in its generalness; it could still be useful as a container for today's digital content. Unfortunately, this is also its greatest weakness. By leaving so much room for adaptation, Nelson has only specified a skeleton of a file format; it seems that, in trying to anticipate the needs of the future, Nelson has created a file format so general as to be almost meaningless.

Is it possible to design a file format that will truly meet the needs of future users?

Digital Storage

On the top shelf of my friend’s book case sits a shiny 1-terabyte external hard drive. This mysterious rectangular box contains a vast library of photos, texts, videos, music: an archive of files he has accumulated over years of digitizing, saving, receiving, creating and downloading. A quick product search on Amazon.com reveals that for every dollar one can purchase approximately 9.54 gigabytes of space. In the era of new media, such storage space is precious, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that digital data storage systems are unreliable, inconsistent—riddled with “gaps”.

The impermanence of digital files can be seen everywhere. Almost all of us have experienced the loss of some critically important file on our computers. In “Out of File, Out of Mind”, Vismann points out the difficulties of disposing physical files and highlights the ease with which erasure is performed in the digital world. In class we looked at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and found that the snapshots it takes are often incomplete. It does not paint a complete picture of the history of the web; rather it gives us glimpses here and there. This seems to suggest that what is digital is transitory—but is this transitory nature inherent to the digital or is it merely a reflection of the inadequacies of current technology? In other words, could we theoretically reach a point in time when technology is so advanced that these “gaps” disappear? Is it possible to build the perfect program—a type of matrix without holes? Another question which struck me is the following: is our fixation on archives and immortalizing files even reasonable?

Shelley Jackson seems to think not—she writes, “I would like to invent a new kind of self which doesn't fetishize so much, grounding itself in the dearly-loved signs and stuff of personhood, but has poise and a sense of humor, changes directions easily, sheds parts and assimilates new ones…instead of this morbid obsession with the fixed, fixable, everyone composing their tombstone over and over” (Jackson). Perhaps the impermanence of files can be liberating.

This concept of being freed from the grasp of the archive is tied in closely with the idea of the “privilege to forget”, another double-edged sword. By attempting to create a super-archive of human consciousness, we free ourselves from the responsibility of remembering, but also lose memories we would perhaps like to keep. I was reminded of a passage in Alex Garland’s The Beach, in which the protagonist, an experienced traveler, expresses his disdain for travel mementos: “I don’t keep a travel diary. I did keep a travel diary once, and it was a big mistake. All I remember of that trip is what I bothered to write down. Everything else slipped away, as though my mind felt jilted by my reliance on pen and paper. For exactly the same reason, I don’t travel with a camera. My holiday becomes the snapshots and anything I forget to record is lost” (Garland, 54).

Hypertext as a malleable story

In Tuesday's lab session we have interacted with the hypertextual story of the "Monsterous" Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson, with little instruction so I had no preconception of what I was going into. As I clicked around the story, it didn't take me long to realize that the contents of this piece were presented to me in a relatively jumbled up way, making me read through many passages over and over again, without realizing what actually was going on.

Contextually, the story fascinated me because the monster kept changing constantly; her creator, the author, changed places with her offspring and then finally set her free. I really liked the dissolution of "I" as both their minds and bodies conjoined both physically and emotionally.

Given the discussion that we had today I think it presented a very good example about how hypertext is not to be "consumed" or simply read, but to be played around with. As I clicked around the passages I discovered links that I hadn't noticed before (such as the head, torso and various parts of the body on the "graveyard" page) and finding out about them made me look for more clickable passages that might take me away to a different part of the story. And even if I had to read a passage again, reading it with the insight coming from another path changed it.

It was also an interesting depiction of the dual nature of hypertext. As I clicked around in the story panels, the "map" of the story line would also move from square to square. So, although I was moving freely and without a linear narrative within the story, the skeleton, the essence of the story was already encoded and set in line. I could move to any point, but that point was already predetermined, and therefore constrained.

Man and Machine

In the article, “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush emphasizes the need for a machine and operating system that will augment the human capacity to cope with an overload of data and information. Written in July 1945, Bush envisions a world in which biology and technology blur: a world in which humans become more machine-like and machines more human. For example, he writes: “In the outside world, all forms of intelligence whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another?” (Bush, 12).

This question is still relevant today, and in some ways, even more so. Let’s examine the process of navigating the Internet, otherwise known as ‘surfing the Web.’ This particular cliché expression implies a kind of carefree voyage of discovery; with just a simple click of the mouse, we are able to explore an infinite amount of pathways in cyberspace. We can communicate and share information and services with the entire Internet community. “There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record” (Bush, 11). The Internet allows us to operate naturally – by association. Search engines encourage us to probe deeper into the digital media realm. Hyperlinks engage our attention, following our train of thought through the maze of materials available. We are both man and machine, inextricably linked, working together to understand and harness our ever-expanding civilization and its records.