[rohrpost] Hypertext [Part 1]

[Henning Ziegler]

[Part 1 one of a 5 part essay, comments or corrections are very welcome]


Why Hypertext became Uncool
Notes on the Power Struggles of the Cultural Interface

Henning Ziegler



  Introduction
Cyberspace is where the bank keeps your money.
=97William Gibson

I must have been one of the last people to ditch Victory Garden.  On a hot=
 day in late 1999, as a relative newcomer to digital media studies, I was 
clicking through Stuart Moulthrop=92s 1995 CD-ROM on an Apple Macintosh in=
 the McHenry library at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  I had 
heard a lot of enthusiastic criticism about the work, so as it was finally=
 flickering on the screen before me, I did at first feel somewhat intrigue=
d, but 
that feeling quickly gave way to the loneliness of a reader in a hyperlink=
 maze; trying to make sense of what then felt like =91postmodern=92 writin=
g in 
digital form, I was simply annoyed at the impossibility of arriving at a m=
ental model of the digital rhizome that was spreading wider and wider befo=
re 
my eyes with each click.  A reading experience, I held then and I hold now=
, basically is strategically building many contradictive voices of a text =
into 
a mental whole.  With Victory Garden, that just didn=92t work.  If a book =
consists of materially sedimented social contradictions, unchangeable but 
analyzeable, the problem with hypertext is that simply stays fluid=97my re=
ading became socially meaningless in that it was only one among many; I 
was equally distanced from the text as I was from my fellow readers of Vic=
tory Garden.  Looking back, it seems to me that during that afternoon in 
the library, then, I had lived through the second half of the 90s again=97=
the period when hypertext gradually became uncool.

	What happened during that time?  In the first half of the 90s, books such=
 as Landow=92s Hypertext 2.0 or Bolter=92s Writing Space celebrated 
the coming of a new age for a medium that is a metaphor of the mind: decen=
tered, fragmentary, associative.  The company Eastgate built a whole 
business around hypertext with its costly, professional hypertext editing =
program Storyspace and CD-ROM releases of major hypertext fiction such 
as Moulthrop=92s Victory Garden (1995) or Michael Joyce=92s Afternoon, a S=
tory (1990), both written with Storyspace.  Since then, however, hypertext=
 
(in the sense of an authoritative, literary artwork) has steadily been on =
the decline (alongside with the =91New Economy=92).  Eastgate=92s Storyspa=
ce is 
now on sale for 70 dollars, and nobody really bothered to buy the hypertex=
t literature CD-ROMs=97after all, you could hardly bring your Apple 
Powerbook to the beach for a read.  So the Digerati were as quick to turn =
away from hypertext as they were to hype it before.  What you got now 
were remarks like =93Hypertext? Oh yeah... been there, done that.=94  What=
 got lost in this all too quick turning away from hypertext, however, is a=
 
critical discussion of the reasons why hypertext =91failed.=92  Or, in my =
mind, many of the critical remarks about hypertext hurried back to older 
conceptions of text (=93So books weren=92t that bad after all=94) instead =
of looking at the structural reasons for the hypertext=92s loss of coolnes=
s: The critics 
celebrated the downfall with the same rhetoric as hypertext=92s appearance=
, eagerly awaiting the next hype.

	In this essay, by way of a =91digital materialist=92 position that I owe =
to Lev Manovich, I=92ll argue that authoritative hypertextual works as a n=
ew 
media object have the same formal limitations that hold for the human comp=
uter interface in general (for hypertext always takes place within a HCI).=
  
In a nutshell, the interface is a site where absent cultural and social co=
ntradictions clash and  meaning is being dialogically produced for a cultu=
ral 
community.  But this is not to =91unmask=92 that hypertextual works weren=92=
t as =91resistant=92 as seemed to be in the first place: Instead, both the=
 older 
celebretory and the recent gloomy rhetoric about hypermedia are part of th=
e same logic of capitalist hype.  So on a formal level, I will try to expo=
se 
some of the limits of authoritative hypertextual works and the cultural in=
terface by looking at new media objects such as Storyspace, the AOL 
interface, or Netscape Navigator within a Marxist political framework.  Re=
ad in this way, hyperlinks become associated with the Althusserian notion 
of interpellation, and the HCI becomes hegemonic.  It may come as a surpri=
se that in the end, I will refrain from calling all =91resistance=92 futil=
e.  But 
hypermedia, understood as the totality of the World Wide Web,  do promote =
a shift in the relationship between reader and author on a formal level in=
 
new media objects such as the Navigator browser suite (or it=92s non-propr=
ietary variant, Mozilla): the Browser comes with an HTML (hypertext mark-
up language) editor=97unlike old media, reading and manipulating a Website=
 here become two equal choices in the =91file=92 menu.  So Mozilla might n=
ot 
be so uncool, after all...


Henning Ziegler, Berlin
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~hziegler