RHIZOME POWER
Again we read a very linear, analogue,
sequence-oriented piece of text that talks about the mechanisms
of the digital, multiple, synchornized aspects of hypertext.
Grrr. It's like trying to define a circular stairwell without
using your hands. It can be done but it would be so much easier
to communicate by twirling your hands in the air and saying:
see! look here.
"What distinguishes hypermedia is that is posits an information
structure so dissimilar to any other in human experience that
it is difficult to describe as a structure at all."
Now try communicating that one.
It is so hard to communicate that Burnett and others feel the
need to compare it to, of all things, a rhizome.
What is a rhizome?
rhizome<noun>: a specialized rootlike plant stem that forms
shoots above and roots below.
Botanical terms as metaphors for the history of book design:
THE ROOT-BOOK: book reminiscent of your basic, standard
everyday plant that grows linearly from the roots up:
manuscript, editing, etc., until it buds forth:
straight-forward: definitive: God the author etches directly
onto the stone: no one messes with authoritative power <or so
they say>: linear structure--on Monday God created day and
night, on Tuesday God created the animals, on Wednesday....
THE RADICLE-SYSTEM BOOK: o.k. we're branching
out a little: getting crazy: less straight-forward: grafting somes extra
leaves and so forth onto the stem in the tradition of collage and assemblage:
strangely composed books by the avante-garde, drug-induced likes of William
Burroughs: becoming looser with the logic <e.g. Gertrude
Stein's _Tender Buttons_>
AND FINALLY, THE BELOVED RHIZOME: e.g.
The works!: close your eyes and imagine a potato growing in the
earth with wierd stringey things sprouting out of its center in
all directions: you are in the center of the potato with the
option of entering any one of these outshoots which are marked,
for you convenience by flashing visual and textual
hot-links and connected to a billion other potatoes:
potato and couchgrass, weeds and kudzu= THE WEB
SOME HYPERTEXT DESIGN "TRUTHS"
Connection/Heterogeneity:
--In hypertext design, images <still and moving> and sound are just as good
as any old word.
--Everything is perfectly <or almost perfectly> ironed out to one, level,
beautifully democratized plane: no annoying hierarchical,
hegemonious wrinkles in the fabric of the medium.<?>
Principle of Multiplicity:
--Authorial blurring: who's the boss?: the reader at the center of
the potato/web or the one who grafted all of the
possible stems to the reading surface?
Rupture
--Hypertext design's forms of access are anti-hierarchical,
democratizing, liberatingly disruptive: you can always hit the
hot-link out of a text that drags on and on <I guess it's just too
bad you can't do that in your Unix account>
Mapping
--Reader as trail-blazer, Reader as Hansel and Gretel throwing
crumbs behind them as they walk into the deep, dark unknown: relationships
between points are not preordained by some high priest: points
are presented like Alice in Wonderland's "Drink Me" bottles: There are no
sterile institutions, musty old canons,
walls, barriers to undermine: The structure? The wild, wild West.
My very own, personal dilemna with MAPPING:
If we are all so busy following our very own crumb trails in
the hypertextual woods, will we ever hear the far off snap of
another's boot on a branch? Will we ever run a fellow traveler
we can compare notes with as we move through the Web?