Once again, the word democratization has come up in reference to hypertext.
Deomcratization means the collective, and I still do not see what is
prefigured in hypertext that will necessarily make it a more democratic form
than print or speech. As well as discussing social issues, this question
seems to extend to one that seems to me to be the focus of the reading, and
a question that Kaplan addresses. All these differences and characteristics
that we are discussing and that the number of papers that we have been
reading, approach hypertext and print as if they were object with definable
features that never changed and were uniform for the entire object of
"HYPERTEXT" and "PRINT" or "PAPER". This just does not appear to be true.
When Tuman claims something like the printed text is configured to create
insightful investigation and what? the injection (writing) and extraction
(reading) of meaning, significant meaning, he's assuming this is something
that is an inherent feature of this object called print. As a matter of fact
print and hypertext are just words that define a braod broad area of a
variety of different work. All these claims that we're making, even in
class, what makes them so solidly true? Is it a charcteristic of hypertext
that it is more democratic than print?-- (I don't think so, you can already
see a number of elitist or hierarchical strucutres that exist already in the
hypertext environment-- especially professors who talk about filtering the
garbage of the internet as if they wanted their small, computerized,
scholarly apparatus without having to stumble on Penthouse Online as well)
But, suppose it is, why does it necessaryily 1) always have to be and 2) why
is that so? Does the injection of the computer into the form make a
significant difference? A number of the comments Tuman and Postman made
strike me as fears of what they have seen of computer culture rather than
definite hypertext writings or projects (which raises another question, how
much work have our authoritative, insitiutionalized, professerized
commentators really done with hypertext or computer mediums at all?). They
see their kids staring at nintendo and assume that hypertext is a more
distracting medium, or that it is only a medium, a stylistic presentation, a
method of managin and transmitting information, without having and "meaning"
to it. An already asked question: is Madame Bovary different on the computer
screen than on the white page ... why? Is there truly a different logic
inherent in hypertext, one that is fundamentally different than print? A lot
of people seem to think so (and they themselves sound as much like
worshippers to a hope for true innovation, the clean break). If this logic
is truly different, then Moulthrop's arguments about integration seem to
become extremely important. Do we want to "taint" this medium. Isn't
integration the only way we can deal with this form? What is a medium
without its creative gestation, its heritage; much like a mind without any
prejudices and therefore no ability to judge, just a falt, level plain of
uninterpreted data. McGann talks about digitizing libraries, creating
electronic archives as replacement tools for libraries, would this strike
Moulthrop as an integration of hypertext into its forerunner, print. Are we
demanding that hypertext be something uniquely original, a clean break from
history, the computer transforming something into true innovation? A place
that cannot be described? or how much is it an electrification of what
McGann calls our "customary work". Both?
Enough, jesus, keep saying the same things. James.