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Is This Progress?

Or are we just going around and around?

Look at the history of human communication and problem-solving. What drives it? What do you think causes things to happen? God? Great leaders? Chance?

Or is it a combination of these and some sort of determinism? Determinism says that all events are caused by other events and that we can understand the cause.

For example, Marxists preach materialism. Royalists preach elitism. Preachers preach divine will. Many folks, whether they know it or not, would agree with some degree of technological determinism. If people have a tool, they'll use it. If they don't have it, they'll eventually invent it. Events are driven, at least in part, by tools. Would the Cold War have been possible without the missiles that would have delivered the bombs to blow us up?

A recent (within my lifetime) and very influential tech determinist is Marshall McLuhan. He argued that printed books changed human consciousness. So, he said, will electronic communications -- hypertext.

I'm not sure whether I want to defend that position as far as the hard-wiring in our brains, but here's a sampling of the evidence offered by these determinists. They say that we're in the midst of several overlapping stories, one within another:

Story of tools to do work

Story of symbols
to carry meaning and expression

Story of the book

Story of information

Story of electronic tools

Story of digital tools (computers)

Story of hypertext

Meet the New Boss

Each of us has our personal story with tools, language, information, and computers. In this course, it all comes together in the exchange of words and pictures, which is where it started and what it's always been: telling our stories to each other, using tools to extend ourselves and help each other.

Now we're calling it hypertext. Same as the old boss?

Readings

Jorn Barger calls himself a hyperterrorist. His contentious posts on alt.hypertext provoke thoughtful as well as outraged responses. His response to Patrick Lynch's influential Web style manual is must-reading. The Hypertext Timeline timeline on Jorn's site fills in around the ones above. I encourage you to make your own timeline, if only by cutting and pasting others.

The next three webs date from several years ago. They have few graphics and are good examples of first-generation Web sites, basically repurposed paper-based essays. Read them for the content. Also read them as hypertexts.

Note the size of the nodes and the proportion given to orientation and navigation. 

Do you always know where you are?

Can you get anywhere you want to go in only a click or two?

The Electronic Labyrinth

Click on the timeline link on this web's navigation bar to find yet another galloping overview of the story of the book as a tool. Most of the side nodes (legs? caterpillar metaphor?) are short. Please read them all up to 1967.

Don't Miss Nodes

1) Beginning and Ending a Hyperbook: Possibilities for Authors

2) Early literary oddities and experiments such as Tristram Shandy (1760) and Finnegan's Wake (1939). In retrospect, they seem precursors of hypertext.

Manuscripts, Book, and Maps

This hypertext by Bruce Jones of the University of California at San Diego traces the history of the printed book. It has thumbnails of some large images that are well worth looking at. Note especially the illuminated manuscripts. Note the relation of text to image. The monks who illuminated those manuscripts would be exercising the same judgements about shape, size, and color if they were alive today designing webs. Do you agree? Send an email with your thoughts.

Rhetorics of the Web

Douglas Brent, who teaches at the University of Calgary, has a web written for teachers. A hypertext about hypertext. Please read it with the idea that you, as a person constructing a hypertext, are also a teacher. I'm especially struck by Dr. Brent's attempts to root the Web in Aristotle and in fundamental human psychology.

More Readings

If You're Interested in ...

... the history of texts and hypertexts, precursors and prophets

Start with these two authors:

Aristotle. Poetics and Rhetoric. circa 300 B.C. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.html
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html

Bush, Vannevar. As We May Think. Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.

... how the tools fit in with other Twentieth Century inventions

See the January 1998 Newsweek Extra 2000: The Power of Invention or the magazine's Web site.

... more detail about the electronic and digital stories

Byte magazine featured How Chips Changed the World in the December 1996 issue.

... pre-industrial technology

The Ancient Greek World

Castles on the Web

Discovery of a Paleolithic Painted Cave

The Egyptian Museum

Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology

Leonardo da Vinci Museum

Mesopotamian Prehistory (Neolithic, Chalcolithic)

... exact dates

I don't want to debate dates; some of mine are estimates. Others, such as the dates for the dictionary and for paper, ignore the Eastern civilizations almost as much as they ignore us. If you have a more accurate date, email a reference and I'll be happy to change one of mine, especially if the change affects the sequence.