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Michael N. Louka, March 1994
HTML conversion, August 1994
"Imagine a new libertarian literature with alternative explanations so anyone can chose the pathway or approach that best suits him or her; with ideas accessible and interesting to everyone, so that a new richness and freedom can come to the human experience; imagine a rebirth of literacy." - Ted Nelson, 'Literary Machines'.
One of the field's foremost evangelists is Ted Nelson, who coined the term 'hypertext' in 1967. His Xanadu system has been under development since the beginning of the 1980s and is an endeavour to realise his dream of creating a central repository and distribution network for writing. It would be a global publishing house, library, and communications medium in one. His hope is that IT will spark a return to literacy -- a renaissance of literary inspiration and understanding.
This paper looks at how IT, through the medium of global, hypertext-based, computer networks, may transform our perception of what being literate means. It introduces the hypertext medium and considers how it reconfigures our notions of familiar concepts such as the reader, writer and text. By examining the features of 'online literacy'. It also explores the role of libraries and the possible social and political consequences of global hypertext systems. The underlying question throughout is whether hypertext has the capacity and ability to revive text and literacy from an apparent decline.
Oral literacy enabled thoughts to be codified and communicated, allowing culture to be developed and passed on (Harnad, 1991). Harnad points out that this revolution may have had neurological foundations: "[W]hatever the evolutionary changes underlying language were, they were imprinted as permanent modifications of our neural hardware".
Scriptural literacy made it possible to preserve thoughts independently of speakers. Since a writer is able to think about what is being written and formulate words carefully, the scripturally literate person is able to make more reflective communication than was possible before the advent of writing. It became possible to write books and letters, and to keep diaries. A disadvantage compared with oral traditions is that something written can normally only be read by one person at a time, whereas a speaker can communicate with many people simultaneously. Writing is less interactive than speaking but although many people cannot read a single text at the same time, the text (or copies of it) can be passed around. The loss of interactivity was balanced by the fact that a text could be read again and again by any number of people (Harnad, 1991).
The emergence of typographic technology in the sixteenth century made the hand-copying of text obsolete and led the way to mass distribution of books and other printed texts. The social effects of print literacy have been tremendous, and are the primary focus of McLuhan's 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' (1962). McLuhan makes a number of very interesting comments on the sociopolitical significance of the invention of typographic technology, which he describes as "the first uniformly repeatable commodity, the first assembly-line, and the first mass-production" (McLuhan, 1962:124).
Individualism and self-expression was encouraged through the portability of printed material and as a result of mass-production. Through the nurturing of national cultures, national uniformity and government centralism resulted (McLuhan, 1962: e.g. 235).
Print had a marked affect on language usage, especially on notions of what was correct and how words alone can be used to communicate effectively. McLuhan writes that "[p]rint altered not only the spelling and grammar but the accentuation and inflection of languages, and made bad grammar possible" (1962:231). He later comments that "[n]obody made a grammatical error in a non-literate society" (1962:238).
Typographic technology also had a profound affect on the importance of authorship and copyright. Before 1500, little significance was given to ascertaining the precise identity of the author of a book. Writing before print was similar to constructing a mosaic. The assembly of the parts of a book was often a collective scribal affair, and authors regularly quoted large chunks of other authors' works without giving their sources any credit. The identity of the author was not considered to be important (McLuhan, 1962:130). The role of the author in the pre-print era is very similar to that which is apparently most natural for the author of electronic texts.
Although printing completely replaced handwriting in book production, it did not render handwriting obsolete (Bolter, 1991:39-40). The emergence of print led to increased literacy because more people learnt to write as a greater number of people learnt how to read. Successive revolutions in the history of literacy have led to an increase in the size of the literate population. Although the computer has been used as a writing medium in a number of ways, only hypertext appears to be a revolutionary new medium. Word processing and desktop publishing merely enhance print technology and are therefore not new media as such. Hypertext can be seen as revolutionary because it is requires a new manner of thinking.
Interestingly, hypertext revives features of early forms of literacy such as sound and pictures, recovering the lost dynamism of the past. The advent of writing resulted in words becoming static parts of the visual world, losing the dynamic characteristics of the auditory world (McLuhan, 1962:18). The computer can imitate almost any technology in the history of writing, which would indicate that it has the potential to be at least as good as the earlier media that it can mimic. "[T]his new technology is a thorough rewriting of the writing space" (Bolter, 1991:40). Electronic writing is fluid and dynamic to a greater degree than any previous writing technique (Bolter, 1991:4).
Print no longer has the cultural influence of the past. Television and video already dominate common culture. Some authors, such as Moulthrop and Nelson, are enthusiastic about hypertext because "the idiot box -- or to be more precise, the boxed idiot -- is precisely the intellectual problem that hypertext seems excellently suited to address" (Moulthrop, 1991). Print may be in decline but, they claim, the literacy of print is not yet beyond revival.
Although Bush was the first to propose a machine that stores information in an associative manner, he was not the first to recognise that improvements to the way in which large amounts of information were stored and retrieved were necessary. Samuel Taylor Coleridge aired his annoyance over the way in which the Encyclopaedia Britannica was arranged almost one hundred and fifty years earlier, in 1803 (Tuman,1992:52). The system of alphabetically ordered entries appeared counter-intuitive to him. In his 'Treatise on Method', written in 1817, he writes that "[w]e may, therefore, assert that the relations of things form the prime objects, or so to speak, the materials of Method: and that the contemplation of those relations is the indispensable condition of thinking methodically". Like Bush, he is suggesting that the mind works by association.
The ambitious hypertext system that Ted Nelson is developing is called Xanadu, after the "magic place of literary memory" in Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. Nelson's vision is of the creation of a single repository for the entire world's literature. He created the hypertext model of links and nodes as a means of efficiently storing and accessing such a vast amount of information.
Coleridge, Bush, and Nelson were all looking for new ways of storing and retrieving information. If creative thought depends on our ability to make associations then hypertext would appear to be the most intuitive solution. Unfortunately, we have little experience of creating hypertexts and large texts that have been created lack the fluidity and ease of use that ideal hypertext would have. The basic problem is not the technical limitations, which will eventually be overcome, but our ability to create a new literary practice (Tuman, 1992:78). We have been trained to be print literate, and it is therefore often difficult for us to adjust to the associative way of reading and writing that hypertext requires.
Information is stored in chunks called nodes, which are linked together to form a multidimensional network. In a purely text-based system, the nodes are pieces of textual information. Hypertext can be viewed as a form of non-linear writing where a reader can follow links between nodes to access information.
Purely text-based hypertext systems are becoming increasingly uncommon and the term 'hypermedia' is commonly used when nodes are not restricted to containing text and may contain multimedia information (text, images, video, music, animation, and other media). The terms 'hypertext' and 'hypermedia' are often used interchangeably. Hypertext hyperdocuments (collections of related nodes in a network) may be self contained or may link to other hyperdocuments, which may be distributed over a local or wide-area computer network.
Nodes within a hyperdocument are objects that normally contain a single concept or idea. A writer (also called an 'author' in the literature) creates a network of interrelated ideas or concepts in order to communicate information to the reader. The writing process is therefore one of taking a collection of nodes and creating associative links between them. The writer must determine the size of each node and what its contents should be as well as create a suitable network through which the reader can browse.
One of the best introductions to hypertext is that of Conklin (1987). He describes the hallmark of hypertext as being a "single coherent interface to the database". What the reader sees on the computer screen usually corresponds to a single node of the hyperdocument, offering a level of integration of information and interaction that other information retrieval systems do not.
Hypertext is fundamentally different from a traditional database in that there is no central definition and no regular structure (Nielsen, 1990a:8). It is this irregular structure that gives hypertext its great flexibility. The trade-off is that the flexibility of structure often culminates in navigational problems for the reader (Nielsen, 1990b) which have not been satisfactorily overcome. It is common for hypertext systems to provide navigational aids, such as maps, indexes, and contents lists.
Our Gutenberg notions of text and author are reconfigured by hypertext. By allowing the reader to create new associations between nodes in a hyperdocument and by allowing the reader to add new nodes and annotations, the reader can also be a collaborative writer (Jennings, 1992). A new reader is still under the control of a previous reader and cannot usually change previously created nodes, but where there is no distinction between the reader and the writer, no single person can claim to be the author in the traditional sense of the word. This has consequences for our print-literate notions of writing, authorship and copyright.
Hypertext can be used to enhance traditional linear text by supporting an advanced footnoting system. Rather than have to make the effort to go to a library and look up a reference (which may be obscure and difficult to come by), a reader can simply choose to follow a link to another node in a hyperdocument in order to access background information about the primary text. Hypertext can enable a reader who is unfamiliar with a text to have a reading experience closer to that of an expert because the background knowledge that an expert has can be made instantly available. Tuman quotes Landow as having this view in the context of the study of English Literature. A reader can read up on a text while reading it, putting it into a wider context (Tuman, 1992:60). Landow uses an example of a student reading Charles Dickens' novel 'Great Expectations'. As well as the actual text of the novel, the reader can have instant access to information on Dickens, his other works, Victorian politics, culture and religion, and anything else relevant to the novel. Landow believes that this ancillary information can greatly increase the reader's appreciation of the text.
The advantages of rich annotation, and links to footnotes and references, are clearly not restricted to the study of classic literature. Bush's vision of the Memex was of a system that scientists and researchers could use to keep track of published research, so that important discoveries would not be lost between the pages of obscure journals but would instead be available to all who are able to apply the information.
Hypertext probably lends itself best to retrieval of reference material, including reports and papers. If this paper were a hypertext then the reader could have the option to choose to retrieve the texts of references made as well as background information on topics such as hypertext and literacy. This paper would then not only serve the purpose of conveying what I have to say on this topic but would also serve as a pointer to other related information. Since the background materials could be made instantly available, the reader would be spared the inconvenience of going to a library to search for references, or waiting several weeks for materials that are only available through inter-library loan schemes. When reading hypertext there is no longer a single text, but an entire associated literature.
Reading hypertext is an interactive activity. The reader no longer obediently follows the linear argument of a single author, but is free to choose to attach an annotation or branch to a reference, which may itself link to another related work. The reader must be capable of putting the text into context, giving the information meaning. Reading hypertext can therefore be a more intellectually stimulating challenge than reading printed text. This is a point that authors such as Landow and Bolter perceive as encouraging.
Hypertext forces readers to think more about what they are reading than traditional printed text does. The reader has to alternate between reading the texts and reading the structure of the hypertext (Bolter, 1991:167). Bolter suggests that a good hypertext should make the transition between the two kinds of reading almost effortless. Conversely, a poor hypertext places heavy cognitive demands on the reader.
What excites hypertext enthusiasts most is that this computer-based medium has the capacity to change the way we think. Print literacy promotes critical thinking whereas hypertext promotes associative thinking. Some authors believe that hypertext is an enhancement of print-literate critical thinking, adding an associative dimension to our print-literate way of thinking. "Literacy under hypertext must extend not only to the 'content' of a composition but to its hypertextual 'form' as well" (Moulthrop, 1991). Others fear that the form will become all important and that the content may become trivial (e.g. Waterworth, 1992:183).
Hypertext technology provides a technique for structuring any presentable information and, as stated earlier, there is no requirement that any nodes in a hyperdocument should contain text at all. Waterworth (1992:184) suggests that the introduction of multimedia "can be seen as a liberalisation of the social mechanisms that control access to knowledge and to the opportunity to reach others through the media". Waterworth states that multimedia implies the deskilling of knowledge, "the redundancy of techniques of interpretation". He suggests that literacy may give way to mediacy, that literacy will become an outmoded concept, "[i]n the same way that 'computer literacy' is becoming a meaningless term today given the increasing transparent access to computer-based information." This is the opposite extreme to the rebirth of literacy that Nelson foresees. Knowledge may become trivialised by being presented in small chunks that can be accessed as the reader chooses, becoming knowledge-poor entertainment. To put what Waterworth has written into context, it is important to point out that he is not specially pessimistic about the future of hypertext, he provides this degenerate view when discussing alternative futures. Waterworth believes that hypertext and multimedia "give us the potential, if we are clever enough, to build the ultimate responsive information artifacts."
Hypertext is well suited to information retrieval activities, but the writing of creative literature such as novels and poetry may have little place in a hypertext future of online literacy. Tuman (1992:80) stresses that today's writers of hypertext fiction have print-literate backgrounds and that their readers also have print-literate backgrounds.
What will future generations of readers who may not have print-literate backgroundswant?
Will hypertext promote a surge of interest in fiction and creative literature (a new literary renaissance) or will it simply be used as a convenient medium for information storage and retrieval?
Tuman suggests that literary hypertext might become just "a relic or craft from an earlier time, occupying something of the status of calligraphy in the age of print." The issue here is the difference between hypertext as a universal storage and retrieval system for digitised information and hypertext as a literary authoring system for the creative association of texts.
The text that we produce using "the conventional tools of print is necessarily the result of compromise" because writing the text is the result of a struggle between associations in the mind of the writer and linear order (Tuman, 1992:67). McLuhan (1962) comments that the notion of linear narrative is a product of the Gutenberg print revolution and is "totally alien to the nature of language and consciousness." An electronic (hypertext) book does not have boundaries there is no beginning and end in the traditional sense. The 'book' is an abstract notion and the 'text' is a web of all associated texts ('the literature').
The role of the writer is to prepare the nodes of a hyperdocument and link them together, creating an information space through which the reader can navigate, so limited authority over the reader remains (Jennings, 1992). The writer has the authority to decide how the nodes should be linked and what they should contain, and the reader would probably not be allowed to make changes to the writer's original work. However, rather than be guided along a single linear narrative, the reader is entangled in a network of associations and so claims that hypertext offers a fantastic new-found freedom for readers can be viewed as exaggerated.
Hypertext encourages a new relationship between the reader and the writer, where the reader gains power at the writer's expense. The reason for this is that the reader has the power to create new links and add new nodes, blurring the distinction between the writer and the reader to the extent that the two roles become indistinguishable. The greatest transfer of power to the reader is in the breakdown of linearity that hypertext promotes. At an organisational level, the writer loses what was once a total control over the reader (Jennings, 1992).
This new role of reader-writer that hypertext encourages is well suited to collaborative writing, and hypertext systems have been used for both technical and creative writing in collaborative writing environments. Conklin and Begeman (1988a) describe a system called gIBIS, which is a multi-user hypertext system for collaborative software design. More recently (with a "grand opening" in February 1994), Brown University, in the United States, has set up a text-based virtual world that enables real-time networked reading, writing and annotation of a fictional text called 'Hypertext Hotel' (Meyer, 1994). The system is intended for the teaching of hypertext writing to students, for research into collaborative writing, and for experimenting with hypertext publication of research journals .
Although hypertext promotes multidimensional writing, it does not prohibit guided (linear) 'tours' through information networks. Also, the linearity of the text is not affected at node level. It is not always natural to break up thoughts into discrete units, which can lead to a high cognitive load for both the reader and the writer (Conklin and Begeman, 1988b:260). Breaking ideas into small fragments can obscure the greater idea being developed (Tuman, 1992:72). Hypertext does allow for the preservation of the styles of linear writing to which readers are accustomed from printed text. Whether readers will want to read actual texts or just read summaries to extract essential information is an open question (Tuman, 1992:69).There is clearly a danger of readers simply traversing from node to node in a hyperdocument without doing anything other than skim-reading.
Despite the danger that readers will only skim-read, the ability to skim-read is an important skill for retrieving information from a hypertext structure. Simply reading summaries is often necessary in order to determine what is worth 'deep reading'. It is a similar skill to that which newspaper readers use to decide which articles are worth reading. In most newspapers the headlines function as guides to the reader, but it is becoming increasingly common for newspapers to print summaries of the main stories and articles along with page references as a kind of index (The Guardian and The Times are examples of newspapers with this feature).
When writing hypertext fiction, the role of the author becomes very much that of creating 'worlds' that the reader can explore (Nielsen, 1990a:171). Although traditional linear fiction can be integrated into hypertext and richly annotated (as in the example of a hypertext version of Great Expectations mentioned earlier), converting linear fiction into multidimensional hypertext is akin to making a film for cinema by filming a play at a theatre. This new medium requires a new way of thinking and forces a reevaluation of what it means to be literate.
What exactly is the online literacy required to make intelligent use of the medium? Is the creation of great works of fictional literature, that people will want to read, really possible in the absence of a sequential unfolding narrative?
Bolter observes that modern fiction is more open to experimentation than before and cites James Joyce's 'Finnegan's Wake' as an example of a modern author employing almost "every technique available in the rhetoric of print" to create a narrative that is very difficult to read because the "narrative strategy is too complex and too dynamic for the medium of print" (Bolter, 1991:135-137). He describes 'Finnegan's Wake' as a hypertext that has been restricted to the printed page. He also discusses what he calls "the geometry of interactive fiction", suggesting that narratives can be presented from different integrated perspectives, resulting in greater richness (Bolter, 1991:129). He believes that "electronic writing takes the modern literary experience one step further" and provides a number of suggestions as to how the medium of hypertext could be exploited to create new forms of literature.
This section on writing has concentrated mainly on authored hypertext, where a human writes and manually links the text. However, it is more likely that most hypertext in the future will be generated automatically by computers. What affect this will have on claims that hypertext will lead to a rebirth of literature is impossible to say, as it is unknown whether future generations will want to have what is today described as a literary reading experience. The ability to communicate, retrieve, and interpret information will be important in the future, but it is unknown whether being literate will also encompass having an interest in fictional literature and 'the arts' as it does today.
In this and the previous section, the tasks of reading and writing hypertext have been described. It should be clear now that hypertext blurs the traditional print-literate concepts of reading and writing to the extent that the role of the reader and the writer is often inseparable, and that being online- (hypertext-) literate is not the same as being print-literate.
The Perseus project is an electronic library currently under construction in the United States. It contains over a million words of ancient Greek text along with modern English translations and grammatical notes. This library also contains an historic atlas, a 30,000 word Greek dictionary, and pictures of archeological sites. All of this material is hypertextually interconnected, and constitutes an entire small research library. Although the aim of the Perseus project is to make the library available on a CD-ROM that is distributable, the information can easily be made accessible via a computer network.
The library of the future is not likely to be a monumental place of reading, with shelves of books and manuscripts, but a network centre where vast databases of electronic texts are stored. Librarians may still work to preserve old books, but the job of transcription will probably become more important, as the task of preserving enormous numbers of decaying books is likely to become too great. Bolter (1991:19) quotes Daniel Bell, who speculated in 1975 that the Yale University Library would, by the year 2040, need a staff of 6000 just to catalogue and store the books and reports that would come in each year. It has been estimated that there are 7000 journals in science alone, each producing more than 142 articles per year.
Libraries are already preparing themselves for a digital future. The Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bibliotheque de France are investigating digital storage and retrieval of books (Browning, 1993). Since the majority of texts published today exist in electronic form before they are printed, one of the main tasks is agreeing on a standard format for electronic storage. However, there are other significant problems, including the effect that electronic books will have on the economics of publishing and on copyright legislation, but each of the three great libraries, as well as a number of smaller libraries, is pushing ahead in its own way.
The French have the most ambitious project to create a library without walls. They are already scanning the pages of 100,000 great works of the 20th century. A new library building is scheduled for completion in 1995 and will accommodate 200 workstations, with network links to card catalogues, note-taking and bibliography software, and an electronic notebook system for researchers.
"France worries little about political correctness The bureaucracy can brush aside publishers' concerns over the implications of electronic distribution of texts with a speed and power that their English-speaking counterparts could never match" (Browning, 1993:65).The British and Americans are trying to sort out the economics of an electronic library before pushing ahead with ambitious projects. Nevertheless, the British Library is experimenting with the electronic distribution of documents from CD-ROM and the American Library of Congress is involved in debates on its future as an electronic library. The Information Industries Association, representing publishers, fears government subsidised competition and the American Literary Association fears an end to free services.
"The Library of Congress is talking compromise on both fronts. It says it will offer publishers a right of first refusal on all of its electronic projects though it is not clear how this will work. Similarly it promises to give librarians a guarantee that certain basic services will remain forever free" (Browning, 1993:110).Browning goes on to write that
"[i]f libraries do not charge for electronic books, not only can they not reap the rewards commensurate with their own increasing importance, but libraries can also put publishers out of business with free competition. If libraries do charge, that will disenfranchise people from information -- a horrible things. There is no obvious compromise."Although the dream of vast electronic libraries is alluring, and will eventually be technologically feasible, the legislative problems could result in a situation different to that which the great libraries envisage. Ted Nelson's blueprint for his Xanadu system, which is outlined in his book 'Literary Machines' (1987:1), is "a plan for a worldwide network, intended to serve hundreds of millions of users simultaneously from the corpus of the world's stored writing, graphics, and data".
Nelson's approach is to have a kind of pay-by-byte system where those that access information pay only for the information that they access. The alternative is for publishers, or even authors, to make their works available directly and independently on the computer networks, while 'libraries' operate as central databases of 'free' information, handling information that can be freely copied.
The effect of electronic libraries on literacy will depend on legislation regarding the future distribution of information. There is a danger that wealth rather than ability will determine an individual's ability to survive in an information economy if information becomes too expensive. A thorough reassessment of copyright-related legislation is necessary, as the ideas that have been described above either overlook the problem of copyright, or would be virtually crippled by it in practice. Hypertext complicates matters further because there is not a single text but an entire literature. How does one satisfactorily decide who owns what information when an entire literature is inter-linked?
The notions of authorial property and copyright are products of print technology, and it is not easy to see how they can survive in an open hypertext-based, globally networked, information future. Jennings (1992) optimistically quotes Landow as predicting that hypertext will "frame and historicise several such heretofore 'self-evident' Truths about Art."
Librarians appear to be optimistic too. In a paper on academic libraries delivered at a conference on library networking in the UK in 1992, Kelly (1993:83) writes that "[t]he library of the future could have the capability to offer a global commonwealth of information to all". His final reflection is that
"[w]e often speak of the communication bandwidth that will be required to carry all of this information. Could I, in conclusion, suggest that it is bandwidth of human imagination and courage that are required to achieve the goal of the universal commonwealth of information" (Kelly, 1993:83).
McLuhan contends that what is communicated is less important and less powerful than the medium itself ("The medium is the message"). In other words, each new technology affects society more than the information that it carries. He argues that after three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technology, the Western world is now imploding. He maintains that previous technologies, and in particular typographic technology, have served to isolate man from his feelings and emotions, but that the 'electronic media' will change this.
"Those who panic now about the threat of the newer media and about the revolution we are forging, vaster in scope than that of Gutenberg, are obviously lacking the cool visual detachment and gratitude for that most potent gift bestowed on Western man by literacy and typography: his power to act without reaction or involvement. It is this kind of specialisation by dissociation that has created Western power and efficiency. Without this dissociation of action from feeling and emotion people are hampered and hesitant. Print taught men to say, "Damn the torpedoes. Full steam ahead!" (McLuhan, 1964:178).McLuhan predicts that the result of this implosion will be the creation of the 'global village'. Global events will become as much a part of our daily lives as local events -- "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (McLuhan, 1962:31).
The 'global village' is the result of a significantly restructured global society, where everywhere is networked to everywhere else. "'Centers' exist everywhere" (McLuhan and Powers, 1989). By encouraging an 'online' literacy that favours associated thinking, hypertext can accelerate this change. "The type of literacy and the kind of social structure that this medium supports stand fundamentally against absolute property and hierarchy" (Moulthrop, 1991). Hypertext is a "fundamental reshaping of text production and reception" and, Moulthrop argues, "[t]he telos of the electronic society-of-text is anarchy in the truest sense: local autonomy based on consensus, limited by a restless disintegration of global authority."
There is little consensus on the subject of predicting the effects of these changes, if, indeed, they are allowed to take place. Writers such as Bolter (1991), Zuboff (1988), Tuman (1992) and Moulthrop (1991) are generally optimistic, but they also express some caution. Change can be frightening.
"Even without collision, such coexistence of technologies and awareness brings trauma and tension to every living person. Our most ordinary and conventional attitudes seem suddenly twisted into gargoyles and grotesques. Familiar institutions and associations seem at times menacing and malignant." (McLuhan , 1962:279).It is impossible to predict with certainty what the long-term effects of information technology will be on society and there is a real fear that there may be either a social backlash fuelled by fear of a technological future, a desire to return to 'traditional values', or an attempt by 'the authorities' to use information technology to cling tightly onto their power. However, it is difficult to assess the effects of hypertext on literacy without assuming that it will have a role in a more or less desirable future. The medium's ability to revive literacy on a large scale, possibly sparking off a literary renaissance, would be severely limited by it's use being restricted for political reasons. Waterworth is optimistic and predicts a liberalisation of access to information and communication of ideas and does not believe that attempts to restrict progress will succeed:
"Managements, and in some societies governments, will try to control this process. Such attempts seem unlikely to succeed in the long term since they run against an irresistible technological trend" (Waterworth, 1992:187).Hypertext encourages collaborative writing and, thus, cooperative and consensual thinking. Harnad suggests that those that are most likely to gain from collaboration will act as catalysts to promote networked computing as a social technology. The research community in particular will benefit from electronic publication because it is considerably faster than print and encourages feedback:
"The culprit is again the factor of tempo: the fact that the written medium is hopelessly out of synch with the human thinking mechanism and the organic potential it would have for rapid interaction if only there were a medium that could support the requisite rounds of feedback, IN TEMPO GIUSTO!" (Harnad, 1991).With hypertext, the speed of computer networks is exploited even further because not only can research be made available faster than before, it can also be annotated directly and be expanded by peers. Of course, hypertext not only allows for annotation and feedback, but is also a technology for linking new work into the literature that exists already, so each new text expands the frontiers of the subject literature.
The importance of consensus and cooperation, whether throughout society, within interest groups, or within and between organisations, is reflected in the work of Drucker (1989) and Handy (1989). Handy (1989:128) comments that "intelligent people prefer to agree rather than obey". In his discussion of what he calls 'the triple I organisation' (where the three I's are Intelligence, Information and Ideas), Handy writes that "intelligent organisations have to be run by persuasion and by consent" (1989:131). He warns that 'cultures of consent' are not easy to work in and require commitment. Thus, he writes
"The culture of consent is not, as the British would say, going to be everyone's cup of tea unless they are educated and prepared for it. There lies the challenge for our society" (Handy, 1989:133).Both Handy and Drucker predict a trend towards organisations consisting of interconnected project teams, an information infrastructure that is directly supported by hypertext and online literacy. Indeed, Tuman and Moulthrop (1991) comment that despite the extravagant assertions of hypertext evangelists, it is likely to be organisations and their information needs, rather than scholars, that will ultimately decide how hypertext is used on a large scale:
"The model of reading that will emerge with the triumph of hypertext in the twenty-first century is likely to be far more radical [than the shift in reading mode from aloud to silent in the nineteenth century] -- shaped more by practical business needs than by literary sensibilities -- than what most hypertext advocates are now willing to concede" (Tuman, 1992:79).As online 'reading' becomes a major economic activity, it will become increasingly important in education, perhaps becoming the dominant model of reading (Tuman, 1992:79). This may have consequences in defining the relative significance of hypertext for information storage and retrieval and hypertext as a literary authoring system for creative writing. Tuman believes that it is vital that the task of defining hypertext as a creative literary medium is started now in order to prevent the loss of narrative art:
"It is a task that we must begin immediately while the most highly literate among us still have solid contact with both worlds. Looking back from the world of computers, we are now able to see the serious limitations in the well-entrenched patterns and institutions of print; the literacy of print has exhausted itself as surely as the industrial culture that supported it has exhausted the natural world" (Tuman, 1992:138).Hypertext may also have significant influence on education by "redefining the role of instructors by transferring some of their power and authority to students" (Landow, 1992:123). Landow claims that hypertext environments "[free] learners from constraints of scheduling without destroying the structure and coherence of the course" (1992:131).Once again, this is really a reflection of the collaborative nature of hypertext and suggests a trend away from teaching, also advocated by Drucker:
"We now know how people learn We now know that learning and teaching are not two sides of the same coin. They are different. What can be taught has to be taught and will not be learned otherwise. But what can be learned must be learned. This new insight will increasingly shift the emphasis to learning" (Drucker, 1989:238).Hypertext appears to support the ideas of both futurists and post-modern theorists, whether they make direct reference to the technology or not. It demands reevaluation of print-based industrial society's way of thinking, supporting flatter networked organisations, consensus, cooperation and collaborative work, and learning rather than teaching. What it does not promise is smoother change, in that it provokes print-literate man to think radically about concepts that were previously taken for granted. Conversely, an online-literate person may find change more natural, and thus easier to accept, as the developments that take place may reflect the online-literate mode of thinking more closely.
Because hypertext requires a different mode of thinking and a redefinition of what it means to be literate, the effects of hypertext on culture may be more extensive than simply the recovery of print literacy and print culture. Some of these effects have been discussed in the previous section. The introduction of print led to a decline in literacy, until literacy was redefined to no longer mean "the ability to recite from memory long passages of important texts and as the ability to produce beautiful and accurate manuscript copy" (Tuman, 1992:18).
Major new media require a redefinition of what literacy is and so predicting whether hypertext can recover literacy from decline is difficult, because hypertext both recovers literacy and redefines what it is. An attempt to answer the question of whether hypertext will result in a new literary renaissance would be inadequate if the renaissance was required to be purely print-literate and not reflect online literacy. Assuming that various technical problems will eventually be overcome, it is tempting to answer a cautious 'yes', despite the current cultural domination of less mentally demanding media such as television and video.
Historically, each cognitive revolution has resulted in a surge in mass literacy (see for example McLuhan, 1962). Hypertext's ability to provoke a similar awakening rests largely on the question of whether the technology will become available to the masses. There are a number of recent, positive, developments that make it difficult to dismiss hypertext as a technological fad. Libraries of classic literary texts on CD-ROM are becoming increasingly common, but are largely used by scholars, wanting rapid access to the texts with powerful cross-referencing, rather than by people interested in reading for pleasure. This could be seen as an example of a trend towards reading for information gathering purposes rather than for personal satisfaction. This may be a consequence of the relatively high price of adequate hardware and software or because user interfaces are often designed for information retrieval purposes rather than encouraging reading for pleasure.
A virtual reality interface could greatly encourage reading by transforming it into a form of interactive entertainment. For example, Sun Microsystems is working on a project to create a virtual theatre (based on Shakespeare's Globe theatre) in which the user can immerse themselves inside the theatre and act any part in a play together with computer generated actors.
Another recent development that is particularly encouraging in the context of increased hypertext usage and acceptance is the phenomenal growth-rate of the Internet-based World-Wide Web (W3) hypertext system. Using a browser such as Mosaic, (developed by the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications in the United States and, significantly, given away free) users can easily access an enormous amount of hypertext-structured information, in addition to a range of other Internet resources.
Usage of the W3 is currently doubling every four months, and there are, in March 1994, at least 200 hypertext servers around the world (and that is a very conservative estimate). Although the W3 is a fairly limited hypertext system, it makes the retrieval of information from a vast information space easier than was previously possible, and so deficiencies, such as network speed and the lack of a clear overview of where the user is in the system relative to other locations, are easy to forgive. Many extensions have been proposed to make it more flexible and dynamic.
It is, therefore, difficult to dismiss the hopes of hypertext evangelists like Nelson and Bolter. Hypertext does appear to have the necessary appeal, as well as the power, to induce a new common literacy and a new literary renaissance of sorts. Nevertheless, the cognitive revolution that hypertext encourages requires radical reevaluation of social and political concepts regarding knowledge and information which may prove to be too great. Claims that hypertext will result in a new literary renaissance, as opposed to revolution, are even more difficult to accept or refute because it is impossible to predict whether traditional 'literary experiences' will be an important part of online-literate culture. The potential is there, but it is unclear whether it can, or will, be fulfilled.
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