Hypertext and the Age of Connectivity

Hypertext

The rise of electronic media has brought about an Age of Connectivity.

This man may

have predicted it.

The rise of electronic media has brought about an Age of Connectivity.

His work defined the fieldof media theory.

The argument describes four types of culture.

oral culture

manuscript culture

typographic culture

electronic culture

participation control

collage linear perspective

For McLuhan, the

paradigmaticelectronic

medium was television.

Neil Postmandid not like this.

a medium thatprivileges emotion

a medium thatprivileges reason

Enter hypertext.

oppositions overcome.Enter hypertext.

hot/cool

producer/consumer

oral/typographic

a different textual medium requires

As Ted Nelson said,

a different way of writing text.

dynamic static

hierarchy

collage

Hypertext Structure on the Grid

Yahoo

VictorianWeb Blogs

Wikipedia flickr

del.icio.us

User recs.

Google

Its promise…

When we post and…tag pictures on … Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions.

-Kevin Kelly, Wired

[Electronic communication promises a] Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity.

-Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy

…and peril.

…[T]he cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses [has become] a technological brain for the world.

Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer…And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence…Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.

-Marshall McLuhan, ibid.