[Networked hypertext] is indeed an exciting, provocative if frequently frustrating medium for the creation of new narratives, a potentially revolutionary space, capable, exactly as advertised, of transforming the very art of fiction, even if it now remains somewhat at the fringe, remote still, in these very early days, from the mainstream.
Electronic text processing marks the next major shift in information technology after the development of the printed book. It promises (or threatens) to produce effects on our culture, particularly our literature, education, criticism and scholarship, just as radical as those produced by Gutenberg’s movable type.
The novel … as we know it, has come to its end … True freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text … With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes … hypertext presents a radically divergent technology … Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners and co-writers, as it were, fellow-travelers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetic and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.
Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.
Information has now become a form of garbage. We don’t know what to do with it, have no control over it, don’t know how to get rid of it. In the fact of this, we propose to spend billions on a super-information network. To do what? Instead of 60 TV channels, we’ll have 500, maybe a thousand. We’ll have access to more entertainment, more sports, more commercials, more news – faster, more conveniently, in more diverse forms. We will, in other words, flood our lives with that from which we are already drowning.
[The Internet is] like a television station without programmers or a newspaper without editors – or rather, with millions of programmers and editors, a lot more opinionated than polished. Like it or not, in a time seemingly dominated by giant communications empires, the amateurs may hold the key after all.
Blending our actual telephones and televisions will surely require a lot more than FCC approval. The video side of the information superhighway is a one-way street and will remain so for a long time – even if interactive boxes do someday let us send a few bytes worth of nay votes up the line toward Geraldo.
A highway makes sure you can’t even stop at a restaurant that might serve something local. So with the communications superhighway, I think. Five hundred channels sounds wonderful – but the 500 channels, and the electronic bulletin board, and the CD ROM Louvre, will still be showing the same narrow band of human experience, the only parts that can come across a screen. Vast amounts of information – the kind one gets from contact with other human beings or with the natural world or with live performance or with one’s own navel – remains beyond even the fiber-optified magicians.
It is the new standard by which literacy must be judged, and for a time whole nations, but perhaps for government elites, will in effect be made newly illiterate. They need not remain so: This is easier to overcome than hunger or drought. New tasks for future Peace Corps: wire up the global village.
And, if it is not clear who owns what in digitized hyperspace, it is also not clear, beyond the sale of hardware, just where the profits are … If telephony and cable put a lock on the hard-wiring, watch for pirate satellite ships.