The Space Between

Spatiality and Mash-ups

Jay David Bolter writes that computers and hypertext were designed as symbol manipulators that used language and mathematics to produce an expected effect. His 1993 essay, “Writing on the World,” pondered virtual reality: the use of computer simulations to recreate sensory input and trick a user into thinking that its simulation was reality. Despite the fact that the actual technology is little closer to being a reality now than when Bolter wrote, the idea of virtual reality redefined computers as perception processors, whose goal was “to replace the world as we know it through our senses with another world…telepresence,” removing “any sense of difference or separation between the viewer and the view” (“Writing on the World: The Role of Symbolic Communication in Graphic Computer Environments” 3).

Bolter’s idea can be expanded to include eliminating the separation between authors and readers and between signifier and signified. This is not a new idea. In 1909, E.M. Forster published a short story entitled “The Machine Stops.” In this early science fiction, Forster creates a world in the distance future in which all humans live in underground pods:

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk - that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh - a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

Every such room around the world is identical, and all of them are maintained by the Machine, a global system that refreshes the air, delivers entertainment, educates the citizens, and (rarely) arranges transportation. The Machine is so old and vast that no one understands how it works.

People in Forster’s imagined world speak to each other through something like videophones and have developed a disdain for personal contact. Indeed, Forster writes, “The clumsy system of public gathering has been long since abandoned.” The people prefer to say in their rooms, allowing the Machine to supply their every need. In the story, the woman, Vashti, receives a call from her son who wants her to visit him in person. “But I can see you!” Vashti replies. “What more do you want?” Vashti, believing herself so well-connected to humanity through the Machine, cannot see any benefit to a face-to-face encounter.

On one level, Forster’s story cautions against relying too much on machines. By isolating humanity from itself and from nature, machines will stagnate the mind and eventually cause the collapse of society. Despite the doomsday scenario, elements of the tale are eerily prescient of the Internet and virtual reality, especially Vashti’s fear of isolation. Though characters can isolate themselves from the flow of communication at any time by pressing a button, most see it as a waste of time. More important, though, is Vashti’s confusion between virtual reality and “real” reality. She knows the difference between the two, but her utilitarian view of life does not include wasting time to physically visit someone when it can be done instantly through the Machine. For Vashti, the image, the representation, is as good as the real. Crossing space is an unnecessary waste of time.

Her near-religious apprehension of the Machine complicates her feelings as well. Though she denies having faith in a god or following any religion, she sees her son’s questions about the Machine as mild blasphemies and reacts in much the same way the devout might respond to someone taking their god’s name in vain. Vashti even reads from the Machine’s manual, the “book of the Machine,” daily; and it is the one item she takes with her when she goes to visit her son because its presence comforts and reassures her of the Machine’s higher power. Forster’s allegory warns the pious against blind faith and also hints that religion could really be no more than a misunderstood creation of mankind. The worship of symbols and images, in other words, is the real waste of time.

Allegory aside, Bolter’s essay addresses a similar secular worship of images through text, an appropriate approach considering that Bolter is an expert on the history of print. Images are powerful, and he reminds his readers of the old saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words.” Pardon the puns, but in other words this means literally that a picture could be translated into text, not with a hundred percent accuracy, of course, but far more accurately than the reverse: text to image. Writing has recorded not only speech and thought but also live observations for millennia, but far less attention has been paid to translating text into images (unless you consider the text itself to be an image or glyph, which it technically is). A picture cannot fully capture the meanings present in a written. That is why all those Hollywood adaptations of popular novels fail to satisfy like the books did. Ultimately, images and writing are different kinds of communication. Images are seemingly more “present” because they can be experienced without language. Text, like the human presence in Forster’s story, requires more work; it requires effort from both author and reader to cross the space between, and it is vastly more nuanced and complex.

But presence and spatiality play important roles in the history of print too. When people first began to write, before paper was invented, Bolter says people “wrote on the world,” on tablets, the soil, buildings, rocks, wherever they could. And from very early on, words and images were combined in the same space, what Bolter calls “spatialized text” (“Writing on the World: The Role of Symbolic Communication in Graphic Computer Environments” 5). An example of spatialized text can be seen during the opening credits of the television series Rome, a drama set around the assassination of Julius Caesar. As the show begins, the viewer sees the city of Rome as it might have looked during the time of Caesar. Rather than the bleached white buildings that greet tourists today, the viewer sees what history tells us was once there: illustrations, drawings, graffiti, Latin phrases, representations of the gods, etc. More than that, some of the images are animated. Snakes slither, warriors battle, lovers kiss. The city comes alive. Though the graffiti plays no role in the show itself, its credits exemplify how the combination of images and text can move writing into the third dimension, a kind of virtual reality that parallels “real” reality. Rather than freezing meaning in place, writing becomes part of the environment. Instead of a metaphor for death, spatialized text connotes life. Writing becomes vital and real.

Some modern hypertexts allow computer users a similar power to write on the world around them. In a project that Bolter worked on at Georgia Tech, software modeled the city of Atlanta and allowed its users to make notes on the digital copy. Some early operating systems were even modeled in 3-D so users could navigate through their personal files in a digital simulacrum of a city. A modern example is Google Earth, a Web site that combines satellite photographs of the earth with a labeling feature. By default, the program marks major highways, roads, and streets, layering them atop the photographs. A realistic representation of the world is thus turned into a multi-layered map. Users may also make their own notes and reference points, creating a personal copy of their world.

Now the question is whether this counts as hypertext or merely software. If we take the characteristic-based definition of hypertext, then Google Earth qualified as one because it contains links to lexias outside of itself. A map point indicating a florist might contain information culled from their phonebook entry and a link to their Web page. Multiple databases and resources are pulled together into one site for easy of use. From that point of view, it is certainly a hypertext, but is that also true from the Wardrip-Fruin media-oriented point of view? Is Google Earth a medium that offers users a unique reading experience, a “textual” experience to use Nelson’s words? Well, look at what Google Earth is: a coordinated blend of the visual and the textual. It pulls information from both its own sources and the entire Web, taking only what it needs and leaving the originals intact, even referring the reader to those sources; and since the pool of information it pulls from is constantly updated, it is rarely out of date. The program blurs the line between different media types, creating what Nelson would call a “hypermedia” environment that is more than any one media alone.

It is original? Not necessarily. This hypermedia document combines elements of existing media, but in doing so it creates a new kind of medium, one designed to replace certain print resources, like atlases and phonebooks. Whereas print is fixed in space on the page, hypertexts like Google Earth remain fluid and malleable. In addition, independent hypertext designers have taken a cue from what Google Earth does and taken it a step further, creating what industry analysts are calling mash-ups, after a similar phenomenon in hip-hop music. Many of these combine Google’s features with other sites’ functionalities, like one site that automatically plots online housing vacancies on a Google Earth map. Another plots Chicago crime statistics on a Google map, letting users visualize where crime happens and read details about it. This is just one mash-up reporter Robert Hof mentions in “Mix, Match, and Mutate.” He writes:

Suddenly, hordes of volunteer programmers are taking it upon themselves to combine and remix the data and services of unrelated, even competing sites. The result: entirely new offerings they call “mash-ups.” They’re the Web versions of Reese’s (“Hey, you got peanut butter on my chocolate!”) Peanut Butter Cups. (Hof)

Hof sees mash-ups as the future of the Web, the epitome of Web 2.0. He writes, “No longer just a collection of pages, the Web is morphing into a sort of global operating system.… And now, people are learning to program Web 2.0 with much of the same innovative energy of the personal computer’s early days.” The benefit, writes Hof, is that users are “seizing far more control of what they do online.”

Like the animations at the beginning of each episode of Rome, the established texts and layouts of hypertexts do not stay put. This is partly because there is no physical place for them to be fixed, as they exist only in the world of electrons and magnetism. Hypertext is both nowhere and everywhere. Yet like the graffiti in Rome—and I use that word, graffiti, very specifically as a term for writing or art that defiles existing writing or art—it also shifts and changes because of readers who take it upon themselves to change the hypertexts, to give them functionality they didn’t originally have, to seize power that was originally the province of the hypertext’s author. The readers take control of the hypertext writing space.