The Space Between

2

Introduction

There is a space between the author and the reader, one that exists naturally as a result of the technology of writing. This space is both physical and temporal. Writing can record speech, either actual or potential, and thought, coding that information into language for the reader to decode later. The amount of information and the efficiency of this transmission vary depending on a number of factors, from context to social upbringing to education. A space opens between the author and reader because the two of them do not have to be in the same place for this transmission to happen. The author may be located around the world from the reader, the physical space; or the author may have written yeas ago or even be long dead, the temporal space.

Space, in a sense, also exists between individual writings. Some readers and authors believe that an individual text is distinct, that it lacks connections to other texts. In a case like this, it is up to the reader to make his own connections between two or more texts. We call this interpretation, and if the reader then writes about those connections and analysis, we call it criticism. But the task of making connections is not easy. It relies heavily on memory, past experience, and context. While some conventions in writing have been developed over the centuries to help in this task (indexes, bibliographies, tables of contents, glossaries, etc.), bridging the intertextual space remains difficult.

Computer technologies may provide a way. In 1945, Vannevar Bush called for a review of the ways that scholarly readers around the world shared information, both across physical and intertextual spaces. In “As We May Think,” Bush wrote, “Professionally, our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose” (Bush). In his time, at the tail end of World War II, scholarship was moving faster, and more was being written than ever before. As the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, Bush saw ways the world could benefit from the hundreds of thousands of hours of research conducted during the war. He proposed a new way for scholars to communicate, a system called the memex, a desk-sized machine much like a modern computer, though reliant on punch cards and not circuit boards. The memex was intended to model human memory. A memex user might read a text and then link it to another text by association. These “trails” were what Bush saw as the “essential feature of the memex” because they allowed the user to return to what he or she was doing, perhaps months later, and recall those same trails with the push of a button.

The memex would have bridged the intertextual space nicely by giving readers an easy way to retrace their connections without having to sort through volumes of notes. And though it was meant to model memory, the memex would have ironically reduced the need for detailed memories of those intertextual connections. The details of those trails would be recorded for them, and the way in which texts were connected would have jogged the user’s memory as to the details. Bush also addressed the physical space with the memex by allowing users to share their trails with others. Though this still would have required physically transporting a record of those connections to someone else’s memex device.

But the memex was intended chiefly for scientific readers who, it could be argued, need to make more intertextual connections than scholars of, perhaps, literature. But that changed with the rise of literary theory in the twentieth century. For myriad reasons, literary scholars began to question traditions in literature and found new ways to read and interpret texts. Even the definition of a “literary text” broadened to include elements of popular culture that would not have been considered worthy of study before theory. Contextuality and intertextuality became much more important to the study of literature than ever before, as did studies of power relationships. Established traditions were questioned, and authors became, for some, the agents of colonial or cultural power. Ideas culled from other ideologies—Marxism, for example—transformed under theory into useful ways to look at literature. In other words, scholars began looking at the places where cultures, texts, readers, traditions, and history collided. The “space between” became very interesting.

In addition to appropriating material from other fields of study, theorists in the 1950s and 1960s began to look at the way new technologies challenged traditional approaches to literature. The popularity of television, radio, and film not only broadened what counted as literature but also forced theorists to look at print as one medium among many. Though centuries of use had turned print into the chief medium for serious scholarly communication, the rash of technological developments after World War II suddenly gave print competition.

Among those post-war technologies threatening print was the computer. The first computers, like the vacuum-tube leviathan ENIAC that was unveiled in 1946, were number-crunching machines without the ability to communicate in ways that a normal person could understand (without a doctorate in physics or mathematics). But then, in 1960, Theodor Nelson began work on Project Xanadu, an endeavor to make computers user-friendly. More than that, Nelson saw what computers could do with raw data and numbers, and he wondered what that kind of power could do to text. The eventual result was what Nelson termed a “hypertext.” Though it will be problematically defined below, suffice to say, a hypertext is generally a computerized document that allows users to easily access it, search it, and navigate it, usually through a series of links between documents; and rather than the reader sifting through the text, traveling toward the desired pages, the hypertext document brings those words to the reader. Hypertexts give readers more control to shape their reading experience than ever before.

Hypertext, along with being a technology, is a new way of reading that can remove linearity from a text. The order in which an author set down her words no longer necessarily matters. With hypertext, the reader can produce her own unique instance of a text; and though readers have read printed books and articles out of order for almost as long as that technology has existed, the hypertext provides tools designed specifically to undermine its own stability. For example, a person reading a hypertext novel might read one chunk of text, or lexia in Barthes’ terms, and then be asked to choose from a set of options as to what the “next” page will be. By the time the reader finishes, she may not have read all possible lexias, and should she return to try to “finish,” she will find a different text, even if only by small degrees. Printed books—with a few exceptions like encyclopedias, dictionaries, and books openly trying to break up their own reading order (usually to emulate hypertext)—always have a privileged reading order: the order they were bound in, the order the author set down. A hypertext, on the other hand, provides no such order. It provides only text waiting to be read however the reader wills.

Hypertext does more than just give the reader more control. It complicates the author’s relationship with the text. Remember that writing traditionally separates the author and the reader both physically and temporally. Writing literally removes the life from language by allowing it to exist without the speaker’s breath. In his famous essay “What is an Author?”, Michel Foucault states that as an author writes, he “cancels out the signs of his particular individuality,” making the author “nothing more than the singularity of his absence” (141). That absence is linked with power: who has it and who does not. For example, Richard Lanham suggests in The Electronic Word that writing’s power comes from “the role it allows the writer to play” (220). He explains:

The writer seems to speak as we do, but actually speaks from a different time scale, one that condenses years of work and thought into minutes of reading time. The rush we get from reading great writing comes from that sudden, almost instantaneous transfer of power. No writer’s role, no transfer of power. (220)

Lanham here addresses the temporal space and asserts that writing gives the writer the ability to command great power across that space. When he talks about “writing’s power,” he is speaking from the point of view of the reader, as if to say “the power writing has over us as readers.” Authorial power affects readers across great distances.

Yet hypertext is not a medium for the one-way transfer of power. Electronic reading and writing practices also bring the author back into the text, narrowing the physical and temporal space. With hypertext, it is possible to converse with an author in real time, shortly after or perhaps during the reading. Several experiments sponsored by the Institute for the Future of the Book in New York have attempted to do just that by letting readers take part in the writing process. McKenzie Wark’s forthcoming book GAM3R7H3ORY 1.1 has been written on the World Wide Web with specially designed software that lets readers comment on chapters as Wark posts them to the Web. Those comments are publicly accessible, and Wark has incorporated some of them into his draft. The book, according to the Institute’s Web site, is part of their continuing effort to “investigate new approaches to writing in the networked environment … to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text” (Vershbow, Wark and Wilbur). Along with Wark’s book, the Institute has several other projects underway, including an interactive version of the recent Iraq Study Group Report which allows readers to comment on individual paragraphs, a running “conversation in the margins.”

What difference does this make? Readers of critical editions have had access to authors’ notes and drafts for years. It is not uncommon for readers to glimpse the writing process, but that treatment is given to only a handful of the most famous and researched authors. Moreover, critical editions take years to compile and are always retrospective, and there is the question of what merits inclusion, an issue that Foucault addresses in his attempt to define the work:

Even when an individual has been accepted as an author, we must still ask whether everything that he wrote, said, or left behind is part of his work. The problem is both theoretical and technical. When undertaking the publication of Nietzsche's works, for example, where should one stop? Surely everything must be published, but what is “everything”? Everything that Nietzsche himself published, certainly. And what about the rough drafts for his works? Obviously. The plans for his aphorisms? Yes. The deleted passages and the notes at the bottom of the page? Yes. What if, within a workbook filled with aphorisms, one finds a reference, the notation of a meeting or of an address, or a laundry list: is it a work, or not? Why not? And so on, ad infinitum. (142-43)

With the above example, Foucault has only to deal with notes that were written by Nietzsche himself. Left out are the other marks that might have found their way into a manuscript, notes that were perhaps not made by the author. Should they be considered part of the text? Would they be part of a critical edition?

Web-based, hypertextual projects like GAM3R7H3ORY contain traces of reader commentary, but when the monograph is published, those “marginal” comments will be limited. There will be no doubt who the author of the book is. But other Web-native projects are not as clear about authorship. Take for example, the Wikipedia, the Web’s largest encyclopedia. Launched in 2001, the site relies on reader-generated content; every article was written by, often, amateur and, more often, anonymous contributors. Any visitor to the site can either edit an existing entry or create a new one, a process that opens the door for vandalism and abuse. With over 1.6 million articles, Wikipedia is one of the most visited Web sites online, and academics have begun to question its accuracy. Despite a study, published in Nature, that compared the Wikipedia to the Encyclopedia Britannica and found them to be similarly accurate, the question remains: can an anonymously created text ever be trusted? If we think of authors and readers as the boundaries that define the space between them, then when one of those boundaries is missing, all that is left is unbound space. It is a level of uncertainty that some find uncomfortable.

This kind of “wreaderly” behavior begs the question of just who has the power to create a text in the age of hypertext, the reader or the author? Thanks to sites like the Wikipedia, where so much has been accomplished by anonymous contributors working together to create a functional whole, modern critics are left to wonder whether the “author” is even necessary.

And when it seems that user-generated hypertexts are eliminating authorship and individuality, we must remember that the Web is supported by a complex system of economics. Along with giving readers a new way to look at literature and culture, the Web has also provided new models of commodification. In the early 1990s, as the Web became more and more popular, users learned to “surf the Web” and travel the “Information Superhighway.” Spatial metaphors abounded as a new “frontier” opened for settlement, and as with any new territorial discovery, entrepreneurs found ways to make money online. This “land grab” was so quick that after just six years, critic Geoffrey Nunberg wrote in 1996 that “access to the Internet has already become so widespread that many of the academics and technologists who pioneered its development have begun to complain about its vulgarization” (Nunberg 13). In the face of early theorists who championed the egalitarian, democratic characteristics of hypertextual networks, the Web evolved around commerce (hence, dot-com). The individual, not the community, was the focus. On an Internet where as many as 60 million users a day choose their reading paths through search engines owned by billion-dollar corporations, the divide between the economics of the individual and the benefit of the community comes into play. Where does the individual intersect with the communal? When a literate society places so much value on authorship, what happens in an environment where the connection between genius and product are blurred?

With this thesis, I intend to look at hypertext and its related electronic writing technologies through the power struggle between author and reader that is excited by networked hypertexts. Will the space between authors and readers be narrowed so much that the two entities merge? Is the author dying off and being replaced by a hybrid “wreader”? Will the author’s return to the reading, thanks to the features of many hypertext programs, make a substantial difference in the way readers read? I think that the answer to these questions is yes.

The emergence and popularization of hypertext and its related technologies and derivatives over the past 20 years has caused an anxiety of belatedness in the print world, as “purists” struggle to hold on to elements of that tradition. Books remain popular because of this resurgence in interest, yet the Web (including Web 2.0) and its style of sometimes frenetic, nonlinear reading have also grown in popularity, provoking reactions from scholars like Lindsay Watters, who believes that silent, sustained reading is the way to deeper scholarship. At the same time, hypertext and the Web are heavy with allusions and references to print. It is a heritage that is hard to escape because it takes readers into unfamiliar territory, the liminal space between print and hypertext.

Authorship, too, must weather hypertext. Just as musicians in the Information Age must face digital pirates who undermine their status as owners of their own work and as directors like George Lucas must face re-edited versions of their own films disseminated around the world, the authors of printed texts must face the fact that their works, once released, may find their way online, where they can be traded easily and without regard for ownership. Is this space between copyright and free-distribution a form of anarchy, or is it egalitarian? Does the institution of authorship face eventual extinction as generations of new “wreaders” forget what pure authorship once was? That depends on whether we believe in the notion of “pure authorship,” especially since evidence suggests that notion, along with intellectual property, is only a product of economics and history. The demise of godlike author should not be mourned, but does this mean that the reader should have the freedom to play with texts as she wishes? Can we stand a world without boundaries between authors and readers, where the space between seems to have vanished, jumped over instantly by a hyperlink?