The Space Between

What Hypertext Is

The first step is the hardest. What is hypertext? Or should the question be worded, what is a hypertext? The term has been used both as a collective noun, naming a larger class of texts, and to name the individual texts that fall under that heading. The choice of which one gets used often has to do with how inclusive the author feels. Using the collective form indicates that hypertext is an established genre or at least type of text and that conclusions about it can be summarized and grouped under a single banner. For reasons that should become clear, this is not fair to hypertext; it is not unified and resists pigeonholing, as deconstructionists say about their own field: it resists labeling and manufactures, in a way, its own demise. At the same time, strictly referring to a hypertext or a hypertextual document robs some power from hypertext as a field. This usage implies that hypertext is no more than a certain variety of text, that it does not break enough new ground to have its own heading or label. This too, is unfair because it does not recognize the genuinely unique features that hypertext/s have by virtue of the technologies they with which they are written and read.

So the problem remains how to define these terms. Does it even matter? Since the turn of the century, the word hypertext has lost much of its currency. In the 1990s when the World Wide Web became popular, the word was used often, but as time went on and network technologies became common, rigorous terminology slipped into slang. Hypertext became synonymous with World Wide Web, which then, in its own turn, became synonymous with Internet until users of the Web dropped the capital letter and came to call an icon on their computer desktops the Internet. On top of this, so many different, yet related, technologies were invented along with the Web that if there ever was a true definition of hypertext, it has now been lost among a—pardon the pun—web of usages. As hypertext critic Espen Aarseth writes, hypertext is a “fluid, ill-defined concept with unclear borders.” True hypertext, he says, is forever and Platonically out of reach because it epitomizes “a technological utopian condition of perfect communication” (Aarseth).

Despite the confusion, a working definition is possible. Hypertext is a text that allows its users to easily leap from one portion of the reading to another text or to a different part of the same text. Under this logic, an encyclopedia could be called a hypertext, though some might debate how “easy” it is to get from one lexia to another. Hypertext gets its most common modern meaning from the inclusion of electronic reading and writing technologies, a.k.a. the computer and its associated networks. However, a hypertext does not have to be connected to a network or to the Internet. Many of the earliest hypertexts and hyper-novels were circulated on CD-ROM, entirely contained on a single disk. The defining quality was not their breadth—though many of them certainly were large—but the linking technology that readers used while reading the hypertext. These links are analogous to footnotes and citations in print, but rather than asking the reader to turn the page of divert her eyes to the bottom of the page, hyperlinks brought the linked material to the reader at her command.

However, in the article that lent its name to the title of this section, Noah Wardrip-Fruin takes a stand against this link-dependent definition. As with other academic terms, he writes, a serious look at hypertext’s definitions begins with “the work of the thinker who coined them,” Thedor Nelson (Wardrip-Fruin 1). The link-dependent definitions, he says, do not fall in line with how Nelson originally defined it in his own early writings.

More than anything, Theodor Nelson wanted the hypertextual system he envisioned in 1960 to be a method of communication that promoted academic freedom, a goal closely linked to his philosophy on computers in general. He wrote that the “purpose of the computer is human freedom, so the purpose of hypertext is overview and understanding” (Nelson “Opening” 56). Nelson’s inspiration came from his thinking about print literature, which for him was already a “connected system of documents.” Inside this “docuverse,” the connections between fields of study and genres were complex and tangled (Nelson “Opening” 53-4).

In 1960, Nelson began work on Project Xanadu, a system of computers that would have allowed scholars to cite any document in the system at any time while protecting the integrity of the original document. The project’s mission statement, states that for almost a half-century, Xanadu has “fought for a world of deep electronic documents—with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.” Nelson summarizes the project:

...proposing an entire form of literature where links do not break as versions change; where documents may be closely compared side by side and closely annotated; where it is possible to see the origins of every quotation; and in which there is a valid copyright system—a literary, legal and business arrangement—for frictionless, non-negotiated quotation at any time and in any amount. (Nelson “Xanalogical”)

Nelson describes Xanadu as being similar to cutting a book into chunks and rearranging the pieces. Though the order and usage of those chunks changes, they remain as pieces of a larger whole. They are not transformed through citation or usage into something different or new. And in the process of all this fair use, Xanadu would keep track of copyrights.

In “Xanalogical Structure,” Nelson writes that Xanadu is an “alternative paradigm for a computer universe.” He says the Web has corrupted the original idea of Xanadu making it hard to find stable links and reliable citations online. “Fonts and glitz,” he writes, “rather than content connective structure, prevail.” He goes on:

The World Wide Web was not what we were working toward, it was what we were trying to *prevent*. The Web displaced our principled model with something far more raw, chaotic and short-sighted. Its one-way breaking links glorified and fetishized as “websites” those very hierarchical directories from which we sought to free users, and discarded the ideas of stable publishing, annotation, two-way connection and trackable change.

According to Wardrip-Fruin’s reading, Nelson saw hypertext as a form of hypermedia that works “textually,” including the link-based “‘discrete hypertext’ (of which the Web is one example) and the level-of-detail-based ‘stretchtext’” (Wardrip-Fruin 2). By “textually,” Nelson means a document that is ultimately readable in some way, despite being perhaps an amalgam of various kind of media. Moreover, the new definitions that are coming forward, which include the idea of association-building and “structured knowledge work” are not appropriate definitions either (Wardrip-Fruin 1). Wardrip-Fruin suggests that scholars of hypertext must disregard these definitions in favor of one that focuses more on the media involved, rather than what is done with/to them (Wardrip-Fruin 2).

There is some benefit to thinking of hypertext as a medium rather than as the way a users work with it. By going back to Nelson’s words and defining the medium, Wardrip-Fruin hopes to permanently establish a genre of hypertext. Reading methods, like the hyperlink structure, can change. The book, for example, introduced the notion of solitary, silent reading because the characteristics of its medium, the bound volume, allowed for portability—hence the ability to take it away from others to a room of your own. The bound volume also discouraged tandem reading; two or more people have a hard time crowding around a single book. So the pre-book reading techniques—which of course require a broader definition of “reading” that includes listening to spoken language—changed when the emergent, popular medium offered new possibilities. As books evolved, eventually moving into the realm of print, new reading characteristics developed in reaction to the medium’s changes. If this logical order is correct, then Wardrip-Fruin’s idea of approaching hypertext as a medium would allow hypertext critics to look at causes rather than effects.