The Space Between

Resistance to Change

At those points in history when one medium overtook another as the chief means of written communication, the older medium never disappeared completely or quietly. Its supporters kept it alive, much as we see some writers (and professors) loathe to use a computer, preferring the typewriter or the quill pen. Even though it may seem like a good idea, the new medium must overcome the resistance to it, a process that has only become more difficult with time. Print had much less social pressure to overcome when it overtook the handwritten book because the readers of handwritten books comprised a relatively small part of the population (due I suspect to low literacy rates).

Over the past five hundred years, though, an increasingly higher percentage of people have learned to read, increasing the demand for printed material to read. More people reading more books results in a much higher resistance to change. Because of this, hypertext has had a very hard time winning over generations raised in the print world, prompting hypertext designers to find ways to win over the holdouts. And the easiest way to win a book lover over to a hypertext is to make the hypertext both easy to use and booklike. The results are methods for creating hypertexts that work hard to emulate the look, feel, and functionality of printed matter, methods that take hypertext further and further away from being a unique medium. Instead it has become print-PLUS! As Jay David Bolter writes, hypertext is little more than a “supplement to alphabetic writing” (“Writing on the World: The Role of Symbolic Communication in Graphic Computer Environments” 8).

A more full discussion of this bookishness comes later in the thesis. For now, it is enough to understand that hypertext cannot be easily defined. Observation leads to a definition based on characteristics, like hyperlinks and database-driven dynamic content. Wardrip-Fruin sees this approach as historically inaccurate and as an analysis that begins with effects. He wants to think of hypertext as a medium whose innate abilities lead to those effects, a move that, if successful, would make hypertext into a genre of its own. Yet hypertext designers are not without their own anxieties of influence. To win over print readers, they must emulate print, sacrificing originality for popularity.