Mexico 01
by eastgate on Mar 05, 2010
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Thoughts on Hypertext Narrative
Thoughts on Hypertext Narrative
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The light is good. Something is happening here. Someone may need the café.
How many links have we already created? You created some while you read this slide, before I began. Tonight, perhaps you will make more. Nothing is blue, or underlined.
People see the Web as all sorts of things, the reflection of their dreams, the image of their fears.
Independence means that you can create without fear of the boss, the client, the provost. This doesn’t mean without regard for others, but rather without fear. The streets of London cast a long shadow in these difficult days.
Just look at advice to bloggers, and you’ll see the same spectrum of concerns. Freedom from pettifogging editors. Freedom from corporate restrictions. Six figure income: the new gentility, which we can achieve from fifteen minutes of fame, or from Google ads and beggar’s bowls. Make viral media, and maybe Hollywood will offer you a job!
My own work has focused on what comes after the end of books – or, more precisely, on how we can make things that are much better than books at what books do.
But we have before us a new thing, a fresh literary machine with new affordances and new abilities and new problems. It draws on all our arts – literary, painterly, scientific. It creates places we will inhabit. It shapes language, and language shapes thought.
Today I’m going to talk a lot about narrative – descriptions of things that happened (or might happen) ranging from history and memoir to novels and instruction manuals and legal briefs.
Link make manifest many uncertainties we have on paper.
Cinema and the link
I sometimes play a very bad social game, just to see what’s happening. It’s very boring. But one of the other players, recently, was a young actress who broke her arm in a sword fight, and found out she had bone cancer, and so couldn’t play the game normally and needed helpers. The game was suddenly very serious and very compelling.
But reality is overrated. Art depends on removing detail, not adding more. And literal realism often distances us from the subject. The most accessible mass market happens today happens to be pre-adolescent, an age where realist art is more interesting than at any time before or after. But we should not let the wealth of pre-teens sway us any more than the opulence of the royal court.
Yet another problem with immersively real media is that they’re immersively real. The girl doesn’t stand, anymore, for an idea of sacrifice and the lost hopes of defeat. The more real she is, the more she’s a girl, a specific girl, somone else. Not you.
David Mamet argues that the natural tendency of cinema is the gradual disrobing of the actors and actresses. When everything is real, it’s the real that matters. Flesh is the enemy of the idea.
And -- even if you could overcome this -- it just won’t do. Let a sane and sensible protagonist like you into the room, and everything collapses Take Hamlet: it's absolutely obvious that he should go back to school, get roaring drunk, get laid, and await his opportunity. He knows this. Horatio knows this. Ophelia knows this. Even Claudius and Gertrude know — why else send for his college pals? Nobody can bring themselves to say the words — that's the tragedy. But what’s to stop you?
Perhaps this is connected to that clean and well lighted place I mentioned before.
In fact, whenever we see elements together, in sequence or in juxtaposition, montage or collage, we create a story.
Yea, paper is more usable than a screen. Unless the paper is in the Bodleian Library, and you’re in Buffalo or Brisbane.
Unless the paper is in your desk drawer, and there’s someone out there whose life it will change, but you have no idea who, and neither do they.
Screens are good enough. They’re getting better.
The end of books is not a disaster to be feared, any more than the end of clay tablets. Books are literary machines. We need literary machines that are better than books/
This is nonsense, of course. It’s been going on since Caesar Augustus shut down Ovid’s Web site. It has nothing to do with reading or writing or ideas, and everything to do with our jealousy of those kids of their nice bodies. Of course, you can’t talk about that in the US these days.
Many of the things we want to talk about, we can only talk about symbolically. From quantum mechanics to law to the nature of true love, symbols are often all we have.
But the computer IS a symbol machine! It’s perfect for the job -- as long as we don’t waste it by trying to make it recreate a the merely real. We may attempt this AGAINST the spirit of the medium, just as we may carve pillows in marble, but it is not the natural tendency of the medium.
(in Nunberg, Future of the Book, 299)
Reading in bed, reading in the bathtub, reading on the Day After The End Of The World.
The Bolter Test is merely a sign of terror in the face of change, which really expresses terror in the face of our mortality. And it’s a sign of lazy editors settling for an obvious master narrative.
Skeptics who talk a lot about the Bolter test also hate movies on VCR. The experience is so much better in a real theater. “Consistency is all I seek/Give us this day or daily week”
Capitalism may be a bad idea. It may be evil. But it’s NOT OUR FAULT.
The Google settlement is probably a disaster, but it’s not a tragedy. We have time to fix it.
They may be right. But what they are really expressing is the knowledge that they themselves will surely decay, the fear that they are already obsolete.
Hypertexts, and books, survive as long as the audience cares. It was ever thus, but it’s truer now than ever.
But suppose, instead of going there and right back, we went for a brief excursion before we came back to our starting point? That’s a cycle. Cycles in hypertext are EXTREMELY interesting, and annotations are tiny cycles.
Recurrence was once thought to reflect confusion, inefficiency. Going back to something already seen seemed -- wrong. You still see this at times in Information Archiotecture. But the theory was wrong, and hypertext right: there are many reasons to go home again, and we do it all the time. Recurrence is not an error: it is how we perceive that structure exists. Without recurrence, we cannot observe structure at all.
Hypertexts do not need to be clear, brief, and sincere -- any more than our other texts adhere to such virtues. Rhetoric, as Richard Lanham reminded us in THE ELECTRONIC WORD (though few paused to listen) is also part of the text. The feint is always present, and can be used to inform as well as to delight -- for utilitarian as well as artistic effect. It belongs to the vocabulary of the technical writer as much as to the poet.
Of course, this isn;t the way we tell stories — not just in our postmodern flights but also our histories, our war stories, our jokes.
Plot: how we describe what happened
Presentation: what we see on the page
So: we can change the story, or we can change the plot.
I mentioned this problem earlier. If we’re talking about death and the maiden and you can change the story, what exactly is the point? And if all your efforts cannot change the story, why invite people to try? Nature’s oppression is hard: the fraudulent game’s oppression is unbearable.
Look, for example, at these three Annunciations. Each is a fairly modern painting that assumes our familiarity with old masters. There is no variation of story here. Yet each tells a distinctly different story.
Notice, also, that these all work through allusion, and allusion has always been hypertextual and nonsequential.
A girl goes to her grandmother’s house. There, her bedridden grandmother has been replaced by a wolf. It’s a very small story with countless variations. Let’s look at one detail: when does the reader find out about the wolf?
Or perhaps we only discover the wolf while we are in progress through the woods. This is melodrama: the horror movie.
Or perhaps we only discover the wolf at the very last moment! This is comedy (if Little Red determines her fate through her effort and ingenuity) or romance (if she wins through because of her inner excellence)
Or perhaps she gets into bed with her grandmother, and only later do we find out what really happened. We’re in the world of Rashomon -- another important hypertext pattern -- or Coover’s “The Babysitter”.
Good. But won’t people find this confusing? I think not. We’ve done this before, after all.
In antiquity, books came on long scrolls. In the 4th century, people started to write instead on codexes -- bound books.
Isn’t this disorienting?
On the Web, we tend to call this AJAX.
In literary circles, the real objection was probably not to hypertext, but rather to modernism and postmodernism. In technical circles, the real objection to navigation is often network latency or rendering artifacts. Still, why not transform the text in place?
It turns out -- I’ll refer you to my Hypertext 09 paper for the details -- that the problem is formal. Stretchtext is a potent hypertext approach, but stretchtext makes it hard to vary the plot.
It’s popular to say, “Most people’s software needs are simple.” It’s popular to say, “they need simple tools.” This is a mistake.
Everyone's everyday tasks are filled with complex and important knowledge work. Yes, perhaps the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, but as designers we should seek to improve things. Our users may be living in universities or cities or in a shack by a pond named Walden (which happens to be down the road from Eastgate). They are doing good work, hard work.
We sometimes make fun of the Web because some Web writers have small audiences. If only your mother reads your Web site, isn’t that a pitiful failure? No: it’s good to write to you mother!
How do we know that what we are writing is any good? How might we talk about hypertext?
The patterns work, with which we began, has been popular because it provides some vocabulary. But let’s look beyond that, to craft and judgment.
Nobody knows how to make love more real, or how to make the Occupation more transparent. Next to these, the importance of making a banking transaction a few percentage points more efficiently loses some of its luster.
But we should be ready to make judgments without regard to page hits or conversion ratios.
Each note is a little box, a writing space. Some of the notes are linked. The computer helps keep things sorted in some useful ways. It stamps the time on each note, it alphabetizes the books I read by author and by title. It looks at what I’ve written and suggests related notes that use similar words and phrases. It assembles the notes into Web pages.
But lots of relationships can’t be mechanised, and for these we have containers and we have links — connections between notes, between ideas.
“The impulse to keep a diary is to actual diaries as the impulse to go on a diet is to actual slimness.”
Yet, as we have seen, the impulse to write often leads to actual writing.
Unexpected simplicity and remarkable concision create elegance. Nothing in software is more prized.