Henning Ziegler on Thu, 3 Oct 2002 13:21:14 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> Hypertext pre.0.1 |
[Here is a second draft of the first section of my hypertext essay for new critique/comments. You might see me working on it via web cam at http://www.automatenbar.de... ;-) -Henning] ++++++ Why Hypertext became Uncool Notes on the Power Struggles of the Cultural Interface Henning Ziegler 1 Introduction Cyberspace is where the bank keeps your money. -William Gibson I must have been one of the last people to ditch Victory Garden. On a hot day in late 1999, as a relative newcomer to digital media studies, I was clicking through Stuart Moulthrop's 1995 CD-ROM on an Apple Macintosh in the McHenry library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I had heard a lot of enthusiastic criticism about the work, so as it was finally flickering on the screen before me, I did at first feel somewhat intrigued. That feeling, however, quickly gave way to the loneliness of a reader in a hyperlink maze; trying to make sense of what then felt like 'post-modern' writing in digital form, I was simply annoyed at the impossibility of arriving at a mental model of the digital rhizome that was spreading wider and wider before my eyes with each click. A reading experience, I held then and I hold now, basically is strategically building many contradictive voices of a text into a mental whole. With Victory Garden, that just didn't work. If a book consists of materially sedimented social antagonisms, unchangeable but contradictive, the problem with hypertext is that simply stays fluid-my reading became socially meaningless in that it was only one among many; I was equally distanced from the text as I was from my fellow readers of Victory Garden. Looking back, it seems to me that during that afternoon in the library, then, I had lived through the second half of the 90s again-the period when hypertext gradually became uncool. What happened during that time? In the first half of the 90s, books such as Landow's Hypertext 2.0 or Bolter's Writing Space celebrated the coming of a new age for a medium that is a metaphor of the mind: decentered, fragmentary, associative. Symptomatic of these early publications is a statement that artist Nicole Stenger made in her essay "Mind is a leaking rainbow," which is included in Michael Heim's 1991 book Cyberspace: First Steps: "cyberspace, though born of war technology, opens up a space for collective restoration, and for peace. As screens are dissolving, our future can only take on a luminous dimension! Welcome to the new world." The company Eastgate built a whole business around this ideology with its costly, professional hypertext editing program Storyspace and CD-ROM releases of major hypertext fiction such as Moulthrop's Victory Garden (1995) or Michael Joyce's Afternoon, a Story (1990), both written with Storyspace. Since then, however, hypertext (in the sense of an authoritative, closed artwork) has steadily been on the decline, alongside with the 'New Economy.' Comparatively expensive hypermedia works, shipped in boxes that blow one CD-ROM up to the size of a small paperback, did not overtake books in sales-after all, you would hardly bring your Apple Powerbook to the beach for a read. So the Digerati were as quick to turn away from hypertext as they were to hype it before. What you got now were remarks like "Hypertext? Oh yeah... been there, done that." Stefan Porombka's 2002 publication Hypertext nicely illustrates this turn: Porombka's basic argument is that the libratory hype about hypertext constitutes a narrative in itself. What gets lost in this argument and in an all too quick turning away from hypertext, however, is a critical discussion of the reasons why hypertext 'failed.' Or, in my mind, the critical remarks about hypertext hurried back to older conceptions of text ("So books weren't that bad after all") instead of looking at the structural, politico-cultural reasons for the hypertext's loss of coolness: The critics celebrated the downfall with the same rhetoric as hypertext's appearance. Porombka's book itself, viewed in that sense, becomes just another narrative. In this paper, then, I'll argue that authoritative hypermedia works (works including texts, images, sounds, videos and so on) as new media objects have the same formal limitations that hold for the human computer interface (HCI) in general (for one thing, because hypermedia reception obviously takes place within a HCI). In a nutshell, the interface is a site where absent cultural and social contradictions clash and meaning is being dialogically produced for a cultural community. It's important to highlight that this is not to 'unmask' hypermedia works as not being as 'resistant' as they seemed to appear: Instead, both the older celebratory and the recent gloomy rhetoric about hypermedia are part of the same logic of capitalist hype. So on a formal level, I will try to describe some of the structural limits of authoritative hypermedia works and the cultural interface in which they are perceived by looking at new media objects such as Afternoon and Victory Garden, the Storyspace computer program, the AOL interface, and Netscape Communicator. Within a Post-Marxist political framework, I will then try and associate hyperlinks with the Althusserian notion of interpellation, and the HCI in general with Ernesto Laclau's concepts of hegemony, articulation, and antagonism. If this makes the interface laden with political ideology, it may come as a surprise that I will refrain from calling all 'resistance' futile. But hypermedia, understood as the totality of computers that are linked through the internet, on a formal level promote an authoritative shift in new media objects such as the Communicator: the software comes with an HTML (hypertext mark-up language) editor-unlike old media, reading and manipulating a Website now become two equal choices in the 'file' menu. This ability to manipulate data (and to redistribute the manipulated data) of computer programs such as the Communicator suite, finally, might constitute a socio-political function of hypermedia that contributed to the success of the World Wide Web (the totality of HTML pages on the internet) - the lack of these functions, on the other hand, might explain why authoritative hypermedia works 'failed.' Whereas authoritative hypermedia works trap a user into a single reading experience, reading HTML source can constitute a shared experience that serves a user's 'desire for intimacy' - provided you have access to the code. # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net