Just as e-mail returns us to the daily letter-writing habits of the
Victorians, hypertext and hypermedia also project us into the past. A thousand
years ago ( and longer in some cultures) the book or text was not simply
a a tightly bound tome of information but an aesthetic object, a work of art charged with painstaking creativity,
executed in colored inks and gold leaf solely by hand.
Artists ornamented the letters
themselves, painted
miniature scenes as illustration, danced fantastic figures down the
margins and often included set pieces of the illuminator's art, full-page paintings of labyrinthian
complexity. Open the links on the colophon
page to see how other cultures beyond the west also created books in
the same way. Until the invention of the printing press in the late 1400s,
the word 'book' was inseparable from the idea of art. You can see this
in the earliest books that rolled off the printing presses, where printers
tried to copy the techniques of illumination: decorated letters, the marginal
designs, and so on. Go to the National Library of Holland's Hundred
Highlights and look at #s 30 (very early 1500s), 34 (mid-1500s) and
54 (early 1600s). (Direct links to pictures not operating today)
In the next four centuries, the book as we know it evolved. Mechanical
printing made the book cheaper to produce and sell: that in turn fueled
a more general market for books and provided the raw materials for a slow,
but steady increase in the number of people who could read. Illustration
bled out of the equation: perhaps a highly decorated frontispiece and some
line drawing, but no elaborate decoration. It was just too expensive. By
the late nineteenth century, the critical component of the book was content
locked into the word, not the aesthetic harmony of art and text, a trend
accelerated by the mass market paperback which dominates book-buying today.
Our ability to create hypertext/hypermedia restores to us that role
of writer as artist as well as thinker and communicator. Michael Joyce,
in his book on hypertext, Of Two Minds: Hypertext Pedagogy and Poetics
quoted in Thomas F. Costello's hypertext poem, "Owen
Hill", writes "Hypertext vindicates the word as visual image
and reclaims its place in the full sensorium." Pictures (still or
moving) and sound create mood, set a tone, qualify or illuminate the writer's
ideas, facilitate understanding, fend off boredom and multiply the sensual
and intellectual pleasures of reading and writing.
Note an interesting cultural contradiction. Our society treasures and
displays in museums illuminated manuscripts and validates them as part
of our cultural heritage. Yet, perhaps as an indication of our cultural
conservatism and closet elitism, the aesthetic potential of hypertext in
writing and reading is largely ignored or dismissed as a bastardized semi-illiteracy,
writing corrupted by television and short-attention span electronic culture.
For your reaction to a media event journal this week, look at
the Umberto Eco article, "The Future of Literacy", now on reserve
in the library. Then try to work out for yourself how the hypertext and
its linkings through the internet might threaten traditional holders of
cultural power in our society. How would you place electronic writing and
reading within our culture? What does it mean to you?
Over the past three weeks we have looked at a wide variety of web pages:
many deploy hypertext resources to sell consumer or cultural products or
ideas, but others, the personal web pages, act as individual works of art
and communication. This week I want to examine some of the ways we might
use hypertext to our own writing.