| Dr.
Randy Brooks Millikin University |
ACI Faculty Development Workshop
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In this keynote address, I want us to consider the question of purposes for being on the web and how the web possibly represents a new means of sharing human thinking or collective consciousness. Then I would like us to briefly describe the emerging design principles and conventions of hypertext on the web. We will begin by discussing what hypertext is and how it assumes a new reading process. Then we will compare manuscript conventions versus hypertext conventions of web sites.
In this keynote address I will begin with the ultimate question of significance. Why is the web exploding with new web sites? Why are most businesses, most schools, most non-profit organizations clamoring to launch their web sites? Why do you want to be part of the web explosion?
Research or learning? Staley Library Library of Congress Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Purchase of products or services? amazon.com etoys.com apple.com webdesign
Avocations? Beanie Babies haiku Model A Ford bicycles science fiction
Communication? a local newspaper local tv station chat rooms people finder
Groups or organizations? a health department DecaturNet United Way a church
Employment? posting resumes college grad job hunter jobs.com
Financial Planning? Armchair Millionaire The Motley Fool Mutual Funds
Expression of identity? family tree personal web pages Decatur
Entertainment? movies movie reviews games kids play baseball
Travel? trip.com travel.com guides for travelers Enjoy Illinois
Why the web? It's content. Content is king. Lots of content. Tons of information. More than you can ever imagine. The web works as an excellent provider of content because it also provides you with a means of quickly finding, sorting and re-arranging that content to your own ends.
I would argue that in all of these very human activities with various types of content, the common element is MENTAL PARTICIPATION. The web draws us into active mental interaction with information being presented--the process of reading texts, in the case of the web, hypertexts.
We use our minds to decode the web pages that come up, to direct our searches through possible web sites, to critically evaluate the worth of the information being brought up on our computer screens, to connect the graphics with the text on the page, to think about the ideas, the hopes, the fears, the concerns of others expressed through their web sites . . . AND we ultimately decide whether or not we will become participate in this very human project of turning our thoughts, our past-times, our research interests, our identities into web pages for others.
In other words, for me, the ultimate value of the web is that we become CO-CREATORS of the docuverse we call the world wide web. We add our 2¢ to the human project of creating TEXTS that capture or express who we are, what we think, how we entertain each other, and what we know.
Collective Consciousness or Distributed Diversity of Thinking? Does the web represent a new form of collective consciousness, the mind of mankind? Or does it represent a docuverse of diversity, the minds of millions of people in constant exchange and transformation? Does the web mirror whatever consciousness the user brings to it? Or does it represent a way for the user to broaden those synapses to include experiences, perspectives, ideas never entertained before?
Consider the role of TEXTS in the history of mankind. Some of the earliest texts were oral narratives and drawings on cave walls, with some form of dramatic re-enactments of key events also representing the origins of dance, song and theater. In even these earliest TEXTS we see an emphasis on social communication--sharing of minds in a public forum. These texts helped provide social cohesion and identity, a means of belonging to and participating in the community. These texts conserve a shared memory of the community's concerns and values.
As communities grew into cities and city-states and empires, the accompanying texts also grew more formal, more extensive and more diverse in perspectives, but still primarily ORAL. A few travelers (business folks, military folks, nomadic fortune tellers and scholars) learned to transcend the local texts and perspectives to establish systems of trade, multiple gods and to speak multiple languages. One group of such travelers, the Sophists, led to the development of a new social construct based on the idea of government through debate of citizens, who would decide key issues of community, commerce, war, education and other matters through a democratic legislative process. This same group also helped developed a system of justice based on debate between the accused and the accuser, with the outcome being determined by a jury who listened to the TEXTS of the parties and determined the appropriate decision. Although a few written symbol systems for business transactions and to identify royalty had been developed by this time, most of these texts remained ORAL, intended for an audience of listeners who could immediately question, challenge or elaborate on the shared text of the audience.
Of course, longer texts used various literary devices such as meter, rhythm, rhyme and imagistic tropes in order to aid the memory of the speaker. Even public speeches were organized through a visualization technique of topics, in order to manage longer chunks of content in an ORAL presentation. The art of memory was not merely a trick for entertainment; it was an essential element of transmitting and preserving the wisdom of the culture. These early democracies were also essential in the birth of writing as citizens sought help with their court defenses and as groups carefully planned their legislative proposals. Many people viewed these written texts as corrupt, deceptive and a threat to the culture because writing would REDUCE the importance of individual memory. Writing was viewed as a means of storing thoughts on paper, so it would live on beyond the moment of thinking. It would serve as an artificial memory device, and people would become dependent on written texts instead of memorizing the important texts of the culture which contain a unifying consciousness.
The early democracies did not survive and were replaced with kingdoms and the empires (military and religious) which dominated all aspects of society (including research and the production of texts) until the revolutions begun in the eighteenth century which continue to the present day. Ancient libraries such as the library at Alexandria were burned, pagan texts were destroyed, many texts were put under lock and key at the Vatican. In other words, certain texts were privileged and distributed while others were censored and destroyed. Latin was the officially sanctioned language of the European kingdoms, and the vast majority of written texts (research, entertainment, educational, sacred) were written in Latin and produced by representatives of the church in Rome. Literacy and education were carefully limited to and for nobility and dedicated servants of the church. Despite the empire's efforts to destroy competing texts, a lively oral folklore tradition lived on through dance, song, fairy tales, theater, healing arts and legends of the common folk which merely went underground due to the threat of inquisition.
The next huge change related to TEXTS in Western society was the Protestant Reformation and the industrialization of the printing press. The Gutenberg Bible represented not merely the first mass-produced book, but also the breaking of the monopoly on the means of producing Bibles, which had been the province of monks, who spent years of dedicated work making and illuminating each Bible by hand. It wasn't long after that Bibles were being translated and printed in several languages, not merely Latin, and that other books were being produced without the sanction of Rome. With more readers and diverse perspectives coming to the sacred text, it is not surprising that readers would start rejecting the idea that only an official interpretation can be brought to the Bible. And of course, this mass production of texts in multiple languages (the reader's own cultural language) led to a rediscovery of ancient texts including the philosophers, poets and scientists. A larger, more inclusive consciousness is discovered and explored through what we now call the Renaissance with it's accompanying explosion of arts, research science and eventual reformation of societal structures. Through TEXTS a new social order is established.
And as more texts are written, published and distributed to a broader audience of readers, we find a corresponding new emphasis on literacy and education of the masses. Democracies return through bloody revolutions and immediately establish libraries and school systems and new governance systems and legal systems based on written laws and recorded court room precedence. Why should only a small elite of nobility or rich people have the leisure of reading and writing? Public libraries are built across the United States and Universities are built around their new cathedral, the research library. To this day we hear about the number of holdings in various top universities with admiration and pride. The University of Illinois now has over 9 million volumes in their library. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN ABOUT CONTENT! Who has the content and who gets to access it for their own uses and purposes? And now we have consortiums of libraries, like the ILLINET system, in which any library patron may quickly access any book in any of the member libraries. Linked by the web, these libraries extend the holdings even of our largest research institutions. Again, I point out that the centralized collection is valuable, but that it is the linking of distributed holdings that quickly surpasses that unified storehouse.
In the twentieth century the big breakthroughs in TEXT production and distribution used to be (1) the typewriter which freed individuals and businesses from the tyranny of handwritten texts, (2) the Linotype machine which freed typesetters from individual pieces of lead, replacing it with whole lines of type, (3) the photocopy machine which allowed people to copy a whole page of any text instantly instead of laboriously re-writing or sketching the contents of the page, and (4) cheap offset printing which broke the monopoly of expensive printing press infrastructure necessary for industrialized production of books.
But those are just the breakthroughs of the first half of the twentieth century. In the second half of the century, we have experienced even more significant breakthroughs in the production and distribution of texts. The computer started this revolution, moving the production of texts from offset printing machines in offices to the desktops of workers, students and parents. Although it was primarily viewed as a computational number machine originally, the computer soon came to be valued as a communications tool rather than as an advanced adding machine. The computer could easily manipulate the elements of text production--graphics, text, layout, design and printing. A single user could input text, manipulate the design of the text on a page, integrate graphics, and print out a proof copy on a laser printer (to be taken to the local quick-printer for inexpensive photocopy or offset reproduction).
The graphical user interface transformed the computer screen from a series of blinking lights with embedded print-media formatting commands (anyone remember Wordstar? or Wordperfect's hidden format text?) to a representation of a document intended to be read immediately by the reader off the computer screen instead of from a printed page. With the graphical user interface (Macs then Windows), people could design TEXTS to be read and used on the computer screen. Most of the early online texts were written as stand-alone applications, or hypertexts requiring a program such as HyperCard or Toolbox. Many were and continue to be published as a Compact Disk, a CD, which stores a great deal of graphical, musical, and video-based information on the disk.
The web established standard formats (HTML, GIF, JPEG, etc.) and free software called browsers (Netscape Communicator and Microsoft Explorer) for the mass distribution of TEXTS (now called hypertexts because of the new linking abilities) through computer networks which extend throughout the world. With so many people creating web pages for a wide range of purposes, this represents the first time in the history of mankind that we have such extensive capabilities to publish and distribute our ideas and TEXT creations to others. It is about CONTENT and so many are helping to construct the CONTENT of the web.
So a user opens their browser and connects to the web. If they are seeking a narrow view of the world, will they find it on the web? Probably. If someone wants to connect to others interested in a similar avocation, will they be able to? Probably. Does this represent a new, universal collective consciousness? Probably not. Does it represent a new kind of intelligence, a distributed social mind? I believe so. The web already has so much content and so many various human purposes for constructing texts, that it has the ability to mirror the mind of the seeker. If you seek filth and perversion, you will find it. If you seek truth and justice you will find it there. If you seek the latest research on spiders, it will be there. Like the synapses in your mind, the links and connections of the web allow you to follow paths of thinking and the intertextuality of texts like never before. Hopefully, web users will continually be puzzled by things they find in that flurry of linkages on their computer screens, things that will continue to open their mind to new ideas, new understandings, new ways of knowing and learning more than was possible before.
The web does not represent a unified collective consciousness. It does not ask that we all know and experience the same limited set of texts which will somehow shape our shared minds. It provides rich wells of content which allows you to enter into the debates, the various storehouses of wisdom, the variety of perspectives, out of which you can construct your own consciousness. The web offers us a ton of information. What we make of it depends on our own desires and ambitions.
Long live CONTENT AS KING! All hail CONTENT! And may we become masters of searching for valuable content and constructing our own treasure maps of this living docuverse.
for a more complete story of books, see:
Manuscripts, Books, and Maps: The Printing Press and a Changing World by Bruce Jones
Myths and experiential definitions of hypertext?
- nonlinear?
- shallow tidbits without significant substance?
Experimental hypertext may emphasize hypertextual links over comprehension. See Bolter's hypertext version of Writing Space. It is this kind of extreme form of hypertext that Birkerts seems most worried about.
But consider this more typical sample web site for our analysis of characteristics of hypertext features.
Common features or characteristics?
Multiplicity of linked texts and graphics and presented together as a coherent whole?
The range of hypertext (suddenly the more appropriate word is hypermedia)?
More dynamic than traditional texts?
What's hyper about hypertext?
How is hypertext different from traditional texts?
- Presentation media?
- Production assumptions?
- Interaction process?
- Modularity or chunking of information?
- Integration of graphics and other media?
Is a web site a form of communal or collaborative publishing? Does it constitute a discourse community?
Halfway Hypertext:
Transitional online documents--publications and writings posted in an hypertext environment, such as the web, without being designed as hypertexts. Compare a traditional vita with a web vita that has been "hypertextualized."Consider this traditional essay versus the hypertext on the modularity of hypermedia. Significant changes? No, but this is merely a traditional document slightly "hypertextualized" for easier navigation.
Designed As Hypertext:
Here is an example of a publication designed as a hypertext publication. Consider how the publication opens, maintains orientation throughout, provides navigation cues, and allows the reader to control the experience.
From start to finish? Beginnings and conclusions? Content, data, details and meta-text? How do readers begin and when are they done with a hypermedia text?
Consider the hypermedia our children are growing up with such as Living Books CDs:
- integrates music and animation throughout (establishes an atmosphere and tone for experience)
- provides a friendly guide (Barney, Little Critter, etc. . . often a participant in the CD)
- allows the child to control the experience--for example, choosing to read (linear narrator) or to play (explore possibilities)
- includes incredible forgiveness features and prompts when the child is stuck
- assumes a curiosity or exploratory sense in the child
A new implicit social contract for information exchange:
Manuscript production conventions focus on the development of a text to be edited or evaluated by others, but not necessarily read until processed by typesetters or designers of printed pages. In the essay and hypertext on the modularity of text in hypermedia, I argue for teachers to make room for hypertext production in college writing.
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format characteristics such as:
text structure features include:
Optional modules include footnotes, end notes, and tables or graphs in research or business reports. The underlying assumption of these modules is that the reader is going to read the essay from start to finish, so the basic process of navigation is to process each module when you get to it. The scrolling interface of most word processing programs reinforces this assumption that readers begin and continue through the entire discourse. |
format characteristics such as:
common modules of a web site include:
The underlying assumption of these modules is that the reader is going to structure their own reading experience and go to only a few pages. The interaction model is to go out to a page, then on to another page or back to the home page to venture out again, until the reader takes a link to another web site. |