Hyertext and Beyond
Jesse Woods
Hypertext is the future. It is, at least the future of academia, if
not narrative.
The beginnings of hypertext, in the sense we generally think of, can
be traced to an article by Vanover Bush in 1945. The article proposed a machine Bush
called a Memex. The Memex was to be a machine for displaying and organizing information in
a truly non-linear form. It was to be both a library and a desk; there would be screens to
display microfilm versions of the books and articles stored in the machine. Bush believed
that the traditional method of information retrieval was outdated in the newly modern
post-WWII world. Bush noted that systems of categorization were always problematic, and
frequently counterintuitive. The Memex was to be the solution; think of your PC with a
true digital library.
Bush theorized his machine before computers were
made feasible, but his ideas were studied by the early computer pioneers. The term
"hypertext" itself was first proposed in the 1960’s by Theodor H. Nelson.
Nelson proposed a new form of writing, a deliberately non-sequential, electronic form of
writing, that would allow some choice in how the document would be read. Through the
1970’s and 1980’s the theory behind hypertext grew, and several programs to
write hypertext were produced, namely HyperCard, Intermedia, and finally Storyspace.
The idea of Hypertext is not as revolutionary as it
initially seems; many texts have been designed to be read in a non-linear or
non-sequential manner (ex. The Bible and similar texts). Fiction has also played with the
concepts behind hypertext, but the non-sequential nature of hypertext has often made it
difficult to sustain a narrative. James Joyce’s Ulysses is often cited as a
proto-hypertext, as has Milorad Pavic’s more recent Dictionary of the Khazars.
With the Storyspace hypertext writing program came
one of the first hypertext novels, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon. The rush was on,
and hypertext fiction is now an established medium. With the internet and the World Wide
Web, hypertext fiction has spread even further. This is partially due to the hypertextual
nature of the web; it is now no more difficult to put together a hypertext than it is a
web page.
In the last few years, as computers have rapidly
increased in speed and the internet has been converted into a high speed playground,
programs like Java and Flash have further changed the nature of hypertext fiction. Change
was already occurring as pictures and sound were introduced, but now the very structure of
the text is changing. Flash and Java allow the text to move and for the reader to interact
with submerged elements of the story in ways that were not possible in a traditional
hypertext. The term Cybertext has been applied to these new fictions to acknowledge their
presence on the internet and to recognize their separation from traditional hypertexts.
Further changes have come as authors try new methods for telling their stories, some no
longer even have textual representation.
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