I immediately thought of this video i saw on youtube, its by some professor specializing in new forms of communication. Its just an interesting visual take on the possibilites of new forms of electronic text... it was featured on the front page of youtube, i happened to chance across it.
Also, since youtube videos are a relatively new form of communication medium, that makes it even more interesting. Its a new communication medium being used to talk about other new forms of communication mediums. Think about the possibilities of that : ).
joshhoe
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Good one, Josh. It reminded me of this one.
Slick editing notwithstanding, I have to confess that this manifesto-in-a-video still leaves me skeptical about the literary possibilities of hypertext. Here are some questions the video raised for me.
How will we read?
It tells us that we will organise the data in the hypertext New World, but I wish it would tell us rather how this organisation might happen. Data oversupply may be a problem in the Old World of books too, but it doesn't seem to be of quite the same magnitude. We'll probably have to rely on, instead of blurbs and bestsellers' lists, things like number of hits, the first lines of RSS feeds, and "linked-ness". To me at least, this is neither empowering the individual reader nor constructing a meaningful community of readers; it dilutes both text and reader in a sea of middlemen; it's frankly alienating.
How will we write?
The rethinking of aesthetics and authorship has been underway for some time now. Performance poetry, on the rise globally it seems, is one example of a kind of shared creation; but it's not a written tradition. It's an oral/aural one, in which authorship has never mattered too much (who is this Homer guy anyway?). Words on the other hand, whether printed or pixelised, seem to always point back rather guiltily at Some Writer. Is this just a reading habit we'll have to break? Or do we, when we write, have to give up our birthing rights? This video ends, to my dismay, with a screen showing not only the name of its Author but his Institution, his Post, and his Field as well, more forcefully than any book cover I've seen (well, maybe not some of the Harry Potter ones).
yee chiang
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