This drive to determine some sort of minimally sufficient circumstance for hypertext is exactly what M. Joyce bashes about the web...its tendency to reduce hypertext to a list of links--he writes that meta-sites (Yahoo, best-ofs, worst-ofs, etc.) are poised to become the medium itself. The obsession with filtering driven to the degree that no one ever really bothers with what is being filtered...ultimately, he suggests the web discourages us from "settling into the particularity of where we are." I confess my gut reaction was Eastgate snobbery, but as I've thought about it more, I don't want to suggest that what I do when I write hypertext and what Amazon.com does when they sell books &c. are the same thing. Because I don't think they are--Amazon and I take pretty different paths to accomplish our goals, and the goals themselves are different. Maybe this means a closer incorporation of the social, as Johndan's NA suggests.

At any rate, to reduce hypertext to linkage, to make everything potentially hypertextual, is to sap the term of any critical usefulness. I understand the allure of easily identifiable (and practical) analogs, and the relative simplicity of the "linkage" definition, but I think we do ourselves a disservice if we can't imagine hypertext beyond its technical functionality.

Collin Brooke
Old Dominion University
cbrooke@odu.edu

From: albert rouzie <rouzie@oak.cats.ohiou.edu>

There are many terms for what are sometimes referred to as "hypertextual" qualities: intertextuality, associative webs, allusions etc. I think it's important to differentiate between qualities of textuality that began with print texts and the material technology of hypertext (however varied). Did J. Joyce write hypertext? No. M. Joyce? yes. Is Amazon.com hypertext? yes. If you point your browser to a web page and the page has no links on it--is that page hypertext? No. If you go to many such pages and use the go menu (in Netscape) as a linking tool, is it hypertext? Hmmmm, I'm not sure. I guess that it is. No electronic link, no hypertext.

Albert

carbone:
Most broadly, hypertext is any electronic document that can be reached by a link (which makes it part of something larger) or which links to something else. Doesn't matter if its literary, pomo, hierarchical (as are, say, software help guides and manuals), webbased, proprietary software based, harddrive, cd-rom, networked, shared, open, closed, menu driven, blind, reproduceable, reader-able-to-write, or any other variation. Now, what people prefer or what they think the ideal type of hypertext should be, that's another matter. But those opinions and decisions depend upon the audience for both the hypertext created and for the person who argues that hypertext should be this or that.

Generally, however, most people say hypertext IS whatever or however they're doing hypertext. So it was no surprise, sometime back, that Carolyn Guyer, writing in Feed Magazine, argued that while the web is an interesting experimental place for hypertext, it's retrograde in many ways because of technology and the fact that writers on the web weren't up to date on the latest theories and thinking of what hypertext might (read 'ought' in her view) be (see http://www.feedmag.com/95.09guyer/95.09guyer.html). But coming from Guyer's background and pedilictions as a writer and thinker, her stance, really is pretty traditional. T.S. Eliot, for example, described an ideal for poetry that, surprise!, captured pretty much the kind of stuff he wrote.

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Nick Carbone, Writing Center Director