Johndan,

I'm never all *that* comfortable finding myself linked with particular people, but I made my bed, so...

While I normally agree with most of Michael's work, I would contest the idea that a list of links is somehow "less" than content; amazon.com is (to my mind), an *amazing* hypertext, possibly more influential than the combined work of everyone doing more traditional forms of hypertext.

I guess here I'd hesitate to conflate influential with amazing--I buy the former entirely. If we had to list the top ten or twenty hypertexts in terms of influence, my guess is that *maybe* afternoon or Victory Garden would register much lower than we would expect, and then as exceptions to the rule implicit in your comments here. But to say that this influence (and I'm trying hard here not to thumb my nose at capital) is thus hypertextual or is characteristic of hypertext strikes me as problematic. And although I may be misreading, my sense of NA was that you were trying to complicate the term itself by expanding our vocabulary with which to speak of them.

I don't want to fall back into some sort of Kantian argument that there must be an essential "hypertext quality" that afternoon possesses and that Amazon doesn't, bc that argument is largely bankrupt, and has been for most of this century with respect to literature. Equally, I'm hesitant to thus conclude that no distinction exists, simply because it's difficult to articulate one. (Nor am I really content relying on the rhetoric of convergence or poststructuralism to do so.) To continue the analogy with literature, I don't believe that denying some sort of essentialist validity to the canon makes it vanish. I prefer the view that it gives us the opportunity to engage in canon-building (as long as we never perceive that process as complete or unrevisable). And that's part of what Joyce says too (this is me lying in the bed I've made!): that these meta-sites, these filters, end up blocking the community-building possibilities that the web seemed to offer earlier in its shelf life: "...it [ the notion of meta-sites] suggests an immanence of cultural values rather than a culture constructed by human presence, discussion and community."

Now, my position may be influenced by the fact that I've been prepping to teach a course on Richards and Burke, and have been delving back into some of the assessments (like Graff's) of the New Critical movement. In fact, I'm feeling sort of fuddy-duddy even making these arguments. But it feels like we're acting out the scene of literature in the early 20th century, where there were first strong distinctions between literary and non-literary language (b/w hypertext and book, George Landow?), and then radically erasing the distinction (the comforting, but pretty limited perspective that ALL is hypertext). According to Graff, that left literature with 2 possibilities: dismissal as a less-than-useful curiosity, or the object of a solipsistic sort of cult mentality. I do see these possibilities floating around in discourse on hypertext, particularly in my students, and I'm wary of them.

Even more to the point, though, I think that Graff attributes the decline of literature/humanities to the inability to find its way out of the hole that rejecting essential literariness put it in. I should say, our inability to do so. And I worry about hypertext in the same regard, although it's surely presumptuous of me to do so. If we can't generate a vocabulary that distinguishes between afternoon and amazon, if we can't find ways to acknowledge the distinct values of both (and both have value), then we run the risk of allowing afternoon to be judged against the criteria that a successful site like amazon implies. And maybe I'm just being alarmist, but as someone who is writing (what I hope are) scholarly hypertexts at the same time that I maintain department websites, the ability to articulate the value of each is important to me (and not just in a T&P sense).

In truth, I don't disagree with much of you're saying, Johndan, even though it's taking me much too long to say so... ;) But I agree with Steve, whose message just arrived as I was writing this--I question the usefulness of a term whose definition negates nothing. I'm betraying my own particular faiths as I say this, I suppose, but defining hypertext purely in terms of the functional link strikes me as giving up on the possibility that hypertext is different in kind--it becomes simply a flashy difference of degree...

Ok. I think I'm done for the moment... ;)

Collin

While the node will always (already) be a part of what constitutes a hypertextual form, the link is where things happen.

As I think Joyce--and Collin--are getting at, the focus on the spatialization and indeterminacy in the text(s) are often a part of the postmodern turn and therefore a contraction of critical distance. But meta-sites are in a way themselves a counteraction to that contraction, a filtering that endeavors to make the datacloud meaningful.

At 12:05 PM -0500 4/29/99, Collin Brooke wrote:

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