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The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) released the first version of Mosaic,
a web browser capable of reading graphics, in February 1993. While
hypertext existed before the Web became popularized by graphic reading browsers,
its audience was limited in scope and size. In the last seven years,
nostalgia for pre-Mosaic Web surfing, i.e. pre-graphic web surfing, has created an emotional
response reminiscent of Plato's argument against
writing in the Phaedrus: visuality has hampered the Internet. The Web has
lost what made it such a powerful mode of communication in the first place.
We can position Coover's "Literary Hypertext" within this argument.
Just as Web purists mourn
Netscape and Internet Explorer's hijacking of Web surfing with the inclusion of graphics,
Coover cringes at the thought that hypertext has succumbed for good to audio and video.
In place of visual expression, Coover appears to desire a return to text based communication; i.e.,
the type of writing that existed in early hypertext systems. Coover's nostalgia reveals
itself in his belief that we're moving into a Silver Age, a "retreat from radical vision" and a return
to "preceding tradition," by which he means a text-based system of writing. But has the radical vision of hypertext ended?
Has it even begun? Can six years of surfing the Web with graphically enhanced browsers,
with the innovations of Java, Perl, and HTML, be over before they have even begun?
Or is Coover correct when he dismisses these innovations and states that
they represent
The constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of
lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle. But, then, nothing
is ever mere surface, mere spectacle, is it?
No, it's not. The history of writing teaches us accordingly.
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