The speed of technological innovation has convinced us that six years ago
was sixty years ago, that ten years ago was a century past. How can the "Golden
Age" be over before we have begun to incorporate hypertext completely into our
daily reading and writing habits? What we do today can hardly be called
a beginning. Our current relationship to hypertext is comparable to the first
months of television - static, no programming, and a few sets tuned in. Only,
we think hypertext has been here forever. Those of us who read hypertext
(fiction and nonfiction) and who read about hypertext have become lost in time.
We have convinced ourselves that we interact with an aged medium which, in fact,
remains in its infancy. We long for the simple days of Netscape 2.0 or a Web when
not everything was dot com.
But those days, those "Golden Days," were less than a decade ago
when traced to popular usage of browsers and only a little beyond that when considered
within the context of early hypertext
systems like Hypercard or Intermedia.
Such nostalgia
fits less well than other acts of cultural longing like the return of breakdancing
or of heavy metal hair bands. Technology is not a fad and those
technologies we associate with the Web have yet to fully
develop.
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