McLuhan: Moulthrop crashes him into his future from our past. Only this
present (watch it, there it goes) keeps replacing itself. What would
McLuhan's resurrection mean for us, for our data-laden souls?
Moulthrop spins McLuhan out into a ditch. Why are so many hypertexts about
car crashes?
Wired ran a fake interview with McLuhan a few months ago,
some guy who's been posing as him on a mailing list for a while. Handled the
interview like a champ, and if you didn't know he was dead, well, then he
wouldn't have been. You see, it doesn't really matter.
We're on the road to nowhere? Same as it ever was?
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It is difficult to forget that Moulthrop is part of the first generation of writers to grow up in a thoroughly media-saturated culture. Allusions to television in the text notwithstanding, the experience of reading Hegirascope is very much like watching T.V. while someone else flicks the channel regularly with the remote control. It's irritating. What's more, there is a certain self-consciousness about the irritation. He knows he's doing it.
Michael Joyce has drawn the parallel between hypertext reading (which to many seems so counterintuitive) and TV watching: "Already with remote control zapper in hand, most of us can track multiple narratives, headline loops, and touchdown drives simultaneously across cable transmissions and stratified time." Hegirascope implicitly asks us why we can perform the act in one medium but are so opposed to it in another.
What Hegirascope achieves is a commentary both on our expectations as readers of texts (and hypertexts) and on our complacency as spectators in an iconophilic culture. Of course we expect printed words to stay still while we read at our own pace. More striking is that this assumption persists (at least with these readers) even while reading hypertext. We expect the text to be fluid only to the extent that our clicking makes it so. Hegirascope shows us how comfortable we as readers have become with the idea of the spatial link, the static, locatable (though often disguised) thing (usually text) that waits patiently for the reader to click it. Moulthrop has, in effect, created a temporal hypertext link, disturbing our ideas of what a link is and does.
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