NM 3.1 – Technology, Hypertext, Milton

The Bolter reading looks at writing as a technology that produces information. Elliot made the interesting point via M McLuhan that with the development of the printing press, writing has become comparatively static compared to the oral histories of the past. The implications of this are dual-edged, as although it means information can be easily democratised, so too can misinformation. One academic whose name escapes me, spoke of how the American neoConservatives used “resonance machines” (the mass media) to disseminate pieces of sympathetic information during the Iraq war. To clarify, the idea of the “resonance machine”, refers to the uncritical reproduction of information across many platforms, especially when the dictates of ‘hard news’ reporting demand unanalysed reproduction of White House statements. Many news outlets, more concerned with immediate, rather than true stories can be easily manipulated to serve the ends of those who understand the ways in which information is retransmitted. Bolter alludes to this when he speaks of how printing, followed today by word processing, “distances” the human from the process of recording and transmitting information. It this “distancing” that works in favour of the skilled propagandist.

Bolter also talks of incorporating ‘skills’ as well as machines, under the umbrella of technology and mentions how Plato saw the alphabet as a technology, a system to “arrange words and thoughts in a visual space”. The article pre-empted my own thoughts about the difficulty of recognising writing as a technology due to what Ong calls, “interiorisation”, an over-familiarity with the process. Ong goes on to say that all technological skills are internalised and hence become inseparable from the user. As I type these words, it gives me pause for thought, as I’ve never considered how this action may be a technology of sorts. The keypad does allow me to think as I write, rather than before I write, but this is an illusion, as by necessity I must be thinking first. It’s just that the gap has been narrowed.

The article goes on to catalogue several histories of progressions toward efficiency in writing. The Mesopotamians and Sumerians moved from pictorial to phonetic language just as the Egyptians, over time, adopted a more cursive script in comparison to their highly stylised hieroglyphics. An interesting exception to this is Chinese, which has remained a pictorial/character based language since its invention by the Mandarins, the bureaucracy of ancient China. Interestingly, in establishing Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew recognised some inherent problems in using a pictorial language and instead chose to adopt English, in his words, more useful as the language of “invention, diplomacy, science and technology”. The question of whether the dominance of English is an accident of history, or due to some inherent flexibility that gives it an evolutionary advantage – is currently beyond me to comment, but I suspect, as is so often the case, the answer is in some abstruse combination of the two.

Bolter finishes by discussing hypertexts and how they help us explore networks, or trees of information, what Landau calls metatexts where every piece of information leads to another related piece of information. For example, the ‘Hypertext Bible’ can serve as a tool for simultaneous lessons in Greek, comparative readings, or even historical contextualisation of events. On one hand this could be very empowering, providing ever widening frameworks with which to understand a given text, on the other hand, the constant filtering of our attention through ever more diffuse pathways might contribute to a lack of retention, but I am just speculating as to the latter scenario. Landau mentions the potential to alter academic essays and in my opinion, this could be one the most profound and powerful applications of hypertext. PHD theses could be able to internally reference in a very succinct and easily accessible way, how this would affect the body of the work I am unsure but one possibility occurs. Counter or contingent arguments, less immediately relevant but corroborating information, along with related scholarly dissertations could all co-exist in the local orbit of the main text, possibly adding to the immediate coherence of a piece of writing by not cluttering the most essential space. Perhaps it would be possible to create a hypertext thesis that could be read in any order but starts and finishes at fixed locations? If we twist the words, maybe this could give literal weight to what Derrida calls “the inside and outside” of a text. (he argues that there is no such real distinction)

I have tried to read Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’, to me, one of the greatest ever works in the English language. However, despite how much I was swept away by some of the verse, there were numerous references to things I simply had no basis for understanding. The hypertext version of Paradise Lost, would in my opinion detract from the overall experience, constantly pulling one away from Milton’s immersive poetic world, yet on the other hand could greatly increase the utility of the text by giving the reader an auxiliary education in the classics as well as an insight into Milton’s inner constitution. Here we have an opposition between what Nietzsche calls the Apollonian and Dionysian forms of thinking. Hypertext represents the machine world, the Solar aspect, the itemisation, categorisation and accounting of knowledge – the uptight, fastidious Apollo. On the other hand, the poetic, intuitive, ludic and hypnogogic reading, letting impressions form as they are rather than imposing a ‘correct’ interpretation is the fluid, Lunar and Dionysian reading. I think it might be easy to get carried away with the possibilities of new forms if not considering the intentions of the readers themselves.