Landow Week 1

It's (electronic linking) effects are so basic, so radical, that it reveals that many of our most cherished, most commonplace, ideas...turn out to be the result of that particular form of information technology...(Landow 31).

Geometry is not true, it is advantageous
--Robert Pirsig

For all its revolutionary potential, the promise of hypertext has yet to re-make the world, the author, the text, the institution, in very many appreciable ways (perhaps I'm guilty of demanding agency on the part of hypertext). There are many who would lose from such a revolution and few who are willing to fight. Once it becomes clear that after the intial excitement of challenge and critique something must be (re-)built...who will be willing to take on the challenge of articulating what the something new will look like? Once we start to name it, fix it, teach it...doesn't it become as static and conventional as that which was overthrown? Is hypertextual thinking a process of constant revolution? Isn't that too a form of stasis?

Central to my reading of Landow is the notion of values. What do we value and how will we be e-valuated? Where are values being made visible, tangible, debatable where they weren't before? How are the structures that were once naturalized now questioned and what does that mean for moving forward (to and from where)? Simply accepting hypertext as part of the canon does little to change the reward systems, hiring practices, or teaching methods...the structures stay in place.

Hypertext, as a shift in perspective, form, and authority, challenges (at least to some degree) some of the foundational ideas built into our discipline. But do many potential truths equal more...what? Noise? What does a constantly shifting center offer and to whom? Offering a vision puts one in the position of having to having to have a position...to name and be named. Is this the postmodern paralysis?

Pirsig notes that to tear down a factory or school or prison without tearing down the thinking that went into creating that structure will only result in the same thinking rebuilding it. Has hypertext already become naturalized--are we satisfied with the web, with the inability to create our own linking systems and structures?

...only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it (the book) has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves free from some of its limitations (Landow 47).

Even those who advocate a change frequently find the experience of advocacy and change so tiring that they resist the next stage, even if it appears implicit in changes they have themselves advocated (Landow 61).

destroying now-conventional notions of textual separation may destroy certain attitudes associated with text, but it will not necessarily destroy text. It will, however, reconfigure it and our expectations of it (Landow 65).

We so tend to take print and print-based culture for granted that, as the jargon has it, we have "naturalized" the book by assuming that habits of mind and manners of working associated with it have naturally and inevitably always existed.

If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic pattern of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government (Pirsig 88).

What shortens the lifespan of the existing truth is the volume of hypotheses offered to replace it; the more the hypotheses, the shorter the time span of the truth (Pirsig 101).