Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies, ch. 11

Birkerts' chapter begins (and ends) with his encounter with Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, but progresses very quickly to consideration of the promises that have been made on behalf of hypertext, particularly those from Robert Coover's New York Times Book Review essay on the "End of Books." According to Birkerts, "Ground zero" is that "The transformation of the media of communication maps a larger transformation of consciousness--maps it, but also speeds it along; it changes the terms of our experience and our ways of offering response" (153).

Birkerts follows this discussion with one of the key questions for those of us interested in hypertext: "Are our myriad technological innovations to be seen as responses to collective needs and desires, or are they simply logical developments in the inexorable evolution of technology itself?" (154) This is a tremendously important question, one that few hypertext writers really confront in a meaningful way--does hypertext respond to our "needs" or are we responding to the availability of hypertext as a technology? Such a question assumes that we have relatively direct access to those needs, that they aren't already conditioned by other technologies (Plato never waxes rhapsodic about "masterly prose," for example), but that doesn't mean that the question itself isn't relevant. That we can write hypertext isn't to say that we should.

The next several pages demonstrate the relevance of McLuhan's thought to Birkerts. When Birkerts writes that "the mode of transmission cannot be disregarded" (155), little echoes of "the medium is the message" should be going off in everyone's head. Interestingly enough, this is some of the same ground upon which Landow, Joyce, et al. build their arguments; whereas they would say "look at what we're gaining," Birkerts is more prone to pronouncements on what we're losing. And those losses are as ideal as the gains that Landow and Joyce assert; the "permanence" (157) Birkerts discusses has as much to do with cultural canonicity, for example, as it does with medium.

Birkerts' analysis, when it manages to avoid nostalgia, is pretty sound. From his understanding that electronic writing privileges process, for example, to the connection that he draws between Barthes and technology, much of his diagnosis of our current situation overlaps with the people whose work he opposes. His reaction to it, though, differs. His impulse is to ask, "Does the idea of literature vanish altogether...?" (161) without confronting the social and cultural factors that have affected that idea more decisively than hypertext has. For all of this, however, Birkerts' book is one of the few sustained and careful objections to hypertext out there, and is worth consideration for that fact alone.

David Dobrin, "Hype and Hypertext"

If Birkerts takes issue with the attitudes of those who favor the sweeping changes brought about by the development of hypertext, Dobrin is skeptical of the changes themselves. His skepticism is based on the overpromising that occurred with the first release of grammar and style checkers, or rather, upon their failure to fulfill such promises. And that failure conditions Dobrin's approach to hypertext in the sense that his questions seem limited to asking how hypertext will help people with literacy.

The answer to Dobrin's questions is not forthcoming from the articles he surveys. He notes that they are concerned much more with the theoretical than the pragmatic, a condition necessitated by the fact that "each considers hypertext to be...something entirely new" (307). And he acknowledges this necessity (conditionally) at the bottom of page 307, granting that questions like his "would have to await a better understanding of how people deal with [hypertext]." Of course, that's only if "this assessment of hypertext is correct..."

Dobrin goes on to assert that it is not in fact correct. "Hypertext," according to Dobrin, "Is simply one text structure among many, made unique by the text conventions it has, conventions that guide the reader's attention and allow him or her to navigate through the text....these conventions are not different in kind from other text conventions" (308). He then offers three claims made by the articles to which he is responding, and proceeds to refute each of them: authorship is fundamentally different, hypertext operates the way the mind does, and the medium is the message.

The next section offers the example of "hoopertext," Dobrin's attempt to separate the "cool" of hypertext from the "momentous" nature of the claims made on its behalf. Dobrin's point, made more directly in the following section, is that we should see hypertext not as a "form of being that will succeed orality and textuality" (315), but rather as a "weak text form that needs to be nurtured and...as temporary solutions that need far more work" (313). The advantage of hoopertext, he argues, is that its status as "contraption" is far more obvious to us and thus open to tinkering or invention. "With hypertext," he writes, "we have yet to determine precisely what skills are needed or how they can be taught, most because hypertext structures themselves are not well developed and the technical capabilities of the machines are not well established" (315).

David Kolb, "Socrates in the Labyrinth"

Kolb's essay, a version of a "much longer" and "more digressive" StorySpace hypertext, takes the claims made on behalf of hypertext at face value for the most part, asking instead if hypertext can ultimately be useful for the discipline of philosophy. He begins with some of the uses to which hypertext might be put in philosophy: providing overviews, extended references, enhanced connections among a corpus of works, and philosophical conversation. These uses, while "worthwhile" and "enrich[ing]," don't exploit what Kolb identifies as "more radical uses of hypertext," however, and he proceeds to test these more radical uses against the disciplinary needs and conventions of philosophy.

In a fairly recursive manner, suggesting perhaps the hypertext version of this essay, Kolb offers miniature accounts of opposing arguments on pp. 325-6, first arguing for the genealogy of linear philosophical argument "on the one hand," and then noting exceptions to that genealogy on the other. He then devotes three or four pages to the "strong case that philosophy cannot lose its line, which I almost believe is so" (326). He notes the importance of sequence in argumentation, and that hypertext might lend itself to writing that cannot keep the focus required of typical philosophical discourse. On page 329, he begins to introduce some of the "supplements" that seem to undermine philosophy's claim to a strict linearity. "Even the purest philosophical line in a technical article or book has vestigial or presupposed discourses...surrounding it" (330). He makes the mutually constitutive observations that those supplements aren't themselves devoid of argumentative structure just as the linear argument is reliant upon some fluidity.

Kolb turns to some specific thinkers' work and tests hypertext against them. He offers the complex two-dimensional work of Hegel as an example of philosophy not strictly linear, and also tests hypertext against Derrida's work. For all that Landow and others have declared hypertext the second coming of post-structuralism, Kolb suggests that "in some ways, hypertext does not question the unity of the text deeply enough" (335).

One of Kolb's most significant arguments comes shortly thereafter. He writes that "We need to understand better the ways in which links and paths can enact forms and figures (intermediate between the lexia and the whole document) that bring pressure to bear on the 'internal' being of individual lexias. We need to understand how to write the individual lexias so that they are more clearly permeable to this influence" (336). The need for intermediate forms and figures allows Kolb to resolve what is in some senses an unanswerable question. If hypertext can enact forms that lie between the strict line and total chaos, Kolb seems to grant the possibility of new forms of philosophical discourse, a discourse formed out of a "plurality of paths...with neither atomistic disintegration nor final unity" (342).

Collin Gifford Brooke