hypertext, perplex

[arcticidiot-deactivated20150702]

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Or, to be continued...

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Anthem!

[inskyfall]

Rule 4. The author of hypermedia materials must provide devices that stimulate the reader to think and explore.

Rule 5. The author of hypermedia must employ stylistic devices that permit readers to navigate materials easily and enjoyably. These devices serve both as navigational aids for readers and as means of reassuring them.

Rule 6. Devices of orientation permit readers (a) to determine their present location, (b) to have some idea of that location’s relation to other materials, (c) to return to their starting point, and (d) to explore materials not directly linked to those in which they presently find themselves.

Landow: The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors (p. 86)

[h-a-mag]

H.A.#175 - Print Culture vs. ‘Secondary Orality’ is what we live in now. i.e. “Post-Literate" Society. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Hip-Hop, Reality TV, emotional advertising, hypertext

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_culture vs.

Secondary orality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secondary_orality

  In his book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, published in 1982 (2nd ed. 2002), Walter J. Ong works with the contrast between oral and literate cultures. In this book, he used the phrase ‘secondary orality’, describing it as “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong, 1982, p. 136).[1]According to his way of thinking, secondary orality is not primary orality, the orality of pre-literate cultures. Oral societies operated on polychronic time, with many things happening at once—socialization played a great role in the operation of these cultures, memory and memorization were of greater importance, increasing the amount of copiousness and redundancy. Oral cultures were additive rather than subordinate, closer to the human life world, and more situational and participatory than the more abstract qualities of literate cultures.

Secondary orality is orality that is dependent on literate culture and the existence of writing, such as a television anchor reading the news or radio. While it exists in sound, it does not have the features of primary orality because it presumes and rests upon literate thought and expression, and may even be people reading written material. Thus, secondary orality is usually not as repetitive, redundant, agonistic, etc. the way primary orality is, and cultures that have a lot of secondary orality are not necessarily similar to primarily oral cultures. Secondary orality should not be confused with “oral residue" in which a culture has not fully transitioned to literate / written culture and retains many of the characteristics of primary oral cultures. Secondary orality is a phenomenon of post-literacy era, whereas oral residue is a stage in the transition from pre-literate to literate.

Contents

1 The Gutenberg Parenthesis

2 McLuhan’s Global Village

3 References

4 Further reading

5 External links

The Gutenberg Parenthesis

Ong notes that human communication has been dominated by oral culture, and the first signs of literacy date only 6 000 years ago.[2] Tom Pettitt, Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern Denmark, agrees with Ong, et al., by considering literate learning more the anomaly than the rule. He considers this to be post-Gutenberg era where knowledge is formed through digital media, delivered over the internet. Calling the previous 500 years a “Gutenberg Parenthesis", he explains that before Gutenberg, knowledge was formed orally and, now, in this post-Gutenberg era, knowledge is formed—increasingly—through “secondary orality" on the Internet [3]

McLuhan’s Global Village

In The Gutenberg Galaxy, Marshall McLuhan discussed his notion of the "global village”, a concept that can be related to Ong’s account of secondary orality. Liliana Bounegru notes the emergence of social media (e.g. Facebook) and microblogging (i.e.Twitter) are re-tribalizing our cultures. Conversations in these social spaces are written, but are more conversational in tone than written communications; they are “rapid communication with large groups of people in a speed that would resemble oral storytelling, without having to share the same physical space with your audience." [4]

[soundanddays]

45 stories organized around a spinning sphere. these are tales of the desmise of major corporations and portals.

"A Interactive logoed world populated with 45 strange and fantastical stories of the societal/cultural failure of influential net portals, giants fast foods, newspapers, airlines, manufacturers and other oddities.

Featuring: Coke, Bank Of America…………."

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Hypertextual capitalism; and the best of the rest.

[zemblacascadia]

Simon Rowberry, a research student at Britain’s University of Winchester, is exploring Nabokov’s 1962 novel Pale Fire as a forerunner of hypertext. (Hypertext is a digital story in which parts of the text link explicitly to other sections, allowing readers to navigate within the story to create various versions of the text.)

Pale Fire is presented by demented narrator Charles Kinbote as a 999-line poem which he is annotating in the commentary that forms the bulk of the book. The novel has a storyline that progresses during sections of the foreword and commentary, but the reader is often directed back to lines from the poem or sent to other annotations (“see also note to line 894”). Subtler elements of the story emerge only through cross-references.

In this extraordinary graphic from a poster presentation given two years ago at the ACM Hypertext Conference in the Netherlands, we can see how Rowberry has begun to chart Pale Fire’s internal links and loops.The novel’s principal characters—John Shade, Kinbote, and Jakob Gradus—sit in a horizontal row of blue boxes in the top third of the graphic.

The word hypertext dates back to 1963, just a year after Pale Fire’s publication—and the two were linked early on. IT trailblazer Ted Nelson, who coined the term, reportedly got permission to use Pale Fire in a 1969 hypertext demo at a conference hosted by Brown University.

Rowberry is working on his dissertation, “The Literary Web,” which will include a chapter on Pale Fire and hypertext. This week he suggested that examining Pale Fire as hypertext is more than an exercise in revisiting history:

I think the importance of Pale Fire as hypertext is not just because Nabokov created a novel that contained links, but also because he included aspects of creative searching within the text that contemporary writers of digital fiction have only recently begun to re-explore.

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Did someone just steal my PhD dissertation topic? =(

[plaidshirtunion-deactivated2018]

Computer Lib/Dream Machines (Ted Nelson, 1974)

[hypertextperplex-blog]

One of the best art works produced in the last 50 years, hands down—in my not-so-humble opinion. Futurists aren't known for their modesty.

[monohedron]

[hypertextperplex-blog]

"You can see this as a classic failure of futurism: Even those of us who actually have a grasp of long-term trends can’t predict the real consequences of those trends. But there’s another moral to the story. The creators of the early webzines—Feed, Word, Suck, parts of wired’s original site, Hotwired—may not have transformed storytelling in the way they originally imagined. But their postmodern literary roots propelled them to experiment with the medium in its early days. New possibilities open up when intellectual worlds collide, and in the long run the web needed the poets and philosophers almost as much as it needed the coders."

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Only [people's] deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between art and empirical reality in the spiritual makeup of the masses explains why they have not, to a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the culture industry. [...] Insofar as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects. The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti-enlightenment, in which ... enlightenment, that is the progressive technical domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves.

Theodor Adorno, "Culture Industry Reconsidered," New German Critique 1975

[hypertextperplex-blog]

THE RUNAWAY GAME is a hypertext novel you can read on your computer. You are the main character. In chapter one, you run away from home. At key moments throughout the story, you make tough survival decisions young people on the streets face every day: Will I eat out of a dumpster? Will I rob somebody? Am I willing to sell my body to eat? At each turning point, you make a choice, click on it, and jump to a new chapter to see what happens next. Each decision brings a different experience, a new set of complications, and another decision a few pages away when the hunger pangs return. The choices you make determine how the story unfolds. There are more than 20 possible endings. When you reach the end of one story path and find yourself HIV-positive, or dead from an overdose, or shuffling the streets of skid row as an adult homeless addict, you can go back to the beginning and see what might have happened if you'd made different choices. That's a luxury kids who are on the streets for real don't have.

Built only with basic, static, and very simple HTML, this hypertext project uses a simple link tree aiming to raise awareness about the dangers of runaway children, including molestation, kidnapping, and other traumas of "life on the streets." Casey, the author of the game, claims, "My greatest hope, of course, is that after reading THE RUNAWAY GAME, a troubled young person who was considering running away will decide that it is not an option. If this book tells you anything, it's that the answers to a kid's problems are not found on the street."

I'm not sure of the efficacy of such a game on the psyche and motivations of a potential runaway (does this demographic typically even have Internet access?), but a sociological experiment based on contentious moral obligations, to say the least.

[hypertextperplex-blog]

“Uneducated people typically think of education as the learning of a lot of facts and skills. While facts and skills certainly have their merits, ‘higher education’ is also largely concerned with tying ideas together, and especially alternative structures of such typing-together: without showing you the vast uncertainties of things. A wonderful Japanese film of the fifties was called Rasho-Mon. It depicted a specific event—a rape—as told by five different people. As the audience watches the five separate stories, they must try to judge what really happened. The Rasho-Mon Principle: everything is like that. The complete truth is never known. Nobody tells the complete truth, though some try. Nobody knows the complete truth. Nowhere may we find printed the complete truth.”

—Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, 1974

[iheart90s]

[hypertextperplex-blog]

She KNEW what was going on. Way ahead of her time, this one. Bow down, everybody!

[haggis]

Yay! Got my Cards Against Humanity holiday pack!

[hypertextperplex-blog]

From the CAH website: "Unlike most of the party games you've played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends. The game is simple. Each round, one player asks a question from a Black Card, and everyone else answers with their funniest White Card."

Fun with hypertextual, postmodern card games. We are truly living in the future.

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Obama and I decided to write a book together, a book of two friends ... I am always working on something, even now. But I can't tell you about it. I believe in superstitions. You don't talk about a child who hasn't been born.

Elie Wiesel on his collaborative book project with Barack Obama This is precisely the problem with traditional narrative. Of course, biography and autobiography are unique genres in and of themselves. But elsewhere, deliberation and iteration can only benefit the creative process and the development procedure of forming a story. Because otherwise, what do we have left to talk about?

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Socrates in the Labyrinth: Hypertext, Argument, Philosophy by David Kolb (source)

[hypertextperplex-blog]

By 'hypertext' I mean non-sequential writing. Familiar text is a linear sequence of parts. Those parts can be of varying sizes and can be nested within one another (sentences, paragraphs, sections, chapters, and so on) but they are presented in a linear order, one after another. ... the text comes to us in a preferred order. Authors work hard to create a clear and convincing sequence of narrative, exposition, or argument. A hypertext, by contrast, is a web of pieces of text. The individual units of the web may be sentences or chapters, but what is crucial is that they do not relate to one another in any unique sequence. The web is like a map or a landscape: many different routes emerge. The author cannot control which links the reader will follow, and in some systems the reader can create new units and links so that the web changes and grows.

Ted Nelson, "Hypertext and Philosophy" via David Kolb's Socrates in the Labyrinth

[frowningballoon]

Relevant.

[hypertextperplex-blog]

Tom is only sad about his reality and his “real life” (is your digital shadow not real?) because it’s too linear. Isn’t it quite obvious?