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In Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George

Hypertext allows for connections between ideas but also influences the political stances that are taken based on what is connected or excluded. While hypertext gives readers more options, authors still maintain significant control over the initial configuration and linking of information. For hypertext to enable real change, issues of access, what can be said and distributed, and how power shapes individuals and communities through technology must be addressed.

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Vanshika Gupta
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86 views3 pages

In Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George

Hypertext allows for connections between ideas but also influences the political stances that are taken based on what is connected or excluded. While hypertext gives readers more options, authors still maintain significant control over the initial configuration and linking of information. For hypertext to enable real change, issues of access, what can be said and distributed, and how power shapes individuals and communities through technology must be addressed.

Uploaded by

Vanshika Gupta
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.

php/fm/article/view/628/549

Hypertext, as a mechanism for organization and representation, calls into question the political
implications of the act of connection. The necessity of forging links is also the necessity of
connecting ideas. Hence, in the hypertext environment, a political stance is defined by the very
selection and connection of elements from a diverse world of information. The web and
the network function by rules of relevance, inclusion and exclusion.

In  Hypertext: the Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George
Landow points out that "[t]echnology always empowers someone, some group in society, and it
does so at a certain cost. The question must always be, therefore, what group or groups does it
empower?" At first glance, it can be difficult to understand what hypertext, a technology, has to
do with social and political issues. After all, given adequate resources and training, anyone can
create and use a hypertext authoring system. And while problems of differential access to
resources and training are pressing, they are often viewed as better belonging to the social realms
of education and resource allocation than to those of hardware and software; they do not impinge
on the design of hypertext systems except peripherally -- or so the argument goes.

As Foucault demonstrates in Discipline and Punish, efficient structures of surveillance and


control are both pervasive and invisible. While hypertext provides the reader with more options
and more control over the reading experience, the technology also can facilitate the disguising of
authorial control. For example, Storyspace's main "views" - map, chart, outline, and tree map- all
involve hierarchy, and the reader's options for following links are dependent, at least at the
outset, on the links that the author has established. It is, in other words, the author who
determines the powerful initial configuration of the hypertext: how the writing spaces are
organized, what material merits linkage, etc. Storyspace even has a feature called a "guard field"
that enables the constructor of links to force the reader to travel in a particular direction or to
follow links in a certain order. This is to say simply that hypertext authors cede less control to
the reader than is usually admitted; that the hypertext reader's choices are constrained, though
constrained differently, than in printed works; and that hypertext itself is not inherently or
necessarily democratic or anti-hierarchical.
We have long known that technology alone cannot solve the myriad social problems that real
bodies confront, and that technology in fact can sometimes make those problems worse. When
particular technologies impinge on the boundaries between people and machines, potential
negative outcomes take on a special urgency. With hypertext, as with any technology that
transforms the relation of persons to machines, individual bodies can be possible sites either for
domination or for transformation and resistance. Who has access to which hypertext systems,
what can be said and distributed on those systems, how information will be distributed, at what
cost and to whom, and how these systems and their users reciprocally constitute each other -- all
these questions must be addressed in order for any theory of hypertext to move from an esoteric
concern peripheral even to literature departments, to become a motivation, articulation, and
catalyst for real change on the levels of systems and interface design, pedagogy, and
participation in communities both real and virtual. 

As technological reconstructions of the body become commonplace, it is necessary to confront


technology's political dimension, as a power to shape individuals -- to shape the body
politics. China's decade-long efforts to censor the Internet, the U.S. government's tracking
Internet users, and Microsoft's continuing attempts to control the consumer and business market
exemplify narrowing the possibilities of Internet freedoms. Hypertext in its most commonly
encountered form, the World Wide Web, provides a particularly important way for the empire to
write back. As Susan Nash Smith has shown in her work on Azerbaijan, former colonies use the
Internet as a means of defining and communicating a newly recreated identity. In essence, the
smallest country with access to the Internet can speak for itself in ways impracticable if not
virtually impossible in the world of print. The chief value of placing these essays online is
simply that Zimbabweans can speak—or rather, write—for themselves rather than having critics
from the Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States write for them.

Summoning skepticism and hypertextual habits of mind can, however, lead us to ask, “What
connections (links) are missing? What complex network of events percolates up through the
linear political narrative we've been offered?” It is important to not how the Web - by far the
most popularly accessible technology incorporating elements of hypertext - does not allow
readers to create their own links between documents, nor does it give readers the ability to
publish responses (except by publishing their own separate documents). Until these capabilities
are popularly (or even universally) available, readers cannot be transformed into writers, and
authorial power cannot be diffused; the social system of traditional print culture can survive,
more or less intact, in online publishing.

The fact that hypertext theory is writing about a revolutionary impact of a nonexistent
technology wouldn't matter if its proponents recognized that fact. But they don't. So far as I can
tell, never once does a sentence in George Landow's Hypertext, to take one example, start with
"Hypertext might" or "Hypertext could." Instead, the language is declarative: hypertext will,
does, shall, forces, demands, compels, evinces, or leads to, revolutionary changes in authorship,
texts, education, the canon, and the politics of knowledge. There are no things that "might
happen," no fuzziness or historical contingency, no space for the author or reader to act as free
agents, no possibility for the future to develop one way versus another. Technological
determinism is bad enough, but determinism caused by nonexistent technology is worse still. 

The value of hypertext as a paradigm exists in its essential multivocality, decentering, and
redefinition of edges, borders, identities. As such, it provides a paradigm, a way of thinking
about postcolonial issues, that continually serves to remind us of the complex factors at issue.

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