Memory Machines: The Evolution of Hypertext (Anthem Scholarship in the Digital Age) - Hardcover

Barnet, Belinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0857280600 ISBN 13: 9780857280602

Verlag: Anthem Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

This book explores the history of hypertext, an influential concept that forms the underlying structure of the World Wide Web and innumerable software applications. Barnet tells both the human and the technological story by weaving together contemporary literature and her exclusive interviews with those at the forefront of hypertext innovation, tracing its evolutionary roots back to the analogue machine imagined by Vannevar Bush in 1945.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Belinda Barnet is a lecturer in media and communications at Swinburne University, Melbourne, Australia.

http://blog.arsmemoriae.com/

@Manjusrii

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Memory Machines

The Evolution of Hypertext

By Belinda Barnet

Wimbledon Publishing Company

Copyright © 2013 Belinda Barnet
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-85728-060-2

Contents

Foreword, 
Preface, 
Chapter 1. Technical Evolution, 
Chapter 2. Memex as an Image of Potentiality, 
Chapter 3. Augmenting the Intellect: NLS, 
Chapter 4. The Magical Place of Literary Memory: Xanadu, 
Chapter 5. Seeing and Making Connections: HES and FRESS, 
Chapter 6. Machine-Enhanced (Re)minding: The Development of Storyspace, 
Conclusion, 
Notes, 
Bibliography, 

CHAPTER 1

TECHNICAL EVOLUTION

How does one write the story of a computer system? To trace a technical history, one must first assume that there is a technical 'object' to trace – a system or an artefact that has changed over time. This technical artefact will constitute a series of artefacts, a lineage or a line. At a cursory level, technical 'evolution' seems obvious in the world around us; we can see it in the fact that such lineages exist, that technologies come in generations. Computers, for example, adapt and adopt characteristics over time, 'one suppressing the other as it becomes obsolete' (Guattari 1995, 40). But are we to understand this lineage from a sociological, an archaeological or a zoological perspective? And what is a technical artefact?

I need to address these questions here for two reasons. First, because it is impossible to write a technical history without defining how that history will be constructed, and second, because these questions also concerned Douglas Engelbart, one of the early pioneers whose work we investigate in this book. The relationship between human beings and their tools, and how those tools extend, augment or 'boost' our capacity as a species, is integral to the history of hypertext and the NLS system in particular.

Traditionally, history has ignored the material dimension of technical artefacts. Historians are interested in tracing cultural formations, personalities and institutions, and especially the social 'constructions' they erect around themselves. Technical artefacts don't have their own history; they are perceived as the products of culture. I have always found it strikingly odd, even offensive, that viruses or star formations are allowed to have their own history, but technologies are not. It's as though silicon (or calculus, or mathematics) has no existence outside of its function for human beings. As philosopher Daniel Little writes in a blog post:

History is the sum total of human actions, thoughts, and institutions, arranged in temporal order. Call this 'substantive history'. History is social action in time, performed by a specific population at a time. Individuals act, contribute to social institutions, and contribute to change. People had beliefs and modes of behavior in the past. They did various things. Their activities were embedded within, and in turn constituted, social institutions at a variety of levels. (Little 2011)

I do not have the space to unpack this in more detail here (that is another book for another time, but interested readers may find my article on the topic). Suffice it to say that I think the material dimension of technical artefacts is important, and I pay attention to that here. Technologies like microfilm or digital computing have their own materiality, their own limits and resistances, and these limits affect the process of invention. Technical prototypes in particular are more than just the product of one person's genius; they are physical artefacts, and they generate new devices and new systems by demonstrating what is possible with steel wheel-and-disc integrators or with FORTRAN. Computer languages like Pascal also have their own control structures, procedures and functions that influence the shape of the software. There is actually a historical approach that is interested in how objects change over time, but it does not come from the humanities. It comes from evolutionary biology.

Since the early days of Darwinism, analogies have been drawn between biological evolution and the evolution of technical artefacts. In the background, there has been a long and bloody Hundred Years War among cultural anthropologists as to whether human culture as a whole can be said to evolve (Fracchia and Lewontin 2002, 52). From the middle of the nineteenth century on, and arguably before this, scholars started remarking on the alarming rate at which technological change was accelerating. This sense of 'urgency', that technological change is accelerating and that we need to understand how it occurs, comes through most strongly in Engelbart's work. As he put it in an interview with the author, 'technologies are going to make our world accelerate faster and faster and get more and more complex, and we're not equipped to cope with that complexity [...] [We] need to establish a balanced co-evolution' (Engelbart 1999). This would be the most important project mankind could undertake.

The analogy of technical 'evolution' can only go so far, however. Technological systems are not like biological systems in a number of important ways – most obviously the fact that they are the products of conscious design. Unlike biological organisms, technical artefacts are invented. Silicon does not rise up and make itself into a computer; Pascal or C++ does not coalesce on the screen to form a hypertext system. Consequently, the mode of transfer of 'ensconced information' – designs, techniques and processes – is different from biological organisms.

We must also be clear about what we mean by 'evolution'. 'Change over time' is a good place to start, but it is far too vague to be useful; political parties, ice cream and conversations also change over time, but cannot be said to 'evolve'. On the other hand, it is dangerous (and conceptually vacuous) to import the language of genetics into historiography. As palaeontologist Niles Eldredge puts it:

It is not ipso facto wrong to seek parallels between biological and material cultural evolution in an attempt to clarify the underlying ontological structure and causalities within each system [...] [But] before such comparisons can be made, however, it is important to start with a definition of 'evolution' that is both suitable and appropriate to both systems. (Eldredge 2011, 298)

For our purposes here, Eldredge's definition is perfect: 'the long-term fate of transmissible information' (Eldredge 2011, 298). By 'transmissible information', we mean not just designs and innovations (for example hyperlinks or the mouse), but also the techniques and processes that might be said to make hypertext unique as an information system (I will be arguing that is the organizational technique of association). To explain this more clearly, I spoke to Eldredge about trumpets, trilobites and historiography.

Tracing a Technical Artefact

In both biology and material cultural systems, history is indeed staring you in the face when you look at a wombat or a [technical object]. But there is no way to divine that history unless you compare a series of objects that you assume a priori are related. (Eldredge and Barnet, 2004)

Professor Niles Eldredge collects things for a living, and there are two great collections in his life. The public one is on display at New York's Museum of Natural History; its 1,000 individual specimens stretch floor to ceiling for 30 metres across the Hall of Biodiversity. There are beetles, molluscs, rotifers and fungi, spiders,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Anthem Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0857280600
• ISBN 13: 9780857280602
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 194
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland