Vannevar Bush's Memex, often seen as a precursor of the networked personal computer,
promised computer technology that would create pathways mirroring human intellingence. The
promise of the memex is mirrored today in the hypertext link. In his book, Interface Culture, Steven Johnson called the link the first new
form of punctuation to appear in over a hundred years. As yet, we still have
little understanding of the complexities of how a link event (of any kind) works. Your
mission today is to arrive at a definition of the link. (this exercise with
thanks to Lesley Smith @ GMU)
- Open a web browser and go to one of the free, online digital resources in the humanities listed
in the Condron, Fraser and Sutherland book. Alternatively, you can choose any other piece of
multimedia dealt with so far in the course (i.e. one of the design or commercial sites in
the earlier exercises,
or one of the popular sites like yahoo, cnn, etc.). Choose a single link to focus on. Before you click/activate the link, answer the following
questions on a piece of paper:
- From the context of the jumping-off point (visual, textual, aural, etc.)
where do you expect to go if you activate your chosen link?
- What hypotheses are you making about what might come next?
- Support your hypotheses with evidence from the page. (i.e. Where are those hypotheses coming from?)
- Now click/activate the link.
- Then, answer the following questions about your linking
experience on your piece of paper:
-
What are you thinking about/doing in the space between activating the link
and arriving at your destination. i.e. Think about linking as an active process.
However short the interval between the two,
you are thinking about/doing something!
- How does what you read/do/see at your destination force you to assess/reassess
the information you have just processed, in the light of this new information?
-
To what extent was your initial hypothesis on track?
-
What inferences do you need to draw from the linking event and your destination
page, especially about unstated ideas or connections, to continue working/learning/playing?
(i.e. what does the link add to / enable in your experience?)
- What new hypotheses are you forming as you settle into your new destination
(about the narrative you are following, about potential links you might follow,
about what you will do next, or where you would want to go next)?
- Of course, it make take a little time to answer these questions.
You may need to go back, re-click the link and so on, or you may
need to try other links and search around the site a bit more. That's OK!
- Now,try to write a definition of the process of linking. Concentrate not on
the physical actions and events, but on the intellectual and emotional events
you encounter. What does a link add to reading/writing/viewing/experiencing? How is it
different from the printed text? (It may help to think of analogies: a link
is like [...])
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