Question 4

Hypertext is most manifested in the internet as we know it today. What Landow and Delany could not have foreseen was the direction the internet has taken. It has a life on its own, having no ownership, spawning new webpages and reinventing itself through constant interaction between users and the computer, users and other users. When hypertext was first conceptualized, it was touted as a revolutionary means of exchanging, disseminating, retrieving information between people. The hypertext was seen as something that sped the intellectual process by preserving text through associations. However I find most of the stuff on the internet to be junk and not helpful for when I want to do research. These days the internet is more of a playground than a portal to greater educational heights, and personally I do most of my work offline because the web is so overwhelming with information bombarding from all directions, it’s distracting. Pop-up advertisements, spam, all these jump at our faces. Everyone wants to make a quick buck and corporate companies have bought into the idea of “selling online”. There is also a big problem of credibility. Information is readily available from a wide range of sources on the internet. But we can get lost in the mountain of information deciding which is credible and which is irrelevant because any Tom, Dick or Harry can put their 5 cents’ worth on a topic and it might not be reliable at all. (ironically, this is what I’m doing too…) I go online to play games, log onto msn, and occasionally check email, but I’m skeptical that the internet is useful academically. Books are still selling well so I can’t really say hypertext has revolutionized publishing. But a book publisher might use the internet as an advertising medium to promote book sales.

Secondly, the internet revolution has caught us by surprise, I think, to have surpassed regulating controls on what goes in and what goes out. Downloading of pirated material, indiscriminate blogging, sex perverts invading chatrooms (at least more so in the past), authorities have trouble managing the massive contents that come and go. Information is being trafficked seamlessly that Ted Nelson’s vision of a two-way authorship can never become a reality. Problems with control have probably been due to that the internet belongs to no one, and everyone at the same time.

So really, the best thing about the internet is it has facilitated transference of bulky data of all sorts (text, videos, pictures, email) from one user to another. Hyperspeed connectivity at the click of the mouse or push of a key has affected how we see information – no longer is it hoarded away by academics, it is now accessible to the layman. However in so doing it diminishes in meaning. Skimming through webpages is one example. The main impact of the internet is fueling our microwave culture so we expect things to come to us faster and make our life easier, but the transcoding effect is it makes us less appreciative of those things.

I do not mean to say the internet is good or bad. After all, I do have a lot of fun surfing on the internet and the storyspace interactivity is interesting. These are observations I have gathered so far, so forgive me if I’m do not make much sense.