Journal of a Sabbatical

small things loosely connected

November 25, 1997

Previous Entry     Journal Index	x	x	n	small things loosely connected the meaning of narrative in a hypertext world If I hear one more commentator explaining the effect of hypertext on everything from Bill Clinton's sound bites to Seinfeld and MTV, I am going to scream. I think I'll just scream anyway. For the hell of it. NPR Commentator David Weinberger claimed on yesterday's All Things Considered, that the World Wide Web has introduced a new sort of structure to popular culture. Basically the structure of this is lots of small pieces loosely linked. He claimed that parallel hyperlinks are replacing the vertical hierarchy of information in books, movies and television, business, President Clinton... Sure you can listen to Clinton's sound bites in any order and they make about as much sense, but is that because of the web? And as for turning org charts horizontally to organize around skill centers, hire lots of contractors, and cut costs... which came first hypertext or downsizing? I think Weinberger was trying to speak tongue in cheek, and on balance I agree with a lot of what he says (for one thing, he doesn't believe that the web will spell the end of reading as is frequently postulated). It's just that I am tired of hearing how "hypertext changes everything". Umm, I hope he's not using a hypertext recipe to cook his Thanksgiving turkey. Now don't get me wrong. Smashing stories to bits and loosely linking the pieces has its merits. And I'm not that tightly linked to strict hierarchical narrative and even less linked to hierarchical org charts. If anything, one of my issues with management in the 90's was that I was stuck in the collegial/participative management paradigm of the 70's when everybody else was hierarchical in that particular company. But I digress. Org charts are not narratives. They may tell a story but you'd need more than turning them horizontal to ferret it out. I'm still trying to imagine Weinberger cooking his turkey according to parallel bits loosely connected. Does he carve it before he cooks it? Does he add the seasoning before he washes the carcass? If so, does the seasoning wash off? Does he preheat the oven before or after he puts the bird in it? And what about hypertext laundry? Hypertext haircuts? Hypertext gardening? Hmm, I like that. I could prune in the spring and plant in the fall. Prune the seeds and plant the branches? How do I get my raspberry bushes to grow sideways? Couldn't I just click on "pick raspberries" without all that pruning and picking? Do I eat the cereal and the raspberries separately? In what order? Do I boil the water before or after I pour it over the tea? Why go through adolescence if we could just click on maturity? A sentence is not emotional a paragraph is. Dates of what they bought. They will be ready to have him. We think so. He looks like a young man grown old. That is a sentence that they could use. I was overcome with remorse. It was my fault that my wife did not have a cow. This sentence they cannot use. -- Gertrude Stein, How to Write Take another Gertrude Stein sentence: "It looks like a garden but he had hurt himself by accident." Let's permute it shall we? It looks like a accident but he had hurt himself by garden. He looks like himself but it had hurt a garden by accident. He had a garden by himself but looks like it hurt accident. A garden looks like accident by himself but he had it hurt. Imagine each word in that nonsense sentence is a paragraph. Them scramble. Links click hypertext them. On the 7th day he rested. On the third day he created void out of the form and the concrete never dried. You can't rush cement. My point, and I do have one, is that you can go from "loosely connected" to "not connected" pretty quickly. And another thing, wasn't it William Burroughs or somebody like that who wrote things and then tore them up and threw them in the air to arrange them? Sort of like what musicians did with tape sampling? Door handles, orange juice, spill, car, perfume, piano, and the giga-pet was between the couch cushions.
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