This thesis is also available in chapters for folks with slower
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last updated October 29, 1997
The World Wide Web is the latest
invention to preserve and enhance the way we create and experience literature.
LIT
web ERATURE discusses the journey literature has travelled, from its beginning as a pre-recorded oral narrative to the current electronic linking reproduction of 'The Story'. From early oral narratives to the first techniques of textual representation upon papyrus scrolls and clay tablets to the invention of alphabetic writing and on to digital representations we have seen many changes along the path of narrative exchange. From the beginning of the age of printing and
Gutenberg's Bible on to the current hypertextual networking of links, the textual path of human social evolution has been scripted in a constantly changing variety of techniques. In this thesis I will discuss the effect of the World Wide Web upon the narrative that is literature.
I use the term World Wide Web (WWW) interchangeably with the term
Internet.
There is a difference though. The Internet has been with us
for several decades and has been used mainly by governments
and universities until the invention of the World Wide Web
in the mid-1990's. The World Wide Web is only a part of what the
Internet is used for. There are other areas of the Internet which
are also having dramatic effects on literature and will change
how we witness and create narratives. The most used
of these other Internet sectors are email,
Usenet newsgroups,
Chat rooms,
chat TV,
Avatars, Virtual Communities
Telnet, FTP, and Gopher. For this thesis I will discuss the World Wide Web
and its impact upon literature. A short
glossary follows this
text.
Civilisation's narratives can be divided into four time periods:
- Pre-recorded (oral narrative)
- Recorded (including hieroglyphics)
-
Printing press (mass production)
- The Internet
Each time period
represents a shift in the narrative procedures of humans.
It is through literature that humanity explores, records and spreads narrative,
whether it is fictional or factual.
One of the changes that the W. W. W. brings to narrative is the perception
of mythologised history. If a text is fictional we know it was written to be
fictional and the narrative is not believed but instead is witnessed as
entertainment. Throughout civilisation's history many myths were created to explain what we now know as natural phenomena. Most all religions are based on narrative stories created and presented as supernatural fact to control people in the society that the ideology is directed toward. As there were no ways to prove whether the stories were true or not they became accepted as true.
Before the printing press the Church was in control of the hand written
manuscripts which were produced by monks and scribes specfically for the
Church. Being in control of the manuscripts put the Church in control of
information. The Church condemned the printers who started the printing
presses rolling in the mid-1450's as they feared writing which was not
under their control would be made available to the people. (Spender, 1995,
pp. 2-5) When the Church realised they had lost control of the
reproduction of texts they proclaimed that the printing press was
of a divine origin and was then greeted by the Church as a
divine art. (Eisenstien p. 136.) The Internet has drastically changed
the control of information so that anyone can now create and disseminate
literature. Because of the wide availability of the Internet no one government
or ideology can
again dominant the world's literature.
'History bears witness to the cataclysmic effect on society of inventions
of new media for the transmission of information among persons.
The development of writing and later the development of
printing are examples...' (St. John, book review)
In 'Literary Machines',
Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext,
writes:
'literature is an ongoing system of interconnecting documents...in
any ongoing literature there is perpetual interpretation and reinterpretation and links
between documents help us follow the connections.'
Within that perspective, literature, as it
appears on the World Wide Web, is the ultimate evolution of 'The Story'.
The need to communicate 'The Story' (as social discourse) has never changed, only
the presentation of 'The Story' has changed.
The World Wide Web is the latest step in the evolution
of this narrative which provides literature with its context, and it should be the most creative,
interesting and liberating step in human discourse so far.
The way people exchange information or develop personal insights
is based on linking. Linking is a natural part of learning and
experience. From the first learning experiences, dealing with
love, business, schooling and raising children linking nodes of
knowledge is vital.
"I link, therefore I am"
has its origins in the
make-up of the
brain. All living things link; whether
it is with others of their own species or with nature there
is a natural linking order that permeates all activity in the
universe. From Black Holes
and Neutron Stars
to single cell
amoebas, adolescent love, astrological aspects, and good grades
at school we depend on links to get from one node to the next;
whether in consciousness, experience, or with our own survival.
What has changed is the manner in which this
link is being modified. Hypertext is the latest of many
inventions that has played a crucial role in the evolution of
humans. Even consciousness is considered
by some schools of thought, such as
Neo-Tech to be an invention.
Hypertext was invented
the same way as consciousness was invented, as a means of
survival and to break free of mythological beliefs. The dawn of literature
was bathed in the twilight of mysticism and mythology. Poets from Homer to William Blake believed their inspiration was from a higher source,
such as a god. According to Frank Wallace, the inventor of the
Neo-Tech rhetoric, three-thousand years ago the human race had become too complicated to continue in the manner in which it was
operating. As people moved from being solely hunters and gathers
to city dwellers they needed to find a new and useful system of survival.
With the 'invention' of consciousness they were able
to form more complex interactions. The same could be said of hypertext.
The world has become so complex, maybe even too complex,
to continue in a linear single-directional manner. As narrative
is one of the primary means of social representations and exchange, its current position of presentable availability is important.
Reading writings as non-linear fiction has been with us
in many forms since the beginning of written human discourse.
The texts from the writings of Lao Tze, the Christian Bible, Talmud, Qu'ran or other belief webs
are often read in random selections. These passages or verses are often linked to
other texts as in a sermon or speech. These reading are unlike
short stories or novels, which are often read in their
entirety in a linear manner. An example of this random textual sampling is
shown at spectator sports events in the United States where placards
with nothing more on them than John 3:16. These signs mean
nothing to people who read them who are not familiar with the
symbolic representation of human experience that these texts
purport to deal with. Whereas to others they symbolise an important node of belief.
With the rise in use of the World Wide Web the reader will have as much say in
the continuation of the witnessed text as will the writer. With some textual
presentations now available on the World Wide Web the reader is
able to
change or add to the already constructed text. Much
like the stories students narrate in primary school when one
person sets a scene and another person adds to it, stories are
added to or layered upon by people unknown to one another in various places of the world.
An example of interactive stories and webfictions which are based on reader's participation for creating an
interactive fiction on the web is located at
http://netfict.com/
Instead of bringing an end to printed works as we know them now
the
World Wide Web will enhance and supplement text in hard
copy. The World Wide Web is the latest instalment in the
advancement of the 'Never
Ending Story' with the spreading and sharing of communication
in an almost instant way.
It will change how we read texts over the next few decades.
Through the use of
hypertext,
which is the foundation of the
World Wide Web, linear reading of text will give way to the
freedom of movement between
nodes
of text.
With each wave of technology we see
this enhancement principal in evidence.
Television did not replace radio,
the two work so well together that at times
they combine as they do when there is a concert and the video
is from the television and the acoustic is from the radio.
Videos and cable television have not replaced movies,
movie theatres are still full. A local shopping centre,
Marion Shopping Centre, South of
Adelaide
, will soon have
30 movie theatres opening in the midst of its 200 store complex.
New large screen cinemas are opening in Australian cities. These
IMAX cinema complexes will be five storeys high and the
audience will have an immersive experience. These large
screens are the opposite
end to viewing a computer screen and though cinemas have nothing
to do with hypertext I mention it as an indication that few styles
of presentation vanish.
Cars never replaced horses,
horses are still very popular though
their use has changed from a necessity to one of sport
or entertainment.
Air planes have not replaced ships,
and cruise liners are still being built.
Throughout the history of inventions and discoveries
humans have rarely totally replaced one mode with another,
usually the new enhances and enlivens the old.
At craft markets on a weekend there will be people
making craft items just as they were made hundreds of years
ago. There are still people in
Capitalistic Western
Societies who have made it their choice to live without any
modern possessions, living without electricity, telephone and
television. Literature will mutate, expand, combine and reform because of the
World Wide Web
but old ways of experiencing text (ie. books) will still be
available.
Just as many printed books are illustrated we see
text with illustrations on the World Wide Web.
This
multimedia interactive feature changes what is expected
from a reading of text. From an image saturated site such as
Odin's Castle to the just text presentation of
Maslin's Beach or the moving poetry of
komninos or his
post structuralist texts the World Wide Web is changing
how we experience text. Multimedia will change how we view
literature as literature
and images merge and become part of the same reading process.
Multimedia brings literature to life and the World Wide Web at
this time is the primary source for enlivened text.
Texts written and produced in CD rom is presently the only other
form in which to experience multimedia literature. Virtual
reality programs will provide another means in which to
experience text soon.
Hard copy, or what we have referred to as books for the past
five hundred years
are stable and non-volatile. Or they are for as long as they remain
in their book form. In a fire, flood or in any one of a countless
hard copy eliminating process methods, once the book has been
destroyed it is gone forever.
Many books and articles have been written
about the death of the book the
death of the author the end of
history.
We can look over history and see how everything
becomes recycled,
re-invented. Hypertext is the latest of the recycles and
re-inventions. Long before there were
electronic
choose your
own path and
multiple layered
stories there were multiple story telling both
in oral and written narrative.
As long ago as 900 BCE there were framed stories within
stories in the
1001 Arabian Nights.
Jorn Barger's
Hyperterrorist's Timeline of Hypertext History on the World Wide Web divides textual presentation into ten periods of time:
|
|
(every book is handwritten, with an individual voice) | 3000BCE to 1300AD |
The Age of Printing | (the illusion of an objective voice) | 1455 to 1768
|
The Age of Electricity | (exploring an infinitely impressionable medium) | 1837 to 1941
|
The Era of Big Iron | (allowing coarse projections of human resources) | 1945 to 1968
|
The Network Era | (a radically new dimension in human communication) |
1969 to1976 |
The Micro Era
| (personalised computing brings a burst of innovation)
| 1977 to 1983
|
The WYSIWYG Era
| (conflicting standards for aesthetic computation)
| 1984 to 1986
|
The Hypertext Era
|
(personal hypertext generates excitement) | 1987 to 1991
|
The WWWeb Era |
(global hypertext with minimal imposed structure)
|
1992 to 1994
|
The Netscape Era
|
(NHTML evolution driven largely by user-gee-whiz factor)
|
1995 to present. | Timelines are rapidly shrinking
constantly bringing new ways of presenting text. |
|
Vannevar Bush (1890-1974) proposed a system similar to current
hypertext systems, in 1945. This system was the Memex ( memory extender ),
and even though it was never implemented the ideas of the Memex, which Bush
described in several documents, was built upon to get us to where we are today with the WWW. (Nielsen 1990, Woodhead, Rosenzweig)
When
Tim Berners-Lee, building upon the Memex system, proposed the WorldWide Web in 1989,
literature began a path that will be forever changed.
...Narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella,
epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting
(think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula ), stained glass windows,
cinema, comics, news items, conversation...narrative is present
in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the
very history of mankind. There never has been a time period
or a society without narrative. Caring nothing for the division
between good and bad literature, narrative is international,
transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes 1977)
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with God", The Christian Bible proclaims. From the time of that first word, which we could date back to a particle of a nanosecond before the Big Bang,
the word has been formulating itself in clearer and clearer forms. Literature is the concreteness, the word made text, of that first great word that has brought creation to its present state. On our particular particle of dust in this remote area of just another universe we have spent the past few thousand years on a quest, the quest of constantly improving communication through story telling of who we are and why we believe we are here.
The World Wide Web, like every particle in the universe is a linking mechanism. Before there was the World Wide Web there was a much simpler form of hyper-communication. Oral story telling, often in tribal settings, was for thousands of years the only way to present and preserve narratives. Aside of Palaeolithic cave art with its fixation on horses and cows there are no records of the discourses of humans from tens of thousands of years ago.
Daniel Chandler divides oral and written into two
categories giving a list of differences:
Spoken Word | Written
Word |
| aural | visual |
| impermanence | permanence |
| fluid | fixed |
| rhythmic | ordered |
| subjective | objective |
| inaccurate | quantifying |
| resonant | abstract |
| time | space |
| present | timeless |
| participatory | detached |
| communal | individual |
The World Wide Web combines these narrative dichotomies and takes away much of the need to be literary literate. With multimedia computers the literature that we once needed to read to understand the narrative we can now hear as well as see; this is the combination of the visual and the aural. The World Wide Web makes literature both permanent and impermanent. Impermanent narrative is experienced through the violative nature of the World Wide Web, both in the way one can link to other sites and with the ever possibilities of losing the site one is viewing due either to the site being removed from the Internet or the server losing the site all together through a crash of its system or deleting the site. All the other paired words of aural and written could be isolated and analysed but we can say overall that the World Wide Web is the current form in which literature will change in presentation, meaning and in experience.
Human's first exposure to writing began about 3,500 BC in
Sumeria and it took
five hundred years for the development of
hieroglyphs and another 1300 years to have the first true phonetic alphabet.
It took humans five-thousand years to go from their first scribbles to finding
a way to mass produce printed words with Guttenberg's Press. We only go back
to 1964 to have the first word processor being invented.
Printing has been the tool of learning, the preserver of knowledge, and the
medium of literature. Until the advent of radio it was the great means of
communication. (Chappell p. 3) Literature on the World Wide Web has an almost
early printing press image to it. Books printed during the Renaissance had
text surrounded by images, usually religious images. The first illustrated
book, was made in 1461 by Albrecht Pfister. (Carter, Martin, Febvre)
Before there was the Internet, printed books, the first
library at Alexandria
and before hieroglyphics, humans shared, made up and spread stories. We can
only speculate how stories were told and spread during pre-recorded history.
With no way to preserve stories or to pass them on except through oral story telling all stories
became linked as one person told another and the stories travelled from tribe
to tribe. Stories would change in their telling and what seemed to be fact to
those who heard the stories became what we now refer to as myth.
With the World Wide Web we still may not know the source of a
narrative but we know it did not arrive through magic or from
the gods. Yet there is an easy comparison made with early oral
story telling and the World Wide Web. Both oral and
technological story telling are susceptible to flux, revision
and the whims of the presenter. Whereas, for the past
five-hundred years we have had texts preserved through the
printing process we now have returned to when literature had no
fixed address.
In narratives of the past there has been the implied author , the person whom the reader assumes is the creator of the narrative. However, on the World Wide Web the implied author can easily be a group of authors. The World Wide Web is now a tribe with interweaving and constantly changing narratives.
 GUTENBERG |
In Plato's Phaedrus Theuth shows his invention of writing to King Thamus, claiming that it will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians. But the King replies,
Your pupils will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality; they
will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in
consequence be thought very knowledgable when they are for the most part quite
ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of
real wisdom they will be a burden to society. (Postman p. 4)
Whether all the information on the World Wide Web will
become a burden to society remains to be seen. There is the problem that we
do not really know who the source of a document is, whether they are qualified
to say the things that they say. Literature will surely change as it is opened
to the masses to express their narratives. As the quality of the
literature is in the mind of the witness of the text there should always be an
audience of appreciative readers for whatever text is considered as literature
and placed upon the World Wide Web.
The history of printing is an integral part of the general history of civilisation. Printing changed the way narration was recorded and perceived and it broke down the barriers of order and control in society which were in place during the Middle Ages.
What was lost with printed literature was the illusion that spoken narrative provided with its direct speech.
The invention of movable type was the greatest single event in the history of narration before the computer then the internet and now the World Wide Web enhanced the spreading of text. The printing press provided the first information revolution and the Internet is providing the second information revolution. And just as the printing press brought about a world change so too does the World Wide Web.
It took a whole century for the printed book to develop a form of its own that was no longer dominated by the aesthetic traditions of the medieval manuscript. It was in the 16th century Italy that the format of the printed book emerged from the experimental and transitional phase and found a basic stability of form that lasted for the next three centuries. By the end of the 19th century the old manual processes had been replaced by mechanical production with power-driven machinery. (Chaytor, Clancy, Spender, Eisenstein, Butler) It has taken just three years, since the release of Netscape , for tens of millions of people to become involved with the World Wide Web. The World Wide web may never develop a distinct form, but will continually reinvent itself. This means that literature as we know it will continually be reinvented too.
Narrations and information were placed into books as an insurance against
the loss of oral traditions which grew beyond the possibilities of memorising
. As more information from more people became known there had to be a means in
order to save this material. Early books were made up of collections of
magic formulas, dynastic records, laws, observations , medical experiences
and experiments along with prayers and rituals (the first manuscript printed
by Gutenberg was a copy of the Christian Bible in 1450). These first
attempts at recorded history were not intended as entertainment or causal
readings but were a means to reinforce the social status quo in which they
were read. Today most of these early works would be found in the reference
section of a library, or they would be stored on the Internet.
Humanism may have owed the ultimate survival of its ideas to Gutenberg's
invention (Bolgar p. 280) To repeat what others have said, The Renaissance did
less to spread printing than printing did to spread the Renaissance (Hirsch pp.
24-37, Eisentein p.180, Bolgar p.157) We have this same phenomena with the
Internet in this new narrative Renaissance. It is the World Wide Web and its
huge exposure to and from all cultures which is spreading the oneness of
multi-cultural narrative. Humanism survives and takes on a wider and more
holistic scope with
many cultures being nodes of one another which can be easily linked to.
The first recorded bodies of texts were done over long periods of time, usually by scribes. The beginning of non-linear reading began in late Roman times when books began to appear in codex form. This was a gradual transition which extended over several hundred years, by the 4th century AD the process was complete. (The Encyclopedia Americana Vol. 4, p.220) Previously to pages that could be
turned text was placed upon papyrus which had to be unrolled to be read.
With pages the reader could go back and forth within the text they were reading. Also with pages there was the possibilities of having page numbers, tables of
contents and references.
The art of printing originated in Germany in 1440 and spread quickly through the
world. Commenting on this invention Harmann Schedel published in 1493 (though
written in 1464) the following notation regarding Gutenberg's invention:
...by means of this invention the precious treasures of knowledge
and wisdom, which have long lain hidden in the old manuscripts,
as it were, in the grave of ignorance, unknown to the world, have
now come forth to the light. (Butler p.102)
The printed form was the only way to permanently record and share ideas for hundreds of years after the invention of the printing press. Language, whether it be oral or written, was limited to a two-dimensional representation. With the World Wide Web a writer no longer is limited to converting their thoughts in such two-dimensional forms of communication such as writing. The printed page limited the writer s expression. Major and minor divisions of the writer s ideas all looked the same on the printed page. The printed page becomes an endless uniform series of printed symbols. (Showstack p.369-376) The World Wide Web with its multimedia enhancements takes narration into a new unpredictable multi-dimensional series of linkable nodes imagined by only a few people before the 1990s.
Marshall McLuhan points to the stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia as one of the side effects of the Gutenberg technology. (McLuhan 1962, p.17) The World Wide Web further enhances this stripping of the senses as multi-directional links and multimedia create the medium within the interplays and interpretation of the message .
The founder of the Internet browser,
Netscape,
James Barksdale points out that
"The Internet is the printing press
of the technology era. How often have you seen technology adopt a rate
similar to the Internet's Forty million Netscape users in its first two
years..."
Meaning within narratives has made dramatic changes between the time of early oral story telling and the rise of the World Wide Web. Before the printing press meaning was limited to an ascribed source, usually the Church or a ruling person or government. With the mass production provided by the printing press, printed text still had an ascribed meaning with the meaning of a text under the control of the creator of the text. Now with the use of the World Wide Web, meaning has made a shift unparalleled in human discourse. In the non-linear and unstable environment of the Internet meaning within narrative is more of an arbitrary means to an end.
The medium used to distribute narrative affects the evolution of the narrative.
As narrative is valuable and grows by an evolutionary process the rate by
which the use of the Internet is growing should make literature evolve at a
rate never conceived of before. The meaning within a narrative on the World
Wide Web can change instantly. On the Internet Meaning no longer has
meaning of any determinable value.
In the past the broadest categories for literary forms has been prose and
verse. These forms now merge with nodes of prose and nodes of verse linking
to one
another. Because of the unstable nature of the Internet this merging of
various forms is becoming evident even in linear traditional written texts.
An example of this merged form which is written as a traditional linear text
and is also available on the Internet can be found at https://www.angelfire.com/hi/OURCHILD/
TRYTHIS.html. Here prose and poetry meet on the same page and meaning is
dependant on whether the reader reads the poems which intercepts the
narrative's linear direction.
Most literature in modern times is printed but long before there was the printing
press there was a long
history of oral narrative.
Oral narrative dates back to ancient Greece and was an important part of
Medieval Europe life. Travelling poets
entertained audiences by
reciting and performing their works prior to the rise of the printing press.
On the Internet narrative creators are considered to be travelling
the electronic highway as they place their stories on the World Wide Web.
When printing began making its mark on the world some of
the first narratives printed were about adventures in the New World.
Contemporary with
the invention of the printing press were the discoveries of the Americas.
The
Conquistadors brought back and had printed their stories of
narrative acres settled and developed by
the new form of interactive literature.
Michael St. Hippolyte describes his web site,
"Mumble Jumble",
as,
'Mumbo Jumbo is a few acres of jungle and beachfront on the Web, hoping to
provide a taste of
passion and its nobler fruits. Passion: the collective name for mysterious
emotive forces
churning just below the margin of our consciousness, shooting inspiration from
time to time
into the blue sky of the human imagination.'
Michael St. Hippolyte
The essential element, if a work is to be classified as poetic or fictional
in the Aristotelian scheme, is imitation, (Wilson p.5).
Aristotles
distinguished three manners of poetic imitation:
- 1. One can speak invariably in one's own person.
- 2. One can use actors to imitate the whole thing as though they were living it themselves or
- 3. One can imitate partly by narration and partly by dramatic dialogue (as Homer does) (Potts)
- We can now add a fourth manner of poetic imitation and that is through the
use of hypertext. Poetic imitation using multimedia through the World Wide
Web combines all three of Aristotles manners of poetic imitation.
Poetry has the widest possibilities in the Internet environment. Poetry has
always had its experimental bohemian side to it. To play with words is the
essence of poetry. In the 1950's there was
concrete
poetry (
Shaped , pattern , Cubist poetry). Shaped poetry can be traced to classical
Greek times and was adopted in the 1950's as a new style by Dylan Thomas,
cummings and Mayakovsky to name a few.
During the 1960's two concrete poets;
Charles Olson and
Susan Howe
with their scribbled poems that go in circles (Olson) or in Howe's case,
of cut lines glued upside down and backwards, were early attempts of unstable texts which the Internet now incorporates. Along with experimental poetry there are the Objectivism poets such as George Oppen,
Louis Zukofsky and
Lorine Niedecker and the Beat poets including Allen Ginsberg
and
Leroi Jones (Amirir Baraka). These poetry movements now are being explored
and experimented with on the World Wide Web canvas.
What the World Wide Web does for poetry is to make reading an experience.
Reading becomes a performance taking in both creator and witness.
This new computer generated poetry written for the Internet without any intention of ever being
published in a traditional print medium is now refered to as
cyberpoetry,
a term
which komninos konstantinos zervos claims to have coined. Kominian discusses cyberpoetry in
detail at
http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502/phd/cf00.html.
There are millions of examples of how present and past poets present
their poetry on the Internet, some are more dramatic than others. One search
engine stated, 'About 607760 documents match your query,' under the keyword
'poetry',
showing how many people are willing to share their verses for free with the
world. And each author hoping to be discovered and loved and understood by
the tens of millions of Internet viewers we are constantly told are wandering
the web.
In the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth wrote,
'My purpose was to imitate, and, far as is possible,
to adopt the very language of men...'
Today's language of woman and men surely is the language of hypertext
as it links narratives from node to node. One thing we know about
language is that it keeps changing. Expressions keep changing, the meanings
of words keep changing. (Spender p. 09) Narrative is now reader driven.
The Internet as a transformation of literature as we know it has the good
and difficult sides to it. On the plus side is that anyone can put their
writing on at anytime. On the difficult side is the massive amounts of
narrative which appear on the World Wide Web. There is also the difficulty
with knowing who the actual creator of the web site we are witnessing is.
As an author creating text there are dangers to contend with. With a
computer it is so easy to lift chunks out of texts and copy them. It becomes an
almost impossibility to know whether someone will take sections of your writing
and use it with their own document, and if they do what can be done?
There is also the issue of money. I doubt that anyone will pay to go to
someone s sites and read their poems, stories, articles, thesis or even novel.
Being published on the internet is a long ways from being published by a book
publisher. There is just too much stuff on the Internet for anyone to care
about what an individual has to say to pay to read them unless they are already known.
With printed literature the reader was able to identify with the text.
This identification had a morbid affect on many readers of
Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, who either committed
suicide or attempted it. Every romantic young man felt that he was Werther.
(Koestler p. 345) As people have associated and projected themselves into the narratives contained within books what becomes of the association with characters within web pages on the World Wide Web?
Point of view selects and shapes the meanings of texts. It is not so much a
single concept as a cluster of concepts,
covering several aspects of the relationship between narrator, story and reader:
the style and structure of the telling, the perspective from which things are
seen, and the assumptions and values that pervade the text. (Reid p.12)
Hypertext's greatest value is in its reshaping of the textual landscape of the
narrative as it has been presented in the past.
The danger of writing hypertext literature is to have too many links so that everything breaks down into incoherency. It would be like having Susan Howe write a novel instead of just one of her poems. Howe explains her work:
First I would type some lines. Then cut them apart. Paste one on top
of another, move them around until they looked right. Then I'd xerrox that
version, getting several copies, and then cut and paste again until I had it
right... (Keller, p.5)
This is close to what many people do with their World Wide Web pages, they combine so much on to one page that it all becomes as incoherent as a Susan Howe poem. If her poems are impossible to make sense of what would a hypertext novel from her be like?
There have been attempts to have a poem with every word linked to another site,
what happens in these situations is that the reader becomes lost and may never
find the way back to the origin
of the poem. A poem of this sort is at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~benedett/lit/mercury.
html.
Produced below to give a feeling of a poem with many links.
The poem on the left shows the poem without the links and on the right with the links.
The World Wide Web provides facilities for building multiple views of
hypertext applications which are linked with other modes within applications.
This multiple views affect on narration opens up literature to many
interpretations of the same text. With alternative routes there is a
never ending array of possibilities. In print this multiple alternative or
branching narrative was first used in
Julio Cortazar's novel,
Hopscotch
which was published in 1966.
John Irving's
The World According to Garp published in 1976 also has stories within
stories. At the beginning of the 1980's there were the
choose your own adventure series which were widely available in children's
books with their binary decision points encoded within portions of the text.
For example, 'if you want the good person to wear a black hat go to page 40
or for the bad person to go to San Francisco with a flower in her hair
pick page 69'. The reader takes partial control of the direction of the
story. Meaning becomes transcribed by the reader dependant upon which view,
or now with the Internet, with what multimedia application is being used.
An Internet example of a work in progress, The Cyberspace Sonnets with
hundreds of choices so far can be experienced at
http://www.teleport.
com/~cdeemer/cyberson.html. A much more vast and confusing linking work,
Queneau's sonnets, can be found at
http://www.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~goudal/htbin/Miliards/poemes-direct.cgi
. Here is where we come across the exponential problem of too many links
with just too many endings available to ever attempt to use every one.
Mathematically narratives can break down with too many links. To have a choice
in a two page story there would be three pages, the opening page
and the two possible continuations. To have a five page story there would be
thirty-one pages of choices. But a dozen pages could lead to over four thousand
pages of choices, with a forty page novella needing a trillion pages of material.
Queneau's sonnets are the results of selecting randomly from ten
possibilities for each line in each sonnet. Again, it is the reader who is
the ultimate creator.
A more simpler approach to hypertext poetry is at
http://www.c3f.com/hyprgrd2.html
which announces, 'Most fucked-up person alive tells all'. In this case we are told to
Select a word or phrase from the mess below to serve as an entry point into the novel. If you don't like where that takes you,
come back here and select another. If you don't like where that goes, then turn on some TVs and Stereos and do some more
drugs and sex and violence and community service, then return here and try again. Keep trying for the next few years.
Eventually this combination will work, despite what you think now.
Clicking onto first birthmemory we are treated to the following narrative.
I was born in a Sony 797, one day, and my first
birthmemory was the sight of the pilot, co-pilot, and
crew, out the window, parachuting by...
Most of the links on this site are short poetic narratives.
Another easy to follow story line is Matthew Miller's
Trip Across the USA . The site has arrows that one may click to
move forward or to return to the site's original introductory page.
Putting the whole story together and printing it out gives a rather
dull and predictable story, but by random selection of links the reader
has a more interesting and unpredictable tale to read. Miller's Trip
Across the USA is at
http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/aboutTRIP.html
.
Two other choose your own adventures on the Internet are Shu Kuwamoto's Choose your own adventure and
Allen Firstenberg's Addventure.
Many Choose your own fiction stories on the Internet have a tendency to become incoherent. Links can lead to irrelevant information or story lines or continually lead back to an earlier section. Most readers are not ready for Tree Fiction as they want to known the consequences of every decision and will follow each lead. If one wants to follow the author's construction then they almost always need
to read it in a linear book format.
Being known is the key to Internet success, especially if someone wanted to
support themselves off of their own writing. The Internet will prove to be a
great source of introduction to new writings, whether from a new writer or an
already established writer. For example, a novelist could put their
first chapter or an
introduction to their novel on the Internet and if the reader wanted to
purchase the novel then they would pay for the remainder of it and either download
it to their own computer or have it mailed to them.
Several on-line novels are from:
- Jeremy Bornstien's
Rollover at http://www.rollover.com/notsosecret/
- Pamela DeCarlo's
Today's Woman at http://www.best.com/~nousmeme/todaysswoman
- John Zakour's
The Doomsday Brunette, at http://zeb.nysaes.cornell.edu/CGI/ddb/demo.cgi -
which uses the merging of narrative to
keep the
story on one track yet still offereing the reader an illusion of choice
- Kurtis Scaletta's
Madagascar
at http://www.tc.umn.edu/nlhome/g159/scale001
- Lewis Call's
Indecent Communications at http://scrye.com/~station/ic.toc.html
Even though it is the easiest way to present a novel
to
the potential millions of readers who view the Internet most cyberwriters
have a notation on their web page saying they would welcome expressions of interest from traditional publishers. (Cohen)
What web publishing lacks is the respect and realness that Web publishing does
not (as yet) provide. Aside of the changeable nature of the World Wide Web
where one day there may be a sophisticated site and tomorrow there will be
nothing at that URL, demonstrates the fluidity of the Internet.
Long pieces of work on the World Wide Web are difficult to read with current
technology. There is also an issue in regards to
copyright and payment to the author for their work.
Unless one is charged for the time they view or for the amount which they
download from a site the rewards of internet publishing will not be monetary.
There is a new group of innovative writers who are
litweberature literate writing hypertextual novels and stories on
CD-ROM as well as on the Internet. Several of these writers who are published
by
Eastgate are
Michael Joyce (the best known of this genre)
Judy Malloy and
Stuart Moulthrop
.
Eastgate publishes and advertise their many authors who write
Hypertext Fiction. It is only since the early 1990's that it has become a
goal
for some writers to remove all thoughts of progression and linearity,
giving the ultimate freedom of textual chronically to the reader.
To get a sense of what their hypertextual writing do read
what the critics say about the various novels that Eastgate
publishes. The critics use phrases like
- "Shifting narrative
voices"
- "An electronic tangled strands of knowing and memory"
- "The experiment with randomization is bold and surprisingly
effective"
- "The effect is remarkably close to the subjective
quirikiness of memory, of past moments floating unpredictable
to the surface"
- "A fractal web that could never be downloaded off the
computer and reprinted in paper form".
All these quotes were
from different critics referring to different texts, but all
these quotes would apply to any one of the writings.
The argument of oral versus literate cultures is once again taking on new dimensions
with the rise of the Internet. Whether people are Internet-literate or not is
adding to
the Great Divide theories of the 1980's, though they should be short lived. These
arguments over whether a literate
culture was superior to an oral culture threaten to spill over into the debate of
technological communication superiority. Just as some people believe that literacy
leads to higher forms of thought there are those who believe being on-line is
important to communication evolution. It is easy to push this line so far as to seeing
non-technological societies as inferior to ones which embrace new communication
technologies such as the Internet. But the Internet will be different from other
forms of communication which divided people in the past. In the past it was
difficult for some sectors of society (women, poor, various ethnic and religious
mixes, age:
too young,
too old) to obtain the technology to advance themselves. Dale Spender writes well
on these topics. With the Internet, as I will say below there are many resources
for anyone to make their presence felt, their say heard and their literature
available.
There was the argument that the Internet would separate the rich from the poor
even more. That it would be available to middle-class westerns and mainly to
males (Spender). Because the United States dominants the Internet there is the
questioning of United States values being projected to the world through
literature as it has in past times. But this too will even out as more countries
become hooked up to the Internet
Other concerns with the use of the World Wide Web as a source of literature are:
rarely do articles have dates for when they were published on the Internet, was
this piece written five years ago or last week and what editions or what edit is
it of the original piece?
At this time no on-line journals has the reputation of print academic journals
and until they do print journals will be more sought after. Rarely is the
source or qualifications of the author known. Just because they put a Dr in
front of their name or a phd after we do not know if the writer is who they say
they are. And the most upsetting aspect of the Internet is the disappearing
web pages. This happens when a site
is no longer on-line for any one of a variety of reasons: through the
server crashing (I lost 200 sites on
Angelfire because of a system crash they had, I lost over a hundred sites
on geocities because they deleted
a major site I had and I lost over one-hundred web-pages on another server when
they went out of business - for several months there were over three-hundred
of my sites - mostly poems - giving back the message
of 'ERROR -
The requested URL could not be retrieved'. I also lost a year's work which
was
difficult at the time to accept.
In Australia the Internet is widely available to anyone anywhere for free. All the libraries and schools have computers and Internet available. It is a simple matter of booking time at the library or spending long hours at university but at least in Australia there is no excuse why anyone can not have their text placed on the Internet and for free. There are many services which give free web sites; the best and easiest to use are geocities and
Angelfire. There are many free community based servers along with
universities and public schools that will give users free space. A list of free web sites is available from http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services/Web_Services/Free_Web_Pages/
and
http://www.netutopia.com/freebies/freepage.html . Angelfire and Geocities even provide templates making it extremely easy for anyone to place their poems or stories on the Internet. And for those who want to learn how to make their pages look more interesting there are many Internet based tutorials that teach simple World Wide Web language. The point being that anyone can contribute to world literature
via the Internet. There are also several free World Wide Web E-Mail services, such as goplay at http://www.goplay.com and hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. With Internet Cafes and soon Internet computers installed at shopping centres, gas stations, airports and on street corners there will be no new class of internet
poor. The new World Wide Web based literature will be the literature of the
people, of the reader and not necessarily of any particular institution or writer.
The World Wide Web will be more accessible to more
people to place their literary genius before the tens of millions of people
who view the Internet on a daily basis.
Since 1945 the number of printed journals has increased from 7,500 to 140,000
and currently are increasing at the rate of more than one-thousand new journals
each year. The number of new book titles published each year has increased
from 300,000 to more than 850,000 since 1945. (Gilster p. 126) It is too
early to forecast whether the number of new journals and books printed will decline with the use
of the Internet. There are already thousands of journals on-line.
Some on-line sources have the complete journal and some have just indexes to
what is within the journal. The advantage of on-line journals to print journals
is the rapid rate information can be retrieved without needing to have many
journals to individually shift through. On-line journals will grow in number
and most journals will have an on-line edition which the reader will
be able to interact with. This interaction will come about by the reader
being able to offer opinions and suggestions in response to
what is presented.
Future literature will be made up of multiple modes linking texts,
sound and
movie bits as well as graphics. Literature will become an
experience. With the further development of virtual reality we will be
able to navigate through text, following sentences and paragraphs over
textual mindscapes. The Internet like the printing press makes literature
available to more people and on a larger scale than ever possible in the past.
Presently hypertext is a one-way avenue, we can hypertext to another site but
once within another site we can not link back. Within a few years there
should be full hypertext where links can be followed in both directions.
There will be editions of literary works that are intended from the start to
be only created for the World Wide Web and will never exist in a printed form
(Lavagnino)
Every poet or essay writer can now have a world audience . Poets in the past
have struggled to get their works out. Charles Reznikoff had to publish his
own books until he was in his seventies. Lorien Niedecker lived all her life
in a small fishing village in
Wisconsin where she scrubbed hospital floors to make a living and was not
widely published until the late 1960's. Now we can publish a poem or essay
as soon as we write it, we can even write it and edit it live on the Internet with the potential tens of millions
of viewers watching us write. As I have done with this thesis.
Of course these millions of viewers are only potential. Having had the personal
experience of creating hundreds of web sites, and promoting them through the
various search engines and
what's-new sites,
I have found that only a few sites registered more than a few hits a week.
And those sites were because I put the words erotic in the title which is what
the search engines display of a web site. Though for a month (September 1996,
when this site
registered 35,000 hits)
my erotic poem of the month received over a thousand hits a day, then starting the next month it went back to a few dozen a day. I have no idea why that happened, obviously it was written up somewhere as a site to visit. I have lost interest
in poems of the week and of the month and no longer up-date them, but the
availability of the internet for poems and stories is always there.
Though it is beyond the scope of this thesis one could
relate the pattern
defining abilities of the brain to adapt, change and as
mentioned earlier to link, to the rise of the World Wide
Web. Everyday thinking is equivalent to the narrative
which will be redefined because of the use of the Internet.
The thought processes that we are always encountering within ourselves is
one of transferring from node to node. For example as a
parent, student, artist, photographer, body builder, astrologer, writer and all
the other things one does to be part of society,
I may be one moment entertaining thoughts about my children's activities,
then jump to thinking about my girl friend, my studies,
body building or which time is the correct birth time for Princess
Diana (2.15 PM or 7.45 PM?) or any one of a thousand and one things. Society is a linking
process, and a society's narrative, to be true, is one of linked nodes.
The narrative that we experience within ourselves and within our reading
or communications is now part of a global syntax. Literature can no longer
continue only as a story produced in dead tree printing methods. Literature
will now become reader driven as the witness-consumer-creator will produce and
consume a new type of narrative. The narrative of the 21st
century will be the narrative of all the world's
voices weaving in and out and linking within and without
providing continuos new structures and new literature unknown before
this time.
'In considering transitions of organs,
it is so important to
bear in mind the probability of conversion from one function to another.
(Darwin, p 45.)
The Internet
provides us
with the first time in recorded history of a world literature. For the past
several
decades there has been a growing consciousness of the world being one family,
the
interconnectedness of all life is a constant theme of the past thirty years. World
literature is now easily available through the internet. At some time someone will
begin a project of a world story done on the Internet.
Writing a story with people
from different cultural backgrounds in various countries would produce a text
that
would have ascribed meaning by the readers as well as the writers.
The story is no longer about what has happened to men and women and how they
responded, instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women
and men as categories of identity have been constructed... (Scott, p.6)
Just as all forms of literature: drama, epic, essay, novel, poetry, short story, novels,
plays, and movements in literature: such imagism, romanticism and surrealism and
the many national literatures: American literature, Catalan literature, English
Literature and German literature have become available to wide audiences through
the printed text so they too are becoming popular throughout the world via the
Internet with the literature of every genre imaginable.
The Internet was made to be indestructible. The American government wanted to find a way to survive nuclear war, or asteroid crashes or any of the other predictive ends that may occur. It is as if all the prophecies of the pass two thousand years about the end of the twentieth century would end in a destructive manner gave rise to the concept of a means of communication that would still be operatable even if the destructive predictions came true.
There is still in the collective memory of the human race the destruction of the
Library of Alexandria in 641 in which a thousands years of scholarly work was
stored. Now we have a way to save the world's knowledge no matter what happens,
whether the vast majority of life on earth is destroyed in
nuclear war, or
natural disaster,
global warming or collisions with rocks from space. Human knowledge will
survive humans. Of course what narrative is found by a future generation
will need to be de-coded by a future generation.
Books will not lose their place, only the reader will. Books will undergo transformation through interpretation and presentation as all literature always has. The Biblical scholar Stephen Prickett prefaces his Origins of Narrative with:
During the late eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different book from what it had been a hundred years earlier...far from being divinely inspired or even a rock of certainty in a world of flux, its text was neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm of all literature...
(Prickett 1996)
Just as Prickett speaks about
a shift in reading the Bible there is now a shift in reading the universe
(Pricett 1996 p.155). Our current shift in reading via the World Wide Web is a shift in partaking of narrative exchanges.
The Internet will prove to be a great source of introduction to new writings,
whether from a new writer or an already established writer. For example,
a novelist could put their first chapter or an
introduction to
their novel on the Internet and if the reader wanted to purchase the novel then
they would pay for the remainder of it by credit card and either have it sent
to them electronically or download the material and print it themselves.
Multimedia is changing how narrative is presented. The onus is upon the reader whether to evaluate material on the World Wide Web and to develop the critical skills needed to give meaning to what is seen. Anyone can self-publish and have Internet sites looking highly polished and professional with very little effort using web page editors. As literature via the World Wide Web becomes ubiquitous, being all
things to all people, each reader (the witness of the narrative) will create a
different perspective to the original creation. The author has not died but instead
has grown up and is part of a true literary-exchange
With the WORLD WIDE WEB's availability to all the individual writer-poet-heroes an
individual voice of the age will no longer be occurring. There will never again
be another Roland Barthes, Wordsworth, Shelley
or a
Shakespeare. Where there was once but a few voices now there are thousands
each with a different point of view and crying out to be heard.
The World Wide Web is a digital speak-easy where literature is experienced as a
process of mutating volatile virtual texts. Literature on the World Wide Web
reflects the unpredictability of human life which has come close to
extinction. As narratives merge, link and interact through the use of the World
Wide Web humanity will redefine itself and survive, which without the Internet
it might not have.
Term originated by author William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer the word
Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources
available through computer networks.
- Above, excessive or beyond. meta = among about or between
- is a subset of interactive multimedia.
Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the
document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be
retrieved and displayed. Ted Nelson claims to have originally coined the term Hypertext.
(World Wide Web) -- Two meanings - First, loosely used: the whole constellation of
resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS
and some other tools. Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which
are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together.
A more complete may be found at: http://www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html
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- Zervos, Komninos Konstantinos. cyberpoetry1995
With one of the most
interesting poetry presentations on the Internet - just hit
the stop button at any time and read what you get.
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 1997 22:25:03 +1000
From: Dale Spender
To: Terrell Neuage
Subject: Re: female/male ratios
just looked it up
according to Danile McCaffrey of Netwatch
47% of users are now women
dale
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Dale Spender Internet: d.spender@mailbox.uq.oz.au
101 Boomerang Rd East Fax: +61 7 371 8780
St. Lucia QLD 4067
Australia.
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