Carmen-Maria Hetrea, Director of the Information Architecture and Management team at Encyclopaedia Britannica, has penned an odd little piece for the Britannica blog: The Problem with Hypertext: From Annotation to Anomie. She asks the question, is Hypertext:
“…an information highway or is each link simply an exit?”
She explains:
“As publishing electronically has progressed, hypertext linking has been adopted as the preferred means of providing additional information on almost every word of a document, even when that information is not pertinent to the immediate purpose of the document. These hypertext links are one-way paths that offer no promise of meeting our immediate information need. The thing they do offer is what has been called the “serendipity of discovery.” Unanticipated topics present themselves across the screen and beg to capture our attention. They distract us from our original quest and carry us away to new places and new interests.”
She calls this: “… a world of total freedom, but also a world without focus and guidance.….At first we are exhilarated and then we realize we“re lost.”
I think her argument is, largely, fallacious.
Her logic is built on the erroneous assumption that we need to be led by others to where we have to go in the pursuit of knowledge, that the ‘purpose of the document’ as determined by the author is one that we need to accept in order to understand the meaning of the document or, and that unless we follow the path mapped out by the author we lose direction. It is a view that assumes that ‘focus’ is something externally imposed, or at least externally defined. It is an argument from a perspective that sees knowledge as largely linear, as opposed to net-like, in structure. It is also an argument, possibly, with an implicit view of ‘authorial authority’ that I tend not to share.
Carmen-Maria Hetrea offers, in essence, a panegyric for ‘the tried and true science of traditional information management’ — a bit like someone extolling the virtues of the LP to a teenage downloader.
She does, however, compensate for her paean to linearity by offering a link to a Google Tech Talk by Ted Nelson in which he explains, yet again, and in somewhat stilted fashion, that the hypertext we know today is a defective version of his original definition built around his much-discussed notion of transclusion. For Nelson, knowledge, whether served up in text, image, sound, video, whatever, should be seen and managed and manipulated as a single universal whole, a world in which there is only ever one copy of any piece of knowledge and all references to that particle of information, in whatever format it might exist, are to the one true original. His impossible dream lives on.