Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story | WIRED

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A ficção de hipertexto teve seu momento de brilho - e depois passou. Em seu lugar, surgiu um conjunto diferente de formas, de blogs a redes sociais em expansão.

1. Sometime in the late 1980s, an enigmatic work of short fiction began circulating through a small subculture of writers and technologists. Entitled “Afternoon, a Story” and written by a then-community college professor named Michael Joyce, the piece wasn’t easily shared—not because of anything particularly radical or subversive in its message but simply because of its medium: the floppy disk. Written in a new authoring program called Storyspace, “Afternoon” was by many accounts the first work of true hypertext fiction: a branching path of overlapping narratives and detours that the reader navigated through the then-novel convention of clicking on textual links.

4. This was the strange mix of myopia and farsightedness that some of us experienced in the early 1990s. We had an intense hunch that words linked electronically to other words—links that would allow you to jump suddenly to different textual locations—were about to become a central mode of communication. And of course this turned out to be entirely true. But many of us thought the primary impact of hypertext would be on storytelling. At Feed, we originally imagined that contributors would compose stories built out of small blocks of text—roughly the length of a blog post—that readers would navigate according to their own whims. Like Michael Joyce’s fiction, each reading would be a unique configuration. People would explore the story, not read it.

3. During these years, I was a graduate student in English who divided his time between reading literary theory and exploring the emerging network culture—with online services like CompuServe, bulletin boards like Echo and the Well, and nascent protocols like Gopher. When word began to trickle out about a new platform called the World Wide Web, built from the ground up as a hypertext universe, it seemed like the logical confluence of all of my disparate interests. Nonlinear storytelling, I realized, would finally have its medium. In 1995, within a few months of first experiencing the web, I left grad school behind and started (with Stefanie Syman) the online magazine Feed, dedicated to exploring the transformative potential of journalism in a hypertext world.

6. It’s not that hypertext went on to become less interesting than its literary advocates imagined in those early days. Rather, a whole different set of new forms arose in its place: blogs, social networks, crowd-edited encyclopedias. Readers did end up exploring an idea or news event by following links between small blocks of text; it’s just that the blocks of text turned out to be written by different authors, publishing on different sites. Someone tweets a link to a news article, which links to a blog commentary, which links to a Wikipedia entry. Each landing point along that itinerary is a linear piece, designed to be read from start to finish. But the constellation they form is something else. Hypertext turned out to be a brilliant medium for bundling a collection of linear stories or arguments written by different people.

2. A few adventurous fiction writers had tried to build branching-path narratives in print form, most famously Julio Cortázar in his book Hopscotch. But “Afternoon, a Story” was the first to take this approach in digital form. Each reading of the story could follow a different combination of nodes; “closure,” in this new form, was as obsolete as the printed page. “When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths,” Joyce wrote in the introduction, “the experience of reading it ends.” By the early ’90s, Joyce and his hypertextual coconspirators had triggered a larger public conversation about the significance of this new form. Multiple print tomes appeared evangelizing hypertext storytelling, and a few even warned of the threat it posed to traditional narrative. The literary/philosophical world had been musing about the death of the author and fragmented, reader-centric text since the late 1960s, but suddenly all those abstract ideas were grounded in technological reality.

5. That future never happened. It turned out that nonlinear reading spaces had a problem: They were incredibly difficult to write. When you tried to make an argument or tell a journalistic story in which any individual section could be a starting or ending point, it wound up creating a whole host of technical problems, the main one being that you had to reintroduce characters or concepts in every section. Feed did manage other interesting hypertext experiments: We annotated important documents or passages from new books, and we held multithreaded hypertext debates. But we never managed to publish a true branching-path narrative. This wound up being true across the early web and remains true of our hypertext today. At last count, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 trillion web pages, all connected through the axons and dendrites of hypertext. How many of those pages involve real nonlinear storytelling? Almost none—the rounding error of a rounding error.

7. You can see this as a classic failure of futurism: Even those of us who actually have a grasp of long-term trends can’t predict the real consequences of those trends. But there’s another moral to the story. The creators of the early webzines—Feed, Word, Suck, parts of wired’s original site, Hotwired—may not have transformed storytelling in the way they originally imagined. But their postmodern literary roots propelled them to experiment with the medium in its early days. New possibilities open up when intellectual worlds collide, and in the long run the web needed the poets and philosophers almost as much as it needed the coders.

Correspondent Steven Johnson is the author of Future Perfect.