Theodor H. Nelson coined the term hypertext in the 1960's, a term which matches the description by Roland Barthes of the ideal textuality - a text composed of blocks of words and/or images that are linked electronically by multiple chains and trails in an open ended fashion. Terms such as link, node, network, web and path are used to describe the framework of what has been called perpetually unfinished texts. According to Barthes, the networks in this ideal of texts;
"are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable;" [1]
Similar to Barthes, Michel Foucault conceived of text in terms of networks and links. In "The Archeology of Knowledge", Foucault argued that the "frontiers of a book are never clear-cut," because "it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network… [a] network of references"[2](Landow 1997).
The gigantic success of the World Wide Web has meant that the concept of hypertext has become common cultural knowledge, even if the word [hypertext] may not have. Most Web pages are constructed along lines that are similar to magazines or illustrated books with a mix of text and images, however, a Web page can be linked electronically to many others, and those many others are generally hyperlinked to yet more. The reader can move through a textual space that could be infinite as it extends throughout the Internet (Bolter 2001).
According to Bolter (2001), the creation and presentation of these hypertextual structures,
"seems to constitute a new form of writing. We use the computer as hypertext to write with symbols that have both an intrinsic and extrinsic significance. That is, the symbols have a meaning that may be explained in words, but they also have meaning as links, as elements in a larger structure of verbal gestures." And further, "Web pages function as ordinary text, but they also function as places along a path."[3]
Bolter (2001) depicts the reader of a hypertext as a visitor or traveler in a spatially conceived virtual space. The reader 'visits' Web sites which are located anywhere in the world, but in fact the 'visiting' is simply a technical action of the user's browser contacting a server which then transmits the required information for display. Why is it then that we tend to believe that these 'pages' are floating somewhere in a 'virtual' space vaguely associated with the locations of computers that are on the Internet? In spite of the seemingly transient and ethereal quality of electronic writing however, it seems to have maintained a sense of place in the physical world (Bolter 2001).
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[1] Barthes, R. 1974, S/Z, Miller, R. (trans), Hill and Wang, New York. as cited in Landow, G. 1997, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The John Hopkins University Press, London. back
[2] Foucault, M. 1976, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Sheridan Smith, A. (trans), Harper and Row, New York. as cited in Landow, G. 1997, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The John Hopkins University Press, London. back
[3] In Bolter, J. 2001, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, New Jersey, pp 27-28. back
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References:
Barthes, R. 1974, S/Z, Miller, R. (trans), Hill and Wang, New York.
Bolter, J. 2001, Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext and the Remediation of Print, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, New Jersey.
Foucault, M. 1976, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Sheridan Smith, A. (trans), Harper and Row, New York.
Landow, G. 1997, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, The John Hopkins University Press, London.