As human knowledge has increased so has the need for communicating, cataloguing, and ordering it. The works of Marshall McLuhan outline the development of human communication, dividing the history of media into four periods – the pre-literate tribal culture of orality, the transitional manuscript culture, the typographic culture of mechanical printing, and the just-created culture of electronic communication, which, he argues, is in some ways a return to oral culture. While McLuhan views the culture of electronic communication as a salutary development, Neil Postman, in his Amusing Ourselves to Death, laments what he considers to be its emotionalism, irrationality, and lack of depth by comparison with its predecessor, typographic culture (Postman 24).

 

However, neither McLuhan nor Postman predicted that, by the beginning of the 21st century, the paradigmatic electronic medium would not be television, but rather hypertext, as presented on the World Wide Web. The hypertext medium is not only more word-centered than television but also inherently participatory in a way no medium has been since the end of manuscript culture. While typographic culture strongly stressed the role of the author in the creation of a work, manuscript culture showed much greater interest in the ideas that a work expressed; the form in which those ideas were expressed was often changed as the manuscript was copied (McLuhan Galaxy 121).

 

Even as websites today often reproduce information and exact quotes from other sources, frequently without attribution, in the period of manuscript culture “the reader was literally involved as producer,” reciting aloud and copying the texts that he read (McLuhan Galaxy 120). As the world transitions out of typographic culture into the culture of hypertext, the intellectual property laws that typographic culture created to preserve an author’s exclusive right to his content are becoming almost impossible to enforce. Copying of information on the World Wide Web occurs almost unchecked, and no major media outlet has been successful in getting Web users to pay online for content which was never free in the traditional media.

 

These developments are destroying, at least in part, the traditional structures of distribution which the mass media have established. However, at the same time, the reduction of the costs involved in mass transmission of information to virtually zero holds out the promise of collaboration and understanding between people who were never able to communicate before. The free and open exchange of ideas which hypertext makes possible creates a world, which in its possibilities for user participation and involvement in depth (McLuhan Understanding vii), is more like the multi-perspectival space of oral culture than the structured, limited space of typographic culture. However spontaneous the exchange of ideas which occurs in hypertext is, though, most content is still conveyed using alphabetic characters. Hypertext makes the printed word dynamic, it overcomes the opposition between oral and typographic space that is fundamental to McLuhan’s thought. The users of hypertext can participate in dialogue, becoming active creators of the “global village” which McLuhan foresaw, not merely passive consumers of media content produced by a few corporations (Medium 16).

 

McLuhan himself, writing in the age prior to the Web, was ambivalent about the new state of interconnectedness and universal communication promised by electronic media. In Understanding Media he wrote, in his typically oracular style, that the new electronic era of pure symbols promises a “Pentecostal condition of universal understanding and unity” (Understanding 80). However, in both that book and its predecessor The Gutenberg Galaxy, he also wrote provocatively of the dangers of human technological development, stating that the history of media is that of humanity ceding control of his senses to machines. Borrowing Teilhard de Chardin’s terminology of the “noosphere,” he speaks of

 

…the cosmic membrane that has been snapped round the globe by the electric dilation of our various senses…a technological brain for the world. Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer…And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence…Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything effects everything all the time. (Galaxy 44)

 

While it would be easy to dismiss this concern as alarmist, the omnipresence of electronic communication in modern life and humanity’s consequently increasing dependence on it make such a reaction naïve.

 

McLuhan’s statement that every communications medium works its users over completely makes such a concern legitimate(Medium 26). Though media technologies are almost always ignored by cultural critics, who prefer to analyze the content that those media transmit, McLuhan argues that the content expressed over a particular medium is inseparable from the medium itself – the medium is the message (Understanding 7). Every medium, he writes reshapes its users by adjusting their “sense ratios,” their primary conceptual categories for viewing the world (Understanding 45).

 

On the basis of these principles, Postman argues that television, which McLuhan regarded as the harbinger of a new age of interconnectivity and involvement in depth, has created an unthinking audience that seeks emotional stimulation, rather than rational discourse (Postman 87). In contrast to the popular cultural image of the TV “couch potato,” the medium of hypertext, as exemplified by the World Wide Web, illicites the image of the “web surfer”; one who is much more actively involved in the reception of content – reading the text presented on the pages of a website, clicking on hyperlinks within the text to link to related pages, entering URLs of other sites in the browser toolbar, and perhaps going to a search engine such as Google to look for other related information. In Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision for the hypertext system which became the Web, the viewer of a website could also become the author of new content, through text-editing mechanisms that were incorporated in the browser (Mueller-Prove 34). Recent developments in Web technology have made this vision reality.

 

Though it is true that many casual users of the Web browse its content unreflectively, simply going to sites that they find immediately entertaining, most of these sites rely more on images, video, and sound for their entertainment value. Thus, they make use of hypertext as little more than a navigational tool, a means by which users can select the content that they wish to see. In such sites, hyperlinks are not embedded in a broader textual context, rather they exist merely as the options of a menu – an extension of the navigation mechanisms prevalent in computer operating systems. As Jay David Bolter, the creator of Storyspace, one of the principal hypertext authoring tools before the development of the Web, writes, “T]he visual and hypertextual do not always combine easily. Usually the graphics and photographs tend to muscle the words out of the way” (Bolter online).

 

Even when hyperlinks are used in such a simplistic way, however, the interaction between user and website that hyperlinks make possible is more complex than the interaction between viewer and television made possible by a remote control. Hyperlinks, even without textual context, provide the user with more information than do the channel numbers on a remote. Furthermore, most websites offer a greater number of choices to the user than the hundred television channels, on average, from which one can choose.

 

Conflicting visions of the nature of thought underlie the contrast between the characteristic images of user interaction presented by television and Web-based hypertext (McLuhan Understanding 13). Television covertly imposes the broadcasters’ view on the viewers because the latter receive a stream of images from a source over which they have no control. McLuhan regarded television as the paradigmatic example of cool communication since it privileges the visual sense over the oral, and thus, he writes, requires more information to be filled in by the viewer than speech or printed books (Understanding 22-23, 318-319). Images are presented to the viewer in a rapid flow that McLuhan describes as almost tactile, a “ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger” (313).

 

However, according to McLuhan’s original definition of cool communication, a cool medium requires a great deal of viewer participation. Postman’s book demonstrates that television, as commonly viewed, often becomes simply part of the background noise of one’s environment. The ecology of television, he writes, “which includes not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted” and so the medium has become “the background radiation of the social and intellectual universe (Postman 79). In such a context, the decontextualized images television presents possess an allusive power by which they work on viewers below the level of their conscious awareness. The fear and sensationalism of television news, the sensuality of television advertising – these narratives are as common in modern society as air, and, like air, are rarely noticed. Yet, as McLuhan himself saw in his earlier work The Mechanical Bride, the subtle ubiquity of television’s messages renders them resistant to critique.

 

In contrast to the stance of passive absorption television encourages, hypertext encourages and, in fact, requires user participation. It does not fit neatly into the categories of hot or cool communication, since a hypertext contains both allusive connections to other hypertexts which demand that the viewer make a decision about which path to follow, and a grounding text which is linear in form and explicit in content. Though a well-constructed hypertext uses the same techniques of juxtaposition and collage employed by other electronic media, primarily concepts and texts are placed in opposition to other, rather than the seductively decontextualized images Postman fears. As Nicholas Burbules writes, in a well-constructed hypertext, the disciplines of juxtaposition and collage do not supplant the traditional rhetorical disciplines of syllogism and outline, but rather supplement them by exploiting hypertext’s ability, through links, to represent more complex, “rhizomatic” relationships between ideas (Burbules 107). When traveling through hypertextual space, a user has a certain measure of interpretive freedom – but within the bounds that are subtly established by the hypertext’s creator. As Burbules suggests, the technology of the hyperlink conceals as much as it reveals, both explicitly, through what conceptual associations a hypertext’s author chooses to make, and implicitly, through what connections are left unlinked (117).

 

Hypertext does not only require a greater level of user engagement than television conceptually, since users must evaluate and choose between the hyperlink paths contained within the text, but also perceptually, since it exists as a series of alphabetic characters which must be processed sequentially. As with manuscript or printed text, a hypertext must be read – it does not progress on its own along a predetermined course, as does a film or television narrative. Since hypertext is a fundamentally typographic medium, it is more conducive than television to the presentation of reasoned argument and ideas. Images and other media can be incorporated within a hypertext, but since hyperlinks are traditionally textually, these other media are framed within a typographic context.

 

Despite hypertext’s similarities to previous typographic media, hypertext documents require a greater level of conscious engagement, since, as suggested above, they do not have to be read in the linear fashion in which books, and, to a lesser extent, other print media, are read. Ideally, a hypertext should offer multiple perspectives on a particular topic, hyperlink technology making it possible for each viewer to have a different experience and reading of the text (Douglas 155). At the highest level of user participation, hypertext permits viewers literally to become the producers of the text, through technologies that allow for collaboration and collective authorship (Snyder 127). On the Web, where most hypertext is now found, certain modern applications, such as wikis, are returning this conception of hypertext to prominence, after years of neglect.

 

The rest of this paper will further demonstrate how hypertext overcomes the dualisms inherent in McLuhan’s media theory: first, by discussing the nature of hypertext in general, describing the properties common to all hypertext systems and the vision of communication which underlies the medium; and second, by discussing how hypertext has actually been used on the Web, the principal space in which it is currently encountered, placing several representative websites on a continuum of author-centricity and possibilities for user interaction.

 

The term “hypertext” was coined by Ted Nelson in 1965 as a description of a hypothetical document-linking system that he envisioned would help him “take thoughts which were not intrinsically sequential” and present them in a manner closer to their actual relationship than the linear structure of print could (“Ted Nelson” online, Whitehead online). Though the World Wide Web lacks many of the features Nelson originally desired for his hypertext system, which he called Xanadu, the Web still makes use of hypertext’s defining feature (Mueller-Prove 6). A hypertext is distinguished from a regular text by the inclusion of hyperlinks, which connect one document, also known as a “node,” to another or connect different parts of the same document. Hyperlinks are usually indicated by a different style of text – such as underlining on the World Wide Web – and can be traversed by a simple command from the user – a keystroke or a mouse click. Since one can so easily move between different sections of a hypertext by following the hyperlinks within it, the structure of a hypertext, to varying degrees, takes on a tangled, associative character which would be difficult to simulate in another medium, and impossible to reproduce. The World Wide Web, especially, has a tangled structure, since anyone can place hypertext nodes on the Web and link them to anywhere else on the Web.

 

Hypertext is necessarily an electronic medium. Though printed texts occasionally indicate connections to other documents or to other points within the same document (an index being the most basic form of the latter), following these connections is not essential to grasping the sense of the text. Neither the glosses in the Talmud, the capitalized word cross-references in technical dictionaries, or the footnotes in academic papers – all of which have been considered precursors to hypertext – are necessary features of the documents in which they appear. To follow these connections, in fact, one must consciously decide to stop reading and perform various physical actions, such as flipping through the book to the page which is cross-referenced. On a computer, however, linking is automatically handled by the program with which the user interacts: the means by which content is presented becomes part of the content itself. Since the user does not need to break focus on the act of reading to make use of the links within it, such links can be made part of the document’s essential character; a document can be created which requires that its users follow the links within it for it to be understood.

 

While the name Nelson coined for his proposed new medium seems to suggest that hypertext intensifies the formal structuring and fragmentation of thought brought about by the advent of printed text, the opposite is the case. Instead of forcing readers down the predetermined track of a linear argument, hypertext offers users an additional degree of freedom. In Nelson’s vision, the connective power of hyperlinks enables authors to layer arguments and text on top of each other. This superimposition of multiple levels of thought is what he intended by the use of the prefix “hyper.”

 

Both Nelson and all subsequent hypertext theorists consider the work of Vannevar Bush to be principal inspiration for their work. Though the association machine Bush proposed, which he called the Memex, was based on microfiche rather than computer technology, his goal was the same as Nelson’s: to create a technology that harnessed the associative power of thought to connect and classify information. In Bush’s case, the number of technical articles that he and his colleagues encountered as researches on the Manhattan Project was becoming unmanageable. In his essay "As We May Think," he attributes a significant portion of this to the limitation of hierarchical methods of classification.

 

 

When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass. It can be in only one place, unless duplicates are used; one has to have rules as to which path will locate it, and the rules are cumbersome. (Bush 45)

 

Bush proposed to overcome this problem by storing all the articles he and his colleagues needed in a microfiche system, which users could browse through. As they found articles that were related, they could build a “trail” of connection between them by pressing a button. These trails would then be stored in the system so subsequent users could follow them as well (Mueller-Prove 13). In this way, the problems of limited information and uniform classification that a hierarchical filing system creates could be overcome and “a set of meaningful relations between…documents” created (6).

 

The words which Bush uses to describe the potential value of the Memex sound startlingly prescient when one considers the work of classifying and linking information that is going on today on sites such as Wikipedia.

 

 

Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified…The physician, puzzled by a patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior. The historian, with a vast chronological account of a people, parallels it with a skip trail which stops only on the salient items, and can follow at any time contemporary trails which lead him all over civilization at a particular epoch. There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record. The inheritance from the master becomes, not only his additions to the world’s record, but for his disciples the entire scaffolding by which they were erected. (Bush 43)

 

This is the state of affairs which, ideally, hypertext can bring about: a world in which every user of the medium is a potential creator of content. The texts which Web users browse may always be created by a limited number of authors, but the hyperlinked directories and other means by which these texts are accessed should be created by all.

 

Insofar as hypertextual communication functions in this manner, it does not merely transmit knowledge, but augments it, as the users of the system bring the system into new, higher states of organization. Unlike the printed text, which, as McLuhan argues, is a fossilized artifact of meaning, the hypertext is active, opening a space for dialogue. When McLuhan speaks of the effects of typography, he refers back to Plato’s myth of the origin of writing given in the Phaedo, in which Thoth, the Egyptian god who invented writing, is criticized for having created an art that will encourage people to forget (Galaxy 35). Since a hypertext exists in a continually shifting relationship to all the other hypertexts to which it is and can be linked, it perhaps does not fall victim to this criticism. Even if it does, however, the permanent links which exist in a hypertext to previous texts enable one to easily bring those texts to reminiscence.

 

As in all things, however, the reality of hypertext’s implementation has not equaled the promise of the original. The traditional mass media and the forces of commercialism have, for most of the World Wide Web’s history, managed to keep hypertext’s true dynamic potential from being realized, putting up barriers to the creation and hyperlinking of content. As stated previously, in Berners-Lee’s original design for the World Wide Web, web “browsers” did not exist: everyone who had access to the Web was a potential creator of content, whether that was content on their own personal homepages – originally a set of links to sites which they found interesting, much like the browser bookmarks of today (Mueller-Prove 34) – or content on pages that had originally been created by others. Before the separation of Web browsing features from content creation features, every site on the Web was potentially dynamic, able to be changed by those who visited it. This was in keeping with the vision of Nelson and the other early pioneers of hypertext, who desired that users be able to make their own links between the hypertext documents that they viewed.

 

However, as the Web’s popularity grew and its user base shifted from primarily scientists to laymen, who were comparatively unskilled at using computers, software companies created programs which enabled users to view websites, but which lacked any editing features. Presumably, they anticipated most people would neither make use of such features nor understand how they worked. Thus the static hypertext, one with a limited number of skilled Web users working behind the scenes to maintain and update its content, became the dominant paradigm of hypertext on the Web. Only recently, through tagging sites and Web-based programs such as blogging and wiki software, has the dynamic hypertext paradigm made a resurgence. This does not mean, however, that a static hypertext cannot make excellent use of the hypertext medium. Such a site can still be highly participatory through use of the navigational options hypertext provides; it simply will not be a dialogue, a continually changing and (hopefully) improving informational resource, as a dynamic hypertext can be.

 

The Victorian Web exploits the nonlinearity and associative linking power of the hypertext medium to the fullest, and so is possibly one of the best hypertexts on the Web. The site’s author, George Landow, quite self-consciously desired to create a website that would present information in a manner impossible on the printed page, following the principles he outlined in his books on hypertext theory, such as Hypertext 2.0. However, he remains the only person ultimately responsible for maintenance and editing of the site, including the creation of the link structures which render its content so useful. Users of the site are encouraged to submit essays to him via email which they believe would be useful and informative; however, unlike on a collaborative website such as a wiki, they cannot themselves upload this content or choose how it will be linked. In this way the Victorian Web preserves the distinction between content producer and consumer, remaining within the static hypertext paradigm that became dominant early in the Web’s history.

 

In a manner all too rare among websites, the content of the Victorian Web is classified and interlinked in more than one way, thus creating a nonlinear structure which is experienced differently by different users depending on the choices that they make about which links to follow. Most websites use hyperlinks as merely an automated means of jumping between discrete units of content, each of which could as well be presented on the printed page. The webpages which make up sites of this type often are organized radially around a homepage – a webpage containing a brief description of the purpose and subject of the site to which the user will typically return after exploring sequentially the links presented in navigation bars, which are usually above or to the left of the homepage’s content.

 

Web site authors have taken this more visually-oriented approach to presenting content since they regard pure hypertext as having a “navigation problem.” They fear that hypertext users will become lost in the connections between document nodes that textual links create unless the hypertext is organized hierarchically and navigational toolbars and menus always make it clear where the user is in the hypertext at any given time. In this way, Web designers borrow from the user interface conventions of graphical operating systems. However, as Web directories like Yahoo demonstrate, hierarchical structure has its limits. In a hierarchical tree, data can only be represented one way – according to the conceptual categories of the tree’s author. If hypertext documents are forced into a hierarchical model, much of hypertext’s potential for textual multivalence and multiple schemes of classification is lost.

 

Hypertext ceases to be a new medium in its own right and becomes instead a distribution mechanism for an old medium. As earlier in this paper the situation was discussed in which hyperlinks are used merely as a means to efficiently deliver multimedia content over the Internet, here they become merely a means to efficiently deliver discrete units of text, much like magazine articles or sections in a brochure. On their website, the developers of Storyspace warn against this:

 

 

The structural rigidity that makes navigation simple and ubiquitous, though it gives a hypertext the appearance of efficiency, can make that hypertext seem sterile, inert, and distant. We may find excitement in individual pages, but the hypertextual whole seems a mere shell enclosing variously interesting bits. (Eastgate online)

 

The allusive power of hypertext, its capacity to encourage user exploration, is lost. If a site is structured radially and hierarchically, users’ interaction with it dominated by extra-textual navigation, “Each time readers finish an article, the navigational apparatus returns them to a central page. Revisiting a landmark always suggests closure, prematurely inviting the reader to leave the hypertext and do something else” (Eastgate online).

 

In contrast to most Web site designs, the design of the Victorian Web is nonhierarchical – or at least, has several coexisting alternative hierarchies – and its navigation unobtrusive, yet intuitive. On first entering the site, the user encounters a diamond-shaped grid of icons, each of which is a hyperlink to a particular topic related to the Victorian era. Thus, the site provides multiple points of entry into its subject matter, each of which is interlinked with the others on deeper levels within the site. For example, if one clicks on the Visual Arts icon, an outline of that subject appears. If one clicks on the link for “Ruskin’s Aesthetic and Critical Theories,” one receives another outline of essays upon that subject, at the bottom of which are links both back to the main Victorian Web page and to a web in which all the main Victorian Web topics are presented in relation to Ruskin. From the pages linked on the main Ruskin page, one can follow links to essays on related topics at the bottom of which are links to the multiple levels of classification under which they fall on the main Victorian Web. Furthermore, the main text of these essays often contains links to other essays and to external sites. The whole site’s structure demands a great deal of user participation and rewards exploration. Not only can such a structure not be reproduced in any other medium, it can hardly be described in print, as the preceding sentences demonstrate. The only concession made to the supposed “navigational problem” of a non-hierarchically structured hypertext are the “breadcrumbs” at the footer of each document node which indicate a possible path back to a higher level of classification on the site.

 

The Victorian Web succeeds marvelously at categorizing and presenting hypertextually a diverse set of information. However, its scope is intentionally limited, such that it may be maintained by a single individual. Furthermore, true to its origins as a Storyspace web, most of the links within the Victorian Web are internal; the site contains few links to other sites on the World Wide Web. The Web, however, strives for universality in a way that a single author’s site on a narrowly defined subject cannot. From the earliest days of the Web, there were sites that served the purpose of universal connection, much in the way that a card catalog once did for printed text.

 

At CERN, where the Web was created, the WWW Virtual Library served this purpose. Later, when the Web became part of popular culture, Yahoo took over this function for most Web users. However, both sites function on the same basic principles of hierarchical organization and control of content by a limited number of authors. In hierarchical Web directories such as the WWW Virtual Library and Yahoo, websites are placed within a multi-level hierarchy, beginning on the highest level with broad categories such as Arts & Humanities, Business & Economy, Computers & Internet, and so on, each of which contain subcategories. In order to make the classification scheme more specific, most sites are linked from the third level down or lower on the hierarchy. All sites within the directory have been selected and classified by a small group of content creators, who provide about a sentence-long description of each in order to distinguish the sites within each subcategory.

 

This system worked for a while, but eventually became outmoded as the number of sites on the Web outstripped the directory creators’ ability to view and evaluate them. The static nature of the traditional web directory, which relied upon the intelligence of a limited number of individuals to categorize an exponentially expanding number of websites, quickly made it an artifact of the early days of the Web.

 

Furthermore, problems resulted from the relative lack of context for hyperlinks on Yahoo or similar sites, as compared to the rich textual and graphical context a single-subject site such as the Victorian Web could offer. In contrast to the associative “trails” between articles which Bush hoped that the Memex would create, Yahoo’s structure is a return to the hierarchical classification schemes which Bush detested. Users of a Web directory must have a fairly clear idea of what kind of information they need, and, even so, there is no guarantee that their conception of a proper classification scheme would correspond to that of the site’s creators. Even within a subcategory, it is by no means clear how to identify which sites are be most relevant to one’s needs based on merely the brief description provided. For these reasons, though the model of user interaction underlying the hierarchical Web directory stands in stark contrast to the passivity of television viewing, it fails to exploit the allusive potential of hypertext links. Links are merely used as a navigation tool within an index that could very well exist on paper; information is only represented one way, within a predefined structure that does not provide much contextual information to the user.

 

Still, despite its flaws, the hierarchical directory model is still in use on the Web. Recently, as the Web has become more decentralized and community-based, with more content being created by a collective of users instead of a corporation or institution, the hierarchical directory format has made a resurgence in “open directories” such as dmoz. Perhaps the hierarchical Web directory may make a resurgence as a dynamic hypertext.

 

Following its creation in 1998, Google has expanded its market share to become the primary gateway to the Web, replacing Yahoo and its like. In fact, now many people hardly know how to begin research on a topic of interest without using a Google search. The site stands halfway between the static and dynamic hypertext paradigms, providing a greater degree interaction between site and user than either static single-topic hypertexts such as the Victorian Web or hierarchical Web directories such as Yahoo. Its great strength is the mechanisms it uses to search an ever-growing and automatically-generated text index of the entire Web. Most users give little thought to the technology underlying Google’s search capabilities; they simply type in a few keywords they believe accurately describe the topic for which they are searching and then browse through the results. Surprisingly often, Google will locate relevant information on the Web without any human involvement on their part. In contrast to the sites previously discussed in this part, Google is using the intelligence of other Web users to improve the quality of their own content.

 

While not the first search engine to enter common use, Google was the first that used the participatory nature of the Web to improve the accuracy and relevance of its search results. No matter what search engine one uses, the Web is too large for a user to locate all the relevant pages within the list of results that a word or phrase search will return. Therefore, search result ranking is crucial. Earlier search engines, such as Webcrawler and Altavista, ranked documents by how frequently search terms appeared in comparison to the average, also taking note of metadata such as webpage titles and keywords which indicated the main subject of a webpage (Bray online). Google revolutionized the search industry with its PageRank technology, which ranks documents by how often they have been linked from other documents. In this way, content creators on the Web have an active role in imparting credibility to the work of their peers. Google’s technology has the further effect of creating a self-reinforcing cycle in which, as pages move up the list of Google results, more Web users discover them, find them relevant, and link to them on their own pages.

 

Since Google’s search results are affected by the opinions of other Web content creators, Google search is a much more dynamic use of the hypertext medium than are hierarchical directories such as Yahoo. Though Google’s search results cannot be modified directly by the users of the site, they are continually changing as the Web itself is changing. Presumably as more Web users discover relevant information on the Web and link to it, Google’s search results will themselves become more relevant. However, in actuality the actions of spammers continually work as a counterforce to the power of decentralized human intelligence which Google employs to categorize the Web. Recently, Google has introduced a personalized search feature, which tracks the links which are followed by users of their site. In this way, the spammers’ malicious linking practices can be in part overcome, since users will avoid going to sites that spam has elevated in the search results and, consequently, those sites will drop lower in the rankings. This recent development makes the Google site even more dynamic than it previously was, since now it responds to user choices on an individual level.

 

Del.icio.us, a site that describes itself as an “online bookmark sharing service,” stands at the forefront of the tagging phenomenon, which promises to give all Web users, not merely the owners of websites, the ability to classify the information they find on the Web. In striking contrast to Yahoo’s vision for a Web directory, del.icio.us is non-hierarchical, decentralized, and wholly user-controlled. Users of del.icio.us apply their own classification schemes, known as tags, to sites which they find interesting and wish to share with the del.icio.us community. This philosophy of classification has become known as “folksonomy,” itself a word coined by the community (“Folksonomy” online). Classification can be as idiosyncratic as the users of the site themselves, though since when a site is bookmarked del.icio.us suggests as possible tags those that have been used previously by others, there is an emerging order within the system.

 

Flickr, another prominent tagging site, allows users to upload and tag their photo libraries for online browsing. In both their system and that of del.icio.us, a combination of the interconnectivity of Web-based hypertext and the intelligence of a vast number of users are creating a body of knowledge that could not otherwise exist: in the first case, about photos; in the second, about websites. A search engine, called CollaborativeRank, has even been created that takes Google’s PageRank technology to the next level of user participation, basing its search results off the tagged postings in the del.icio.us database, ranked by the posters’ reputation. Similarly to how Google ranks a website’s reputation based on how many other pages have linked to it, CollaborativeRank calculates del.icio.us users’ reputation based on how soon they bookmark new pages and whether the tags they use are later used by others.

 

As Kevin Kelly writes in Wired, the potential implications of this expanding database are unprecedented and unforeseen, even by McLuhan. The Internet technology humanity has created has become a network, an extension of the central nervous system, in a much more profound way than McLuhan anticipated, since a feedback loop is occurring between the power of human and machine intelligence. Kelly describes this in terms of the artificial intelligence concept of a neural net:

 

 

When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge. (Kelly online)

 

Though such a network would be immensely useful, McLuhan’s thoughts on the oral world of total involvement and interdependency suggest it can be terrifying as well. Kelly, like many technologists, seems almost to advocate symbiosis between humans and machines – the capital letter in his article is revealing. While the participatory culture of electronic media may extend humanity’s ability to communicate and categorize information in startling and seemingly irresistible ways, it would be foolish to forget the disciplines of silence and contemplation fostered by the earlier manuscript culture of which McLuhan writes in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Before print culture is displaced completely by a technology of speed and convenience, it would be beneficial to consider what was lost long ago in the time of the Renaissance: the practice of ruminatio, long consideration over a brief yet deeply meaningful text, which was central in medieval monastic life (McLuhan Galaxy 111-112). Though the Web makes worldwide communication easier than ever before and hypertextual form may be excellent at showing the connections between concepts, Christians must remember to remain grounded in the Word which is the same “yesterday, today, and forever” (Heb. 13:8).

 

Glossary

 

• Breadcrumbs – a trail of hyperlinks, usually in the header or footer of a webpage, that indicate its position within the hierarchy of the hypertext as a whole

 

• Medium – any means by which humans communicate with each other. The principal media which McLuhan addresses in his theory of the evolution of communication and the thought patterns formed by a culture’s characteristic media are speech, writing – though he draws a strong contrast between manuscript writing, which he views as participatory and humanistic, and typographic printing, which he views as mechanized and homogenizing, and television. McLuhan considers television to be the principal medium of the electronic era, ushering in a new era of multi-perspectival oral space – world consciousness and total involvement.

 

• Metadata – keywords and other such information which Web designers put in the headers of the HTML code for their website. This information is invisible to viewers of the page

 

• User – as used in this paper, this word refers to anyone who is placed in relationship with a medium in which he or she is receiving content from it. More specific terms, such as “viewer,” “reader,” or “browser” apply only to specific media – television, print, and hypertext, respectively – and, as such, connote different levels of interaction with a medium. Since the contrast between hypertext’s level of interactivity and that of previous media is central to this paper, a word for the receiver of media content which obscured this contrast would be harmful to the paper’s argument.

 

• Spam – irrelevant content, usually commercial, which is usually transmitted electronically over the Internet. In the context of this paper, spam consists of comments on blogs and other webpages that contain spurious links to websites that promote products unrelated to the sites from which they are linked.

 

Works Cited

 

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• Burbules, Nicholas C. “Rhetorics of the Web: Hyperreading and critical literacy.” Snyder 102-122.

 

• Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” Interactions 3.2 (Mar. 1996): 35-46. Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly 176.7 (Jul. 1945).

 

• Bray, Tim. “On Search: Result Ranking”:http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/11/13/ResultRanking Ongoing. 13 Nov. 2003. 15 Nov. 2005.

 

• Douglas, Jane Yellowes. “Will the most reflexive relativist stand up: hypertext, argument and relativism.” Snyder 144-162.

 

• “Folksonomy.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia 21 Nov. 2005.

 

• Keep, Christopher, Tim McLaughlin, and Robin Parmar. “Intertextuality”:http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0278.html The Electronic Labyrinth. 2001. U. of Virginia. 21 Nov. 2005.

 

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• “The Limits of Structure”:http://www.eastgate.com/garden/The_Limits_of_Structure.html Hypertext Gardens. 1998. Eastgate Systems. 21 Nov. 2005.

 

• McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto:

 

 

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• —— and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam,

 

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• Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. New York: Penguin, 1986.

 

• Snyder, Ilana. “Beyond the hype: reassessing hypertext.” Snyder 125-143.

 

• Snyder, Ilana, ed. Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. London: Routledge, 1998.

 

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