For the Critical 'photo' essay assignment, I'm interested in understanding more clearly the history of hypertext. I'm curious to develop how hypertext came to exist. Where did its roots emerge in literary history? And, how do we see those roots shift to create the kind of hypertext we mingle with today?
I've been studying eco-criticism for several years now and have come to better understand the paradigm of modernity that we are operating within, and I'd like to extend the deconstruction to hypertext. Though I don't necessarily see multi-modal use of language as a bad thing, I'm interested to know why and how this 'new frontier' developed. I think if we can better trace the path of emergence, then we, ideally, will be able to more effectively utilize this tool.
There's a sort of inevitability that surrounds technological evolution in our modern world now.
Kevin Slavin said in his TED talk on 'How Algorithms Shape Our World' that "there's an uneasy collaboration between nature and man and now there's this third corroboratory force" he claims it's algorithms, but in a way I think it's just technology as a whole. I'd like to explore this idea, and look at some of the implications (both negative and positive) of interacting so frequently with hypertext.
The sort of reseach I will need to conduct for a project of this sort is vast. Ironically, I think a lot of the 'historical' information will need to come from more recent sources, so I imagine I'll utilize textual research. I'd like to uncover the foundation of this shift, see if I can pinpoint when and why we made the move towards hypertextualization. I'll start by looking into Ted Nelson's life, the man who coined this phrase in the first place. We will see where this goes!
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