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Hypertext
Keywords; Decentralised, Interconnected, Democratic
Interesting quotes:
In the age of blogging and tweeting and Facebooking, the demotic word-of-mouth that evaluates a movie according to the seat-of-the-pants bottom-line criterion—whether it’s worth the price of the ticket—gets around quickly, and that this crowd-sourced form of criticism drives people to or from the theatre more predictably and more reliably than the writings of those of us who evaluate movies according to a more diverse yet less immediately practical set of criteria. - Richard Brody
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The people who invented the link saw it as a tool for relating ideas in illuminating ways — for making conceptual leaps and connecting disparate thoughts. - Scott Rosenberg
The evolution of data-handling equipment thus has involved two important features: compression, which allows great masses of data to be stored in a small space, and rapid access, by which a single piece of information can be located and reproduced in a very brief time. - Vannevar Bush
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Commentry:
Hypertext, whose beginnings can be seen in Bush’s hypothetical memex, ties very closely with how the mind’s structure appears to work. Terms, images, videos and audio can all be associated by a subjective authority who is developing their own interpretation. How an individual operates within a hyper-text is very different from the traditional ways of interacting with books. Katherine Hayles is one scholar who does not necessarily view the shift in styles to be a negative thing but the processes are merely developed from a different source of information. The internet is an entirely different medium than books, television or radio. Its ability to synthesise all media into itself and its democratic structure place the user in more control than has ever been previously accessible. The change in how this democratisation is affecting culture can be seen in Brody's comment. The authority of the elite critic is being replaced by the writerly-reader. Ever increasing amounts of people are able to share their experiences and interpretations of texts, forming large communities in the process. the work on these community forums then links to other sites of a similar nature and so on and so forth a digital six degrees of separation.
Bush's memex was able to perfectly recall the journey and all the information that was accessed as a result of the user's searching. The internet, whilst capable of achieving the same aim cannot stay true to that ideal. Information is always corruptible, not different than our human memories and, like our human memories, can be very selective in what it wants to recall. Controlling the hyper-text is a big issue in today's society and no entity controls the hyper-text more than Google.
The problem with the 'assistance' of search engines is that they trap us within trends. There is an entire industry around SEO (search engine optimisation) which aims to make sites appear at the top of search lists, not by merit of their quality but by their linkages, keywords and number of visitors. By using these strategies, companies and groups promoting ideologies can subvert traffic towards their information. Once one user follows the path the search engine assumes that the next user with a similar query would benefit from taking the same path. Instead of being a decentred neutral democracy of information the internet presented by Google is a distorted world of misdirection and falsity.
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A fascinating game grew out of this discussion. One of us suggested performing the following experiment to prove that the population of the Earth is closer together now than they have ever been before. We should select any person from the 1.5 billion inhabitants of the Earth – anyone, anywhere at all. He bet us that, using no more than five individuals, one of whom is a personal acquaintance, he could contact the selected individual using nothing except the network of personal acquaintances - Frigyes Karinthy
We are being immersed in the illusion of freedom.
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