* <<JA0JHFGC>> Ted's Ahead of You
Created: 11/14/2017, 8:21:07 PM
It's funny: you can be a true believer, like me – a real Xaniac –
and you can think to yourself, hey, I GET it; I'm not like all these
other turds-for-brains computer people who don't GET Xanadu. I
understand Ted's ideas. I'm one of the enlightened people!
And then you talk to Ted, or you read something he wrote twenty,
thirty, fifty years ago, and ...you pause ...as in your brain a small
iconoclasm is committed, and a space is freed into which another
little chunk of The Big Picture fits. You then eat your slice of
humble pie, and you think to yourself, ah, well, I get a LOT of it,
but I wasn't quite getting that bit, was I? But now I am!
It's easy to make excuses for oneself when the tao of understanding
has a large unlearning component. I was a youth when I started
learning about "hypertext" and "links", and the concepts I gained
then were not at all the real thing. They were the shallow simulacra
of hypertext and links that the world had consented to accept as
real: hypertext is text with links; links are things you click on.
Try to scratch below that surface and you'd get more layers of
misapprehension: it's chunked text, it's nonlinearity — the great
joke of the latter being that in a single-document browser it's
ALWAYS linear, always sequential – you just have some control over
the sequence.
Hypertext isn't just data structures and informatics, it's sensual
and experiential. There's motion, there's action – it's cinematic.
There's nothing cinematic about a Web browser.
Intertextuality, a term that came later, is the essence of Ted's
hypertext.You might call it dynamically explicit intertext.
--
Excerpted from:
PUBLIC NOTES (H)
http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H
©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <
[email protected]>
