aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Welcome to my hypertext non-fiction novel

Avoiding the news while on vacation, I’ve decided to make the announcement now.

A few weeks ago, after a hearing on a Federal Election Commission proposal that would extend some campaign finance rules to the Internet, including bloggers, and in light of Carol Darr’s FEC testimony, outraged bloggers left and right were following Greg’s lead and abandoning the blogosphere to become, instead, online magazines.

Not all chose the online magazine route: http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/06/apparently_we_c.html” target="_blank">Pandagon became a church and http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/archives/11147” target="_blank">The Moderate Voice was declared the 11th Commandment. Digby said, ”Call me talk radio” and Kos explained to Salon that the point is media, not journalist. Bloggers are media and so should get the exemption.

So what am I?

From Cory Doctorow’s comments on the IT Conversations series Voices in Your Head:

[My transcription beginning @ 44:38] We used to spend a lot of time trying to figure out what hypertext novels would look like. We had these models where we put them in hypercard stacks and you’d have words that would be hot and you’d click them and they’d take you to another screen, or you’d have them in websites, or Ted Nelson Xanadu, all these different ideas of what a hypertext novel is.

But maybe a hypertext book, maybe not a novel, but a hypertext book is a thing that starts with you reading a bit of something on a blog, and going, “oh that’s interesting.” You highlight some of that text you right-click and search Google… You find a newsgroup… and somewhere along there you follow a link to something else…

Maybe that’s what a hypertext book is. Right, truly hypertext in that the links are unidirectional, no one has anyone else’s permission or knowledge of the existence of the links. The links are serendipitous. And the links are made by people who don’t know that the other ones exist or that they’re actually collaborating on this same project.

Welcome to my hypertext non-fiction novel!