Some background serendipity: When I started to read Mark Bernstein’s hypertext article, I quickly realized that I needed some context, so I Googled him. The story he blogged about most recently on his personal webpage, markbernstein.org, was one I had read myself in the Washington Post on Sunday, and had already told several people about because it was so amazing. (Brief summary: Mega-famous violinist Joshua Bell, accompanied by some undercover Post reporters, went busking in a DC Metro station with his $3.5 million violin, making a little over $30 in 45 minutes of playing; he was recognized by only one of the hundreds of people who passed by.) What Bernstein blogged about before that was the second book by Rory Stewart, whose first book, The Places In Between, I read and loved pretty recently.
I believe Bernstein and/or his colleagues at Eastgate Systems might have had something to do with the first hypertext I ever saw, an amazing collection of linked stories and graphics on Macintosh HD floppies that I sent away for after finding a mail-away card in a Mac magazine in 1990 or so. I stuck those into my work computer and ended up spending much of the weekend at the office. I couldn’t get enough of that feeling of having the cobwebs blown out of my mind, after years of that horrible chunk-chunk-grind-whine that seemed to characterize personal computer usage. I’ve often thought nostalgically about that multi-faceted hypertext, and how the corners of the Internet that I’ve traversed have generally failed to come up to its literary (and technical, if that is how to refer to link topology) standard. Armed with that memory, I settled down to try to understand “Patterns of Hypertext.” This proved difficult, as (except for that experience 17 years ago) I haven’t spent much time seeking out artful hypertext. The closest I’ve come to the experience I felt when I read that first hypertext was in 1996, when I started reading suck.com. It was clever in a different way, but it worked brilliantly with what must have been some of the patterns Bernstein writes about. (Speaking of which, the patterns I understood best were the ones with the little line illustrations.)
After some thought, now, I realize that the Internet is simply a place I turn to for information, rather than a way to spend hours in meandering enlightenment. I’m holding that thought, and intending to search out some of the hypertext from Eastgate. I’m bitterly disappointed that I no longer use a Mac, because it means I can’t download Tinderbox, Eastgate’s “personal content management assistant,” which I’m convinced would give me that feeling again, dammit.
This isn’t really about the reading, I guess, but more about the reader. I don’t have much to say about the reading, except that thinking about these patterns opened my mind again, just a little bit, and blew out a few cobwebs. The main problem for me as a content creator is that this kind of super-thoughtful hyperlinking is an entirely new aspect of writing, like playing 3-D chess. I’m afraid I may be too lazy.
