Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Introducing Information Spaces, 1 Tom Maddox Two or more prolonged, almost musical tones; a sudden rush of white noise; one beep, another (or, depending on your system, any of a variety of tones--an eep, a clank, a quack): one modem has successfully connected to another, and your computer is no longer something that sits isolated on your desk. It now has, shall we say, companions. It has connected to another computer, which may, in turn, connect to others. However, though as an sf writer I am delighted by the idea of a computer having companions, the truth here and now is more mundane: in fact, one person connects to another. Keep that in mind. It is people who connect and their intentions that give meaning to the mere interface of computer to computer. Across large parts of the world, computers sit ready to feed you data. You can read electronic versions of journals such as Postmodern Culture and Quanta. You can download shareware or freeware programs for your IBM-compatible computer from White Sands or Finland or for your Macintosh from Stanford, the most recent release of Macintosh system software from Apple's own Internet computer or the latest version of Disinfectant, a free virus killer, from Northwestern University. You can search the library catalogs of a number of huge, connected repositories, including branches of the University of California. From the Gutenberg Project you can obtain electronic copies of the Bible or Alice's Adventures Underground. On any number of bulletin boards and conferencing services, you can ask about cyberpunk, cooking, dogs, "Twin Peaks," or the Space Shuttle- -and generally get answers, some of them well-informed, even authoritative; also, you can read outrageous opinions on virtually any topic of controversy, and you can write them for tens, hundreds, thousands of others to read, depending on your connection. You can exchange electronic mail with any number of people, depending upon how gregarious you are in this medium and how much time you are willing to spend. You can participate in semi-private discussion groups on medieval history, future culture or Finnegans Wake. Learning the networks, using the networks, you can while away the hours in work or play or something that is a little bit of both--the only partly understood mode of interaction that is a human being at a computer terminal. This may be good for you or bad for you, or a bit of each: the jury's still out, and no one is even sure what constitutes evidence in this regard. The cyberpunk future of self-aware Artificial Intelligences and networked virtual realities seems far off, and at present most of us are restricted to clumsy desktop machines, slow modems, and the pedestrian exchange of texts and computer files. However, though you have not donned your goggles and gloves, once connected you are nonetheless occupying cyberspace, at least a primitive, Wright Brothers version of it. However, odds are you haven't had this experience--it requires coming to terms with modems and communications software and phone hookups and is in general a pain in the rear, particularly for a novice. Not only do you have to be a computer user, but also you have to be schooled in at least a few of the higher arcana of telecommunications. For most people most of the time, the effort required to get online simply isn't worth it. In fact, this principle applies to much of the existing information technology. Though something you may be extremely interested in exists, you may not be able to find it, and if you find it, you may not be able to use it, and if you can use it, you may not be able to use it well. For instance, one of the common complaints about Usenet is that it simply is too huge: the amount of information that passes across it daily cannot be read. In the despairing words of Steve Steinberg, editor of Intertek, a savvy journal about cyberspace and its culture, "Reading USENET is like drinking from a firehose. . . ." So, to use information technology well, you must learn how to limit what washes over you, how to filter it. In order to do so, you must first understand a bit about the environment you'll be exploring. I've referred casually to the "networks," not only begging for the moment the question of what they are and how they function, but also leaving unsaid a primary truth about them. The networks themselves are manifestations of a larger process which we might call the emergence of worldwide information spaces-- provisionally defined as the space of all electronic media and all connections among them. Computers connect to other computers, and that's the network part of it, but there are things happening here that transcend networks. For instance, new possibilities in science and technology have emerged because computers exist. James Gleick makes this point in his Chaos, concerning the study of non-linear dynamic systems; without getting at all technical, let's just say that all those pretty pictures of Mandelbrot and Julia sets and those eerie fractal landscapes are made possible by computer technology. Stephen S. Hall's Mapping the Next Millennium: The Discovery of New Geographies takes the point further afield, into projects such as mapping the ocean floor, the human body, the human genome, the universe. Feed in the data points, get a picture of the Strange Attractor, currently my favorite object in the macro-world. In Hall's words, "It does not deposit any photons on optical telescopes, leaves no bark of static for radio telescopes to detect. That is in part because it itself is a forest of galaxies, incredibly dense and unimaginably large, lying off at a distance of 150 million light-years." Without computers, the Great Attractor would have remained invisible. The computer's ability to perform astounding numbers of calculations in short order and to present the results in visual form enables the discovery of new facts and, more importantly, new modes of understanding. Also, the increasingly flexible power of computers to do a number of simple things such as lay out and print out text and graphics will certainly rewrite fundamental practices in our culture, such as publishing, and fundamental ideas, such as intellectual property. It is easy to extrapolate a situation not too far away when every one of us can become his or her own publisher on a desktop, own distributor on the networks. However, you don't have to lament the disappearance of the publisher just yet. Attempts to do pure electronic publishing are embryonic, to say the least, and publishers remain invaluable to getting published. ("Yes," says an imp. "Who else will provide bad cover art, no advertising, and a firm commitment to keeping books in distribution for an entire month, maybe even five weeks?" I, of course, think none of these things, because I really like my publisher, several of whose representatives will likely read these words.) And of course the book itself may well become as quaint an artifact as the stone tablet. Emerging technologies, in my opinion still more cute and interesting than genuinely useful, can present books on computer screens. William Gibson's "Sprawl" novels will be available soon electronically. Without going into the large and unresolved controversies about the death of the book right now (though I will later), I will merely note that a book stored electronically can be searched, indexed, and cross-referenced in a huge number of ways; can be turned into hypertext, however you define that. Finally, to wrap up this glance into information space, there is multi-media, the combination of text, pictures still or moving, music, and whatever else you can digitize. Examples include Voyager's versions of Mozart's The Magic Flute and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, both of which allow you to dip into the composer's life and times and to perform such seemingly magical acts as clicking on a line of musical notation to hear what it sounds like. In short, the emerging computer environment is about new ways of assembling and distributing information. In one sense, you might regard information as anything on your computer disks or held in its memory: that collection of 0s and 1s rigidly quantifiable into bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes, and so on. When your floppy or hard drive is full of it, well, there's no arguing with the drive, no telling it that information is a relative or elastic notion, that some information is valuable, other worthless. (You can quite often "squeeze" that information, that is to say, code it in a more efficient way, and so gain disk space, but the same principle applies: given any sort of coding, your disk will only hold so much, and there are limits to how much it will hold no matter what the form of coding.) Most of us, however, think of information in more qualitative ways. When we possess it, we know something we didn't before. Some bits of it are more valuable than others. Some of it is timely, some of it is particularly pleasing, funny, alarming, disgusting, astonishing. The computer networks make possible the very fast distribution of unprecedented quantities of information to a very large number of people. Limited primarily by your knowledge of what is available, and where and how, you can fill up your hard drive or stacks of floppies quicker than would seem possible or reasonable. The world has become information- abundant and information-quick, and the computer networks are major conduits for the dense, fast information flow. There's no quick, easy way of coming to terms with this information density, no sudden way of knowing what's of interest to you on the various networks and how to get it. The electronic frontier can't be explored overnight. If you try to master it all at once, you risk a peculiarly modern overload: you'll be disoriented out there in cyberspace, unable to remember where you are or why you came there, and the information glut will wash over you like an electronic flood. Too many newsgroups, roundtables, echos, mailing lists; too many different menus structures or command-line possibilities; too much electronic mail: all of it, simply, too much. The issue here is personal bandwidth, or how much information you can absorb in a given measure of time--how quickly you can drink from the firehose. You have to find what rate of information transfer feels right for you given personal factors such as your "spare time" (for many people these days a phrase that can only be used ironically), overall knowledge of computers, ability and willingness to concentrate on learning the electronic frontier, and patience. You also need to find a congenial territory within the electronic frontier and get to know that locale well. Some places will probably seem too wild to you, others too tame, and many will almost certainly appear boring. However, there's lots of space out there, from the totalitarian but quiet Prodigy, to the vast, complex anarchy of Usenet, which offers startling freedom but can require steady nerves and a strong stomach. Thus my next column will introduce to you the major electronic networks. I will not be concerned so much with the technical details as I will with the overall environment, the kind of social life or culture, provided by each. My aim will be to describe them in terms general and accurate enough that you can make a reasonable guess at which ones might appeal to your needs and tastes. Then when you hear the hissing and beeps, you'll have some idea what comes next. Reports from the Electronic Frontier: Introducing Information Spaces, 2 Tom Maddox Begin with the idea of places where people can leave or take away anything that can be put on a computer: text, computer programs themselves, digitized sounds and still or moving pictures. They can also read anything they find there. Such places, accessible through phone lines or network connections, are the communities of the world information space, and together they make up the evolving web of cyberspace. BBSs and conferencing systems, networks private and public, local and global; Freenet and Sugar, the Internet, BITNET, CompuServe, GEnie, BIX, FidoNet, AppleLink, the WELL: there are so many places, so many kinds of places. As Tarzan said to Jane, it's a jungle out there. Unless you're an expert, technically and otherwise (like John Quarterman, author of The Matrix, whom I will quote later), you probably will have trouble keeping them straight. However, you can learn enough to navigate through the world information spaces, or the parts of them you're interested in. At the very least, you can learn roughly what's possible, enough so that you can then explore things on your own. At the local level, the most common of these places is the bulletin board, the BBS. People call the BBS (most often simply a desktop personal computer with the appropriate software and one or more dedicated phone lines) and read the messages posted there. Messages are sub-divided by topic: for instance, computers, science fiction, music, movies, politics. Sometimes callers leave their own messages, either in response to existing ones or by way of starting a new topic. They also may download files (that is, transfer them from the other computer to their own)--text files, programs, sounds, images (given the high percentage of adolescent males in the BBS world, you can figure for yourself what kinds of images predominate). They may also upload files (transfer them from their own computer to the other one) for others' use. They may chat with others online. They may play games against the computer or other users or take online quizzes. They may also leave e-mail--private messages--for other people who use the BBS and read e-mail from them. And, as clever and inventive people think up new things to do on a BBS, people do those as WELL. In the hierarchy of communities populating the world's information spaces, the local BBS is the village. Its population is limited, hence its resources are as WELL. However, almost everything you can find on a larger system or network is available on a BBS, though often in miniature or embryonic form. t}: command not found The virtues of this small town atmosphere are predictable. Local BBSs are informal places, often relaxed and friendly, where discussions are easily started. They reflect local mores and are a good place to discuss local issues. Also, they are unintimidating places, where people can step in without fear and trembling and ask the stupid questions that must be asked for them to become at home there. Generally, it's easy for newcomers to become at home: local BBSs are folksy. Which is why I find that they grow old. If you're looking for sophisticated conversation (about social issues, books, films, or music, for instance), you'll rarely come across it there. More likely you'll encounter something like, "I saw ALIENS last night and it was totaly awesome. Your definately gonna like it." In the worst cases, you can feel that you've wandered into a teenage boys' clubhouse--which can be great if you're a teenage boy, but if not, not. Also, while new versions of really WELL-known shareware programs tend to filter very quickly from the networks and larger BBSs to the small ones, lesser-known programs may not make it at all. And on the local BBSs one seldom finds really interesting text files--which are among the most delightful manifestations on larger BBSs and networks. Also, in smaller cities and towns, the number of BBSs will be small, and the active members in the BBS community will be correspondingly small--so much so that you will run into the same group of people everywhere. In particular, you will be exposed to the same small number of vocal BBS members; at these times, a BBS feels more like an electronic and ubiquitous version of the Liars' Bench in front of City Hall than a boys' clubhouse. However, if you take the capabilities of a local BBS and scale them up--increase the number of users who can log on at one time, the storage space available for files, the number and kind of topics discussed, and so on--you get conferencing systems such as CompuServe, GEnie, America Online, and the WELL, or regional BBSs such as Freenet--all of which are very broad-based, with thousands of users discussing thousands of topics. If the local BBSs are villages, these systems are giant "edge cities," suburban enclaves combining business and pleasure, office building and mall. Of course, the mere fact of a large audience draws commercial interests: computer companies who provide support for their hardware and software (including bug reports, updates, and tips on use); online equivalents of The Home Shopping Channel, flogging any number of goods and services (though with a decided slant toward computers). Each system has its own character, its own culture. For instance, GEnie is almost vengefully Middle American. While it is hard to render the flavor of the place, here is a description of it from Glossbrenner's Master Guide to GEnie: "GEnie has a personality, too, and it is among the most pleasing and congenial you will ever find. If you had to sum it up in three simple words, those words would be energy, innovation, and a wonderful sense of community." How inspiring! How thrilling! How . . . very off-putting! In Glossbrenner's words you can hear the pitchman's (or evangelist's, assuming you make that distinction) tones of hyper-sincere hyper-enthusiasm. To be fair, however, GEnie is not, like Prodigy (joint venture of IBM and Sears), a thin shell of telecommunications wrapped around a gigantic marketing opportunity. Among its many possibilities, it offers a full range of discussion groups ("roundtables" in GEnie terms), most available at GEnie's flat monthly rate, which is to say, available cheaply. And for people interested in sf, GEnie can be a very interesting place. An extraordinary number of writers, editors, fans, and general readers post messages on a numerous and diverse range of topics. You can, if you wish, write to these people public or privately, or, in some cases, engage them in online chat. In short, you can shmooze, suck up, argue, or simply "lurk"--(the universal term for those online who never say anything,the voyeurs of cyberspace)--all to your heart's content. By comparison, the WELL (the "Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link") is extremely West Coast, with lots of interest in topics such as ecopolitics, spiritual development, recovery programs, and the Grateful Dead. However, it is also the most intellectually serious of the conferencing systems I've encountered, the one where the level of discourse is the highest. Many of its users are writers, musicians, artists, and, more generally, people involved deeply and publicly in the issues they're discussing. For instance, if you're concerned with Constitutional protection in cyberspace--freedom of expression, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and so on--then you would find that the Electronic Frontier Foundation runs an active group featuring sometime participation by the main players in the organization, including Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and Mike Godwin. However, the major difference between GEnie and the WELL is more concrete than differences in cultural style. The WELL is connected to the Internet, GEnie is not. The significance of this will take some explaining. The megalopolises of cyberspace differ from their ordinary counterparts in many ways, but perhaps the most difficult to understand is that they are not held together by geography. The Internet, the largest city in cyberspace, is all over the world map: Berkeley, Tokyo, Oxford, Houston, Toronto, Cape Town, Hong Kong, Scott Base Antarctica, and thousands of other places. More confusing yet, what defines a cyberspace city differs from one network to another: Usenet is the network of those machines that exchange Usenet news; the Internet is the network of those machines that communicate by TCP/IP protocols and allow ftp and telnet access to one another, and so on. These details do not matter to most users (though the services do that they stand for); what matters is that the cyberspace city has an abstract and complex structure that really must be experienced to be understood. What is important in network connections is not the geographical proximity of two or more machines but the ways they connect. If I have a very fast and continuous connection to a computer three thousand or more miles away, then we are very "close" to one another; if I have a slow and intermittent connection to one in my neighborhood, we are very "far". If one connection allows sophisticated Internet services while another doesn't, the first connection will take me places and allow me to do things the second one won't. Space has been redefined. So has time. Because of the peculiar nature of cyberspace, we can find ourselves responding to messages that themselves are responses to messages that we won't see until later. Seeming temporal paradox ensues, in which we have effects preceding causes. In fact, every user on the network has what might be called a local frame of reference, which determines how the network looks to him or her, or, more to the point, in what order events on the network happen for him or her. Network relations are governed by a kind of Cyber/Special Relativity: this takes a little getting used to. Also, let there be no doubt that when we explore one of the major networks, we have moved into a different order of community from the relatively isolated systems such as GEnie. The numbers change dramatically. John Quarterman says (in e-mail), "My current estimate is 7.5 million users of the Internet, plus or minus 2.5 million. This is what exponential growth does. For the Matrix (all the networks in the world that exchange mail or news), I estimate 14 million, plus or minus 4 million." Compare this to the few hundred users of a reasonable-sized BBS and the several thousand users of GEnie or the WELL. Quarterman goes on to say, "On a global scale, 14 million people is more than in all but half a dozen or so cities, more than all but a few U.S. states, and between Portugal and South Africa as countries go." Understandably, the range of human behavior expands in cyberspace cities just as it does in mundane cities. And like any citizen of a village or town coming to the big city, the person new to Usenet, for instance, is likely to stand around looking at the tall buildings and is sometimes in danger of getting virtually mugged. These "muggings" usually take the form of "flames," verbal attacks delivered with very little restraint in language and attitude. Fortunately, virtual muggings don't hurt nearly as much as physical ones or leave as long-lasting wounds, but they can nonetheless upset and frighten those who are temperamentally susceptible to them or simply naive. However, even on Usenet (as in New York City or Los Angeles), one will also find a unexpected kindness and a remarkable variety of people talking about almost every topic you can imagine, from the most obscure computer operating system to the spiritual benefits of bondage. Village, suburbia, the big city: most of us are more at home in one domain than the others, and most of us will prefer one domain of cyberspace to the others--local BBS, conferencing system or regional BBS, or major network. Also, we quite likely will find that different needs prompt us to different domains. If I want information about a rumored bug in the latest release of Macintosh software, I'll go to the Mac groups on Usenet; if I want to hear what people have to say about Oakland residents' reactions to the firestorm, I'll call local BBSs. In fact, as in the world outside, distinctions among village, suburbia, and city have begun to blur. Until just recently, the WELL was virtually a standalone system, with only e-mail access to other systems; now it offers full Internet capabilities. GEnie has recently instituted a mail gateway to the Internet; one can reasonably conjecture that GEnie this connection will expand. Similarly, some major regional BBSs either connect to the Internet or are considering such a connection. "The Matrix," as Quarterman calls it, with a term taken from Neuromancer, continues to grow, with no foreseeable end. What does this process mean? Perhaps these connections bring us together. Imagine us all reaching out to one another across the planet: the isolated, handicapped, the lonely able to find one another, to talk, to listen, to give comfort. Or perhaps the connections merely give the illusion of bringing us together. Perhaps we delude ourselves through them, because in making them we believe we have changed our lives but haven't--despite what we do in cyberspace, we are left with our essential loneliness and anomie and our inabilities to love one another. After some years on the nets, I find myself believing both things are true. Reports from the Electronic Frontier: I Sing The Text Electric, Part 1--Hypertext Local and General Tom Maddox New technologies often subvert or replace older ones; we have grown used to this process, which seems essential to our times. However, new technologies can also call into question ideas and practices that seemed universal and inevitable, and they can allow us to envision possibilities that previously were simply unthinkable. During the past few decades, information processing technologies have caused our culture to see anew the fundamental practices of literacy. To understand how this rethinking of literacy has come about, let us begin by asking, what is a book? It is a sheaf of pages, broken up by word spacing, punctuation, paragraphs and space breaks. Other structures are superimposed on the page--page numbers, variations in typeface style and size; sections, chapters, parts--and tables of contents and indexes provide further order. Taken together, such structures manifest the common structures of literacy in our time. When we read, they are what we expect to find; they are more than customary, they are, or so we might think, unavoidable. However, though the page and its structures are both efficient and convenient, they have no more essential validity for reading than the tablet or the scroll, technologies of writing they superseded. Or the screen: the unit of the new technology of writing, of electronic text. The "book" was once an endless scroll marked into columns and read horizontally. The electronic text is typically a scroll with beginning and end, read vertically: this is the structure of the usual computer file as it is treated by a word processing, editing, or viewing program. To read the electronic text, we may move "up" or "down" in the file, or go to its beginning or end, or to a specific "page"-- though strictly speaking a "page" is a metaphor in an electronic text, an allusion to what the text would look like if it were printed. And if we are using a relatively slow system, or one with unfamiliar commands, we may reflect ironically on the speed and ease of a book or magazine--the technically primitive but effortless turn of the page. In fact, we will generally prefer the aesthetic experience of the printed page to that of the electronic screen. Computer screens are notoriously hard on the eyes, and computers are less companionable than books-- as people remark in every discussion of this topic I have encountered on the nets, it is hard to curl up in bed or bath with a computer. Without getting further into these matters, we can just take as a given that printed texts at this time are generally easier and more enjoyable to read than electronic texts. However, the electronic text comes into its own when it manifests possibilities denied to the printed text. For instance, if we are looking for a particular phrase, using a word processor's search commands, we can locate any or every instance of it. We might say that the electronic text is smarter than the printed text--it contains information about itself that a printed text contains only when it has been thoroughly analyzed. More generally, the electronic text can be structured in ways impossible to the print text. Most notably, it can manifest an internal network of connections and associations, and so become hypertext, defined by Ted Nelson, who invented the term, as "nonsequential writing." Two places in hypertext, like two places in science fictional hyperspace, can be multiply, oddly connected: a word, a phrase, or any other element of the text can connect to other, seemingly widely-separated elements along invisible lines. Hypertext startles page-oriented readers by transporting them suddenly from point to point. Moreover, the electronic text can be richer than the print text. It can include anything that can be digitized: words, sounds, still and moving pictures. Thus the text becomes musical, voice-annotated, illustrated. A hypertext concerning Kennedy's presidency, for instance, can include such dramatic elements as the "Ask not what you can do for your country" speech, or Kennedy's confident announcement to the citizens of Berlin that he was a pastry, or Kennedy's last moments as displayed in the grisly Zapruder film. Actually, I've seen the Zapruder film digitized and placed into a form suitable for use on a Macintosh, and the results are both interesting and frustrating. The picture quality is low--constrained by the limits of the screen and the operating system software. Before looking at the digitized sequence, I had a soft-headed notion that I might draw my own conclusions about where the bullets came from and whether the number of assassins was greater than one. This notion survived only a few seconds of looking at the fuzzy images on my computer screen. In fact, video quality of computer-shown pictures, still or moving, is typically low, and the digitizing, storage, and display technologies for computer graphics, whether still or moving, are still relatively clumsy and slow, and often unlovely. For richness and accuracy of reproduction of still images, the printed page still sets the standards; for moving images, film and videotape are generally much superior to what we can see on the computer screen. Setting aside these details for the moment, let us look at some further implications of the medium of hypertext. If we are reading a story (or novel, poem, or drama) in hypertextual form, we can find, perhaps to our consternation, that there is no single, authoritative ordering of the text. In radical cases, the entire nature of the narrative changes depending upon which paths we follow through the text. This occurs in the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books for children--which we might consider print simulations of hypertext for the young; training wheels for the new technologies of literacy. At the other end of the spectrum, high-culture artifacts such as Michael Joyce's Afternoon puzzle, tease, delight, and infuriate in ways characteristic of avant-garde literature. From whatever end of the literary spectrum, such hypertexts invite the reader to restructure them, to choose individual paths that are the reader's own. In the process, something new is happening with regard to the reader and the authority of the printed word. George P. Landow--a literary theorist who helped develop Intermedia, a major hypertext system, at Brown University--says that hypertext and literary theorists alike "argue that we must abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks" (in his Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology). Parisian literary society and Silicon Valley come together in hyperspace, and computer nerd and deconstructionist are joined across what might have seemed an untraversable abyss. Hypertext makes strange connections in a variety of domains, not just from one intertextual element to another. Some uses of hypertext seem destined to become commonplace: computer documentation, parts catalogs, and other such texts characterized by simple structures holding a great deal of data. Other uses, such as avant-garde literary texts, are likely to remain as isolated and rare as, well, avant-garde literary texts. Still other uses are in the process of evolving, and their ultimate nature remains unclear. I find most interesting the whole set of possibilities surrounding networked hypertext--what we might call intertextual- hypertext. Let us imagine that we can connect to a library of libraries, a repository of much or most or all of what is contained in all the world's libraries--books in all languages, periodicals, manuscripts, art prints, sound recordings in a variety of media, transcripts of legislative bodies . . . and so on, anything we imagine that can be recorded, catalogued, preserved. Whatever we want to know can be found there if anywhere. Landow makes an apt comparison between this hypertextual text of all texts and Jorge Luis Borges' "Aleph," a point in space that contains all other points and so allows access to all spacetime. As computer storage space grows denser, cheaper, and more capacious, libraries shrink in size; as library catalogues and collections come online (that is, become accessible to anyone with a computer, modem, and access privileges), individual libraries turn into larger, virtual libraries, or consortia. As these complex dynamics continue, we can at least hypothesize the existence of vast, virtual texts, Aleph-texts whose electronic pages can be turned to reveal all text. But faced with this unspeakable plenitude, how do we find anything in particular? With every increase in magnitude of information, we face a corresponding increase in the difficulty of accessing that information, of transforming information into knowledge, if you will. As information accretes--by processes that seem as natural as those that cause a snowball rolling downhill to gain mass and momentum--it becomes hugely unmanageable. Only a god could wish to spend eternity traversing an infinitely-large search space. Vannevar Bush, fabulous gray eminence of the emerging military-industrial complex during World War II and after, first addressed this problem in 1945, in a justly-famous and oft-quoted article in the Atlantic Monthly called "As We May Think." He foresaw what others later called the "information explosion" and lamented the artificiality of existing systems of classification (think of the Dewey Decimal or the Library of Congress systems), saying "our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing." In a prescient leap of imagination, he foresaw a desktop system that would allow associational indexing and searching of immense quantities of information. To put the matter shortly, he foresaw webs of information that we could explore by pursuing our interests in the most natural way. In later years, Ted Nelson, whom I quote above, expanded on this vision and called for the creation of the Aleph-text under the name "Xanadu." This would be a commercially-available system that would deliver the contents of the Aleph-text through a combination of hardware and software and marketing skills that would make possible providing these services at a reasonable fee. "Imagine a new accessibility and excitement," Nelson says, "that can unseat the video narcosis that now sits on our land like a fog. Imagine a new libertarian literature with alternative explanations so that anyone can choose the pathway or approach that best suits him or her; with ideas accessible and interesting to everyone, so that a new richness and freedom can come to the human experience; imagine a rebirth of literacy" (in Literary Machines). Indeed, the prospect of access to unlimited information is exhilarating--though we could also scoff at Nelson's naive optimism and the general aura of "McInformation--Twenty Googoolplex Bytes Sold" surrounding the idea. Moreover, in the years since Nelson first announced Xanadu, the vision has proved remarkably difficult to implement. However, Nelson still works at it--and has, I assume and hope, made a decent living as well as achieved an international reputation as the guru of hypertext. However, though I wish Ted Nelson well, I consider his vision, like Alan Kay's of the "Dynabook"-- the ultimate laptop computer, and the perfect hardware complement to Xanadu--an ideal we might approach rather than a reality to be grasped. Perhaps it will be pieced together out of many networks, and many kinds of software and hardware hidden behind a common interface, but I believe something like Xanadu is coming. Those who profoundly fear the widespread availability of information will try to put in place social controls to prevent it, but I believe it will come even then. In general, the human animal wishes to know, and in particular, it wishes to be free to pursue the knowledge it deems important. The Aleph- text could become the most powerful means to such knowledge humanity has ever possessed, and the more people who understand this, the more likely its emergence. Powerful intertexts are in fact emerging. On the Internet in particular, one can find a number of different means to information retrieval. Library systems combine regional or statewide library catalogues, many of them academic, into searchable mega- catalogues. Diverse--in fact, motley--collections of periodicals, Internet newsgroups and mailing lists, technical journals and huge quantities of miscellaneous documents are indexed and can be searched through programs such as Gopher, WAIS, and World Wide Web-- services important enough to talk about in detail in a later column. Also, through a program called Archie, Internet users can search the vast collections of public domain software and shareware stored at Internet sites around the world in order to find specific programs. Alas, the existing search-and-retrieval software is often finicky, difficult to understand and use, and spottily documented, while the better software requires expensive hardware and fast connections and so is often unavailable to the average user. However, "Perseverance furthers," as the I Ching says, a maxim especially true in these matters. The technologies of both hypertext and intertext move along at a rapid pace, growing more powerful and cheaper in the manner we have grown accustomed to in information technology. However, there remains a less easily solved problem: what we find through searches often remains outside our grasp. For example, it does little good to find an article that tells you exactly what you wish to know, only then to discover that it exists only in an unutterably obscure journal available only in three libraries in the United States, none of which you have access to. Or perhaps you may go through a laborious search-and-retrieval process in order to acquire a book or article that turns out to be stupid, irrelevant, or both. In short, we can at the moment find references to a great deal of information, but we can seldom find full texts themselves, and this makes the process of searching for information both difficult and frustrating. The reasons for this state of affairs are more social and political than technological, and so very messy and complicated. Issues such as ownership of intellectual property become important, as do more general considerations of the extent to which information can be considered a commodity. Thus Xanadu still beckons: a world in which information is cheap, accessible, and usable; a profoundly democratic world, in which self-education is enabled in extraordinary ways. In summary, then, the electronic text rewrites our basic ideas of literacy. Whether we read and write individual texts or the networked conglomerations of them, we have before us richer, stranger texts than before--containing new kinds of information, structured in new ways, holding out new possibilities. Internet address: tmaddox@netcom.com Reports from the Electronic Frontier: I Sing The Text Electric, Part 2: Reading Hypertexts Tom Maddox Consider a story or novel or graphic novel or poem, or, more generally, consider any narrative or lyrical form you can imagine, but one shows you not only text but also pictures, and it plays and sings for you--literal music, literal song-- and reveals itself only gradually as you explore its byways, and perhaps will never completely show itself, will always contain some hidden passage you never took, some reader's choice you never made. In short, consider hypertext as art, as artifact. The hypertext artifact as I've just described it is not the hypertext as gateway to vast repositories of information. As I discussed in a previous column, the gateway hypertext-- Ted Nelson's "Xanadu" project, for instance--can be thought of as a Borgesian "Aleph," a point giving access to all other points, an Aleph-text that allows us to read all texts. The self-contained hypertext artifact, on the other hand, can be thought of as a labyrinth, to use another metaphor. It provides no gateway to other points but draws us in to itself. It is the literary work of art in electronic, or post-print, form. Discussions of hypertext tend to take a high theoretical tone, unless the speaker is trying to sell hypertext, in which case the tone is typically evangelical as well. However, like all literary art, hypertext is written for many different audiences, at many different levels of sophistication and complexity, and so there are hypertexts devoted to play. In fact, there are fascinating hypertexts for children. One of the first that emerged, a few years ago, is The Manhole, written in Macintosh Hypercard. Like most Hypercard products, The Manhole suffers from being big, slow, and somewhat clumsy; however, it is also imaginative, charming, and constantly delightful. To read The Manhole, the reader uses the Macintosh mouse to click on features of the landscape, a manhole prominently among them, and when he or she does, objects come to life, or the reader is transported. The trips, like Alice's through the looking glass, go strange places, such as a sunken ship where Things Happen. The Macintosh, which from its beginnings featured relatively easy inclusion of graphics and sound and a point- and-click interface, has worked well for children's hypertext and children's computing in general. In fact, programs and text written for it--for instance, a drawing program called Kid Pix, another hypertext, Cosmic Osmo, and The Manhole itself--can blur the distinction between programs for children and programs for adults. Also, Hypercard, which I mildly castigate above, has the virtue of being easy to work in; even a novice at programming can create a Hypercard "stack" that is interesting to explore. An early and influential foray into children's hypertext illustrates several of these points. In 1987, when Hypercard was new, its originator, Bill Atkinson, spent an evening with a colleague, Bob Goodenough, and his wife, Amanda. As a kind of thank you note to Atkinson for their evening, Amanda taught herself enough Hypercard programming to create a little, wordless story called "Inigo Gets Out," in which a black blob of a kitten, Inigo (pronounced eye-knee-go) has a series of adventures in a simply drawn landscape. This was followed by "Inigo Takes a Bath" and four other Inigo stories, then by several stories featuring "Your Faithful Camel." Over time Amanda Goodenough's work won several awards, including a shareware award from the Boston Computer Society. Her work is now available from The Voyager Company (1351 Pacific Coast Highway, Santa Monica, CA 90401, phone 310-451-1383); also, the two first Inigo stories are generally available as shareware on BBSs and other online systems that have good Hypercard collections. Hypertext has emerged, then, as a natural medium for children's fiction. Hypertext's greatest asset is that it allows, indeed demands, magical journeys: down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass, into the clothes cupboard-- away to Wonderland or Narnia, or, more generally, to all those worlds that embody some of the most precious qualities of childhood. Another mode of hypertext, but one that has just begun to emerge, is hypertext poetry. I have not run across much of it but have found particularly interesting the "hyperpoems" of William Dickey. Dickey is currently Emeritus Professor of English and Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. He was a Yale Younger Poet and has published a considerable body of conventional poetry; he was awarded the Juniper Prize by the University of Massachusetts; his Selected Poems will be published by the University of Arkansas Press next year. Dickey first became concerned with what he calls "the relationship of text to visual field" when he was an undergraduate at Reed College, where he worked with Lloyd Reynolds and the Society for Italic Handwriting, an interest he continued at the University of Iowa, where he studied typography. He later started working with Hypercard because it seemed to provide interesting possibilities for people who were not computer experts. I am familiar with four of his hyperpoems; like The Manhole and the "Inigo" stories, they are written in Hypercard. We will look at two. The Throats of Birds begins with a passage from Yeats' "Comforting Cuchulain" about a group of the dead, "convicted cowards all," who no longer have human voices but "the throats of birds." Unlike almost all hypertexts, this one offers no alternative narrative lines, but nonetheless is hypertext by virtue of its inclusion of graphic effects and music. Screen by screen, the reader moves through the text; each screen has one "button"--a hot spot that allows the reader to move to the next screen to the accompaniment of a more-or-less complex series of dissolves and fade-ins, even a few animations, and a simple melody programmed using Hypercard's sound capabilities. One screen can serve as an example. Four Buddha masks, rendered in varying shadings of black and white and different cross-hatchings float above a background of fractal-like tendrils or waves reaching over a black abyss. To the right of the Buddha masks, moderately large type (Hiroshige Bold) in white boxes reads: a bullet asks forgiveness: rites of the animals Though sometimes the transitional music reveals all too clearly the limitations of Hypercard, or the dissolves seem overelaborate, the overall effect is haunting, archaic. Dickey's other hyperpoems allow a more sophisticated set of choices. Dick & Jane & Spot & the Inspector-General, for example, quickly splits into four, sometimes five, narrative lines, chosen by clicking on the name or iconic image of the character--Dick, Jane, Spot, the Inspector- General--or an unnamed image, a shadowed outline of a strolling figure. Dick is represented by a partial image of what seems to be a Japanese man, perhaps something out of Hiroshige; Jane initially by a somewhat demure and conventional face; Spot by an unshaven figure with a cigarette in his mouth, whom I read as a hard-boiled detective; the Inspector-General by no single image. All are also associated with other images--Jane with a bare-breasted houri, Dick with a space-suited man, etcetera. The poem allows the reader to explore the character's lines without getting lost; clicking on a Buddha head takes the reader back to the primary narrative line to the accompaniment of a distinctive tom-tom sound. I find Dick & Jane the most interesting of the Dickey hyperpoems I have seen, both as a poem and as a hypertext. Its words and combinations of words and images and music are most evocative, its use of hypertext links natural and unconfusing. In general, William Dickey's hyperpoems provide a good introduction to hypertext, poetry or not, because they are readily accessible and entertaining. They will be published this coming year in a hypertext magazine called Eastgate Quarterly, which will be available from Eastgate Systems, Inc., P. O. Box 1307, Cambridge, MA 02238. Eastgate Systems is where much of the action is in hypertext these days. In addition to Dickey's poems, Eastgate Quarterly will also publish works by Rob Swigart and Jim Rosenberg. According to Mark Bernstein at Eastgate, the quarterly is intended to provide a venue for shorter works, which have had difficulty finding distribution. Bernstein says that $19.95 is a reasonable price for a hypertext book but is too low a price for software distributors. More to the point, however, Eastgate has published several of the most interesting hypertext narratives, such as Michael Joyce's Afternoon, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Sarah Smith's King of Space, and also has produced and distributed Storyspace, currently the most sophisticated hypertext development program I have worked with or seen--according to Robert Coover, "currently the software of choice among fiction writers in this country." Jay David Bolter, one of the theorists of hypertext and author of Writing Space, and Michael Joyce, author of Afternoon, were primary developers of Storyspace, which Bernstein has contributed to in recent versions, so Eastgate is tightly locked into the emergence of hypertext in several ways. Mark Bernstein has picked up the phone whenever I have called Eastgate; he is Chief Scientist there--a wonderfully grandiloquent title that Bernstein says was invented by Danny Hillis, designer of the Connection Machine. Bernstein appears bemused at times as he discusses the ever-widening circles created by hypertext and his and Eastgate's role in their spread. Eastgate is not primarily a marketing enterprise, he points out, but one devoted to research: specifically, to hypertext systems and the rhetoric of hypertext. So he is as much interested in delivering papers to international conferences on hypertext--a very competitive milieu these days--as he is in hustling Storyspace or any one of Eastgate's hypertext publications. He says, "We have made money publishing hypertext. That is a bit of a surprise." Nonetheless, Bernstein takes Eastgate's commercial ventures very seriously. He says that Eastgate's experience in hypertext has shown it is possible to have a new technology taken seriously by the literary community: "We have moved from being extremely techno-fringe to being only avant-garde." He also says, "If we had greater editorial resources and there were more people writing, we could publish more of it than we do." And with regard to Storyspace itself--which I consider an ongoing laboratory environment for hypertext--he says it is like "a new kind of paint." In order to understand why this is so, we have to consider the general nature of what is in some ways the most serious and complex mode of hypertext artifact: the extended prose narrative. The print text has a beginning and end, easy to locate and understand. We start here, we end there. Robert Coover, in an excellent article about hypertext in The New York Times Book Review (June 21, 1992) remarks: "Much of the novel's alleged power is embedded in the line [my emphasis], that compulsory author-directed movement from the beginning of a sentence to its period, from the top of the page to the bottom, from the first page to the last." Thus, "Have you read it?" has a simple meaning: have you traversed the "line"? Some print texts inflict a kind of hyper-structure on us. Coover goes on to say, "[T]here have been countless strategies to counter the line's power, from marginalia and footnotes to the creative innovations of novelists like Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Raymond Queneau, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Milorad Pavic." Such texts may pose riddles or repetitions that drive us to hunt through what we've already read; they may assume peculiar non-linear forms (dictionaries or encyclopedias, for example); they may contradict themselves or appear to do so; they may even connect their ends to their beginnings in an attempt to defy linear form. Finnegans Wake, Dhalgren, and Gravity's Rainbow, to give three notable examples, do such things. However, the physical facts remain: there is the book, and if I turn its pages from beginning to end, reading each in its turn, I say, "I've read that; I've finished it"--never mind what I do or do not understand about what I've read. However, the hypertext artifact won't allow us such delusions. "Have you read [Michael Joyce's] Afternoon?" Bernstein asked during one of our conversations, and I just laughed. Hypertext has no necessary beginning and end, hence no unitary completeness: it will not allow us to finish--we are reading it, or we have stopped reading it; we have never read it. We have never completed "the line" because we cannot: as Coover says, "[T]rue freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text." Storyspace, written for the Macintosh, allows the writer to invent an extraordinary number of lines and to connect them in weird and multifarious ways. One word or phrase or graphical element can lead to any number of others; one "space"--a kind of window in the text that is to Storyspace what the paragraph is to print text--can lead to any number of others. The reader's choices are both enabled and circumscribed as the author chooses: I might allow only one connection between spaces, I might force you to choose among many; I might not allow you to see certain spaces until you have read others (this is done through a cute piece of technique called a "guard field" that allows access to a given space only when specified criteria have been met). I can present you a two-dimensional map of all spaces and allow you to choose among them at your whim. A sample of the complexities of a specific hypertext narrative should help clarify these odd properties. Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden is a narrative that takes place during the Gulf War and ranges from the United States to Arabia. Victory Garden contains 993 "places" and 2804 "links," so it is a hypertext of considerable complexity. When the reader loads the program, the first choice he or she is required to make is whether to begin a new reading or continue a previous one--a choice with considerable significance in the reader's "construction" of the text. If the reader begins at the beginning, he or she is offered a set of instructions that include the following: You move through the text by pressing the Return key to progress from one moment to another, as you would turn the pages of a book. Click the Back arrow (on the bar below) to review the previous moment, or to move back through the story as you've seen it so far. If you read in this way the story will generally keep within certain discrete lines or pathways--though the pathways themselves may shift or change. At most moments you can double-click certain words ("words that yield") which will carry you to a different story line. Though yield-words often create discontinuities, they also map connections. Also, from select points within the narrative, the reader can access a map of all the writing spaces, which looks like this: [insert Map of Victory Garden] Further, clicking on a section of that map reveals more detail in the form of individually-named writing spaces, any of which can itself be clicked on to take the reader to that actual space and its part of the narrative. As is often the case when one attempts to describe operations (whether with regard to using a computer or to a procedure as apparently simple as tying one's shoes), the description makes the operation sound much more difficult than it is. In fact, moving around in Victory Garden is easy. Accepting a decentered narrative is, however, not so easy. As readers, most of us have a model of a text, and that model demands that there be ultimately one story, Coover's "line," that even if we cannot immediately grasp, could be grasped by some all-seeing observer--we believe in a Newtonian cosmos of fiction, in other words, not an Einsteinian or, more radically, quantum mechanical one. Coover comments: "Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple." So, to enjoy hypertexts such as Victory Garden or Afternoon, we have to repress the desire to know "what really happened"; otherwise we get mightily irritated at our inability to resolve this question, which is to say at the author's (or text's) perversity in preventing us from doing so. We have to accept ourselves as co-constructors of the narrative, and the narrative as radically unstable. However, as with many aspects of reading fiction, one's judgments about hypertext are a matter of taste and interest. I enjoy the immersion in "contingency, indeterminacy" and so forth cited by Coover. I am also confident both as writer and reader of fiction that hypertext expands my sense of possibilities in fiction. In short, I believe that hypertext fiction both amuses and instructs and thus can take its place in the long line of literary art forms that stretches back to the birth of written language.