Fear and Loathing at Brown University
We're the Unknown.
Coover liked our hypertext novel. He gave us an award, flew us to Brown
and poured us a round of beers at the Brown Graduate Center bar. When he introduced our
reading, he referred to our hypertext novel as a throwback to "the golden age"
of hypertext. What he meant was that our hypertext had no shockwave animation, no
synthetic music, no CGI scripting, no applets, and very few images. Our work of writing
was in fact based on writing: a "text-based" hypertext. We like to think that
what Coover in fact meant by "the golden age of hypertext" was in fact books. He's
nurtured the hypertext movement for a decade while continuing to write print novels.
The conference was called "technology platforms for 21st century
literature." What is the future of literature in the electronic age? What is
"text"? These are some of the questions being brought up at the conference,
where technology specialists, professors, hypertext writers, and journalists gathered for
three days of presentations and discussions.
One of the goals of the conference was to get a bunch of rich and powerful
computer people in the same room with a handful of
misunderstood writers, so that the computer people could get a sense of what sort of
software applications would best help realize the future of poetry, fiction, and
hypertext. We aren't sure they got a straight answer. It's a question that we have a straight answer
for, but, since we won't be able to afford the application we can imagine, we stayed
quiet. Fact is, you can do a lot with plain old HTML, but most of the writers there seemed
to be working in Storyspace - software more than a decade old, available only through
Eastgate Systems..
Mark Bernstein, founder of Eastgate Systems, has made an immeasurable
contribution to the development of a "serious" hypertext literature, distributed
on CD-ROM. Eastgate took a great risk, financial and otherwise, to carve a niche for
hypertext that exists largely within the academy. Now, faculty at universities all over
the world are aware that an electronic literature exists. Unfortunately, most of them have
never read hypertext lit, and most can't even get it at their university libraries.
Outside of the ivory tower, hypertext fiction and poetry are barely even concepts.
Bernstein should be applauded for the work he has done up to this point. But Eastgate's
distribution model must be interrogated, for it does not suffice to make hypertext lit
available on a wide scale. A new mode of distribution is necessary. In order for hypertext
to become a popular art form, readers need to experience readable and engaging hypertext,
for free, on the World Wide Web. And yet writers need to eat. How then, to proceed?
As we move into the next phase of hypertext lit, we're going to need to
generate a way to pay writers for their work at the same time as we give it away to
readers. One of the technologists at the conference wrap-up Friday morning mentioned the
viral model of distribution, citing the case of the recent "Melissa" virus,
which replicated itself across the network via a macro in Microsoft Outlook Express. His
point was that hypertext, too, can work like a virus. The more
replication of the work, the bigger the audience. This is the logic of the browser
companies, and of the open source code movement. The new network economy makes almost no
sense in traditional economic terms, yet it seems to be working--somehow.
What is clear is that if hypertext hopes to become something more than an
essentially obscure academic sub-specialty, it will need to have some readers, ideally the
kind of readers without advanced degrees. The kind of people who read books on trains and
beaches. The kind of people who read for fun, not for a living. That's how you build a
literature. We're still hung up on the idea of the masses, and we want literature to be
popular. One of the grad students from Brown attending the conference connected the viral
model to William S. Burroughs, who said that language is an alien virus from outer space.
We hope to be among the first of many hypertext authors who somehow manage to make a
living by giving their hypertext literature away for free on the Web. We want a
shareware-style business
model that will keep us fed and clothed, but will keep the hypertext free for anyone
who can't, or doesn't want to, pay us for our writing. Hypertext needs an audience. Free
hypertexts will build an all -important user base.
Scott was good, he made me proud when he said "we don't
want hypertext to just be the sort of thing that forty academics get
together at Brown University once a year to talk about." He was
talking about a literature that served the people, not a literature
that served professors. Why did Bernstein
say "we're talking about writing, not reading"?
Think about that.
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