Thinking and

Linking:

Teaching with Hypertext

Melody AndersonBrendan Holloway

Alex McAdamsAlex Mueller

UMass Boston English Department

HypertextRevolutionary . . .

. . . or Restrictive?

Revolutionary Hypertext

The capability of banking education to minimize or annul the students' creative power and to stimulate their credulity serves the interests of the oppressors, who care neither to have the world revealed nor to see it transformed. The oppressors use their “humanitarianism” to preserve a profitable situation. Thus they react almost instinctively against any experiment in education which stimulates the critical faculties and is not content with a partial view of reality but always seeks out the ties which link one point to another and one problem to another.

---Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 54-5.

Revolutionary Hypertext

The purpose of computers is human freedom, and so the purpose of hypertext is overview and understanding.

---Theodor Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream

Machines.

Revolutionary Hypertext

There is nothing in an electronic book that quite corresponds to the printed table of contents . . . In this sense, the electronic book reflects a different natural world, in which relationships are multiple and evolving: there is no great chain of being in an electronic world-book. For that very reason, an electronic book is a better analogy for contemporary views of nature, since nature today is often not regarded as a hierarchy, but rather as a network of interdependent species and systems.

---Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing, 105.

Restrictive Hypertext

Hypertext isn't really interactive, they argue; it only gives the illusion of reader involvement – and certainly only the illusion that the hierarchy of the author and reader had been leveled: clicking, they insist, is not the same as writing.

---Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, 98.

Restrictive Hypertext

Contrary to Nelson’s idealistic claim [that “the purpose of computers is freedom”], the purpose of computers is power, and hypertext is as much involved in that struggle for power as anything else.

---Espen Aarseth, Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature, 82.

From Hypertext Critique to Hypertext Composition

Whereas banking education anesthetizes and inhibits creative power, problem-posing education involves a constant unveiling of reality. The former attempts to maintain the submersion of consciousness; the latter strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.

---Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 62.

From Hypertext Critique to Hypertext Composition

. . . what performs

critique . . .

. . . cannot also

compose.

---Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 475.

From Hypertext Critique to Hypertext Composition

With a hammer (or a sledge hammer) in hand you can do a lot of things: break down walls, destroy idols, ridicule prejudices, but you cannot repair, take care, assemble, reassemble, stitch together. It is no more possible to compose with the paraphernalia of critique than it is to cook with a seesaw. Its limitations are greater still, for the hammer of critique can only prevail if, behind the slowly dismantled wall of appearances, is finally revealed the netherworld of reality. But when there is nothing real to be seen behind this destroyed wall, critique suddenly looks like another call to nihilism. What is the use of poking holes in delusions, if nothing more true is revealed underneath?

---Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto,’” 475.