Instructor Wrap Up - The End of Books - Coover

Loved, loved, loved this article.  Did you?

I find it interesting that we are having a similar conversation in 2012, that we were having in 1992.  Here are some of my favorite quotes from this article:

Page 706......

 ...you will often hear it said that the print medium is a doomed and outdated technology,, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries.

But true 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 in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text.

You will often hear the proclaim, quite seriously, that there have been three great events in the history of literacy:  the invention of writing, the invention of movable type, and the invention of hypertext.

Page 707.....

There are no hierarchies in these topless (and bottomless) networks, as paragraphs, chapters and other conventional text divisions are replaced by evenly empowered and equally ephemeral window-sized blocks of text and graphics - soon to be supplemented with sound, animation, and film.

Writing students are notoriously conservative creatures.  They write stubbornly and hopefully within the tradition of what they have read.

Page 708.......
"The great thing", as one young writer, Alvin Lu, put it in an on-line class essay, is "the degree to which narrative is completely destructed into its constituent bits.  Bits of information convey knowledge, but the juxtaposition of bits creates narrative.

In hypertext, multivocalism is popular, graphic elements, both drawn and scanned, have been incorporated into the narratives, imaginative font changes have been employed to identify various voices or plot elements, and there has also been a very effective use of formal documents not typically used in fictions - .......

However, as all of us have discovered, even though the basic technology of hypertext may be with us for centuries to come, perhaps even as long as the technology of the book, its hardware and software seem to be fragile and short-lived; whole new generations of equipment and programs arrive before we can finish reading the instructions of the old.

And my very favorite....
Page 709......
Print documents may be read in hyperspace, but hypertext does not translate into print. It is not like film, which is really just the dead end of linear narrative, just as 12-tone music is the dead end of music by the stave.