1. What the Geeks Know:
Hypertext and the Problem of Literacy
Jianwei Zhang

2. Stuart Moulthrop
• an innovator of electronic literature
and hypertext fiction, both as a
theoretician and as a writer.
• a Professor of Information Arts and
Technologies at the University of
Baltimore.
• a founding board member of the
Electronic Literature Organization in
1999.

3. Hypertext
– Hypertext is text, displayed on a
computer, with references (hyperlinks)
to other text that the reader can
immediately access, usually by a mouse
click or keypress sequence.
– The most extensive example of
hypertext today is the World Wide
Web.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Hypertext)

4. Hypertext
- Nodes +Link
- >Network
(http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/www/)

5. Normal Text vs. Hypertext
(http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/notes/Chap1/Chap1.html)

6. Catching waves
• Three waves in the history of hypertext:
1. concept + first experimental systems
2. personal computers +Internet
widely distributed systems +first
examination of their implications
3. World Wide Web
refinement of existing technologies

7. Catching waves
• Hypertext as reality, not
novelty (3rd wave)
– archive:“ a communication
environment in which virtually all
texts are exposed to automated
search, retrieval and hypertext
reference” (Dalgaard 2001)
– archive refers to any application
of hypertext

8. Catching waves
– Earlier accounts of hypertext:
“remediation” (Dalgaard 2001)
– since the difference between
hypertext and print culture
there is the need to re-examine
earlier positions
– the ‘archive’ and digital media in
general have yet to establish
legitimacy

9. Misreading Reading
– The World Wide Web expands all
over the world and we live with
hypertext in our everyday life
– According to an American (NEA)
report called “Reading at Risk”:
reading of leisure literature is on
decline
in another half century nobody will
pay for fiction and poetry, except
textbooks

10. Misreading Reading
– This report confines reading solely on
printed books
– reading in context of the electronic
archive, like Weblogs, Wikis or even
Audiobooks are not incorporated at all
in this study
– Electronic media is only seen as a threat
to conventional print publishing
– demonstrates the ignorance towards
digital technologies, as well as the
problem to see the electronic archive as
a possibility for literacy to evolve
continuously

11. What the Geeks Know
– encounters between old and new
media are inherently adversarial
and never assured of balanced
resolution
innovation in communication seems
to be problematic

12. What the Geeks Know
– Epistemology (theory of knowledge) of
electronic text vs conventional writing
– According to Miles “hypertext” belongs
not to an economy of scarcity but to a
mode of excess”.
– The archive doesn’t know sufficiency,
only surfeit.
– > With uncountable documents instantly
available, there is an overload of
information on the world wide web
– > attention must be elective

13. Literacy in Babylon
– Moulthrop brings up the
connection to Borges and his story
“The Lottery in Babylon”,
published in 1941.
– a fictional society in ancient
Babylon which reorganizes its
epistemology around a municipal
numbers game
– perhaps God does not play at dice
with the universe, perhaps God is
the dice.

14. Literacy in Babylon
– Moulthrop argues that literacy can no
longer be ceded to print culture alone
– a new definition of literacy founded on
pathwork in the hypertextual archive
– to take up the challenge of reinventing
literacy for a world increasingly
afflicted by ignorance
– he concedes that such a change in
agenda will not automatically fix the
widespread misunderstanding of media
– but he is confident that those ideas will
tend to exceed initial expectations

15. • What is the new literacy we
need in digital context?
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=_XqRR5WJ85k

16. Reference
• http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypertext
• http://www.inf.fuberlin.de/lehre/SS01/hc/www/
• http://www.cs.sfu.ca/CC/365/mark/material/
notes/Chap1/Chap1.html
• Nielsen,J., (1995).Multimedia and Hypertext: The
Internet and Beyond.

17. Thank you