Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
editors
Submitted by marmalade on 25 September 2006 - 9:23pm.
We've all sort of put up a hue and cry here for some sort of, well, what Derrida might call a "center", or as Lulu and thisismycheese mentioned (both on the blog and in class), at least a table of contents.
We do, after all, get one in our books, on our websites, from blogs like this one. And not having it in a hypertext was (is) a bit unsettling.
And that uneasiness is something that Joyce seems to lash out against. It's something he believes we shouldn't be unsettled by. See his railery against Yahoo and alta vista, or his condescension towards library patrons who read the catalog entries and tables of contents more "than they read from the volumes themselves" (54). In fact, he goes even further: "The notion that editors are 'necessary' to filter out the mass of information insists upon a hierarchy of information and implies one of human beings" (54). It's really terribly radical: he's not calling for a generation of pacifist hippies, he's calling for militant communists. Joyce wants to take away the power position of a publisher, of an "expert", of whoever it is that writes the introductions to critical collections. He wants all of us to go back to reading and discovering on our own, in our own time, on our own, un-influenced terms.
But then, as Frabby and others have pointed out, Joyce does away with the power of the external editor only to exercise more power of his own. Without that curtailing influence, he expands to fill the vacuum himself. He wants to get rid of the tyranny of the editors--he wants people to read without being dictated to about the meaning of the subject matter--but he doesn't dream of putting the reader on the level of the author. Maybe that's where his argument falls through--maybe that's where his anti-web paranoia gets the better of him. He wants a democracy--but only if he can control it.
readings, Joyce, hypertext, commodification
He's radical and sharp, and he's put a lot of time and energy and thought into what he's done. I disagree with a lot of it, but he's brought some good ideas forward, and I think some are genuinely populist -- moreso than his hypertexts themselves.
Eastgate (with whom Joyce is affiliated) has made some pretty non-populist -- and, BTW, anticommunist -- decisions. They could have gone with a public file format and open-source technology. Instead, they chose to go private, charge fairly high prices for product (which, to be fair, they were probably not mass-producing!) In the middle nineties, Storyspace, their editing software, came on a single floppy and cost close to $250.00. It was fairly buggy on Windows, too, although it did do some pretty cool things with idea-mapping.
One has to wonder how much of the insistence on the superiority of their linking system has to do with a commercial need to insist that their expensive software is far better than what's available on the Web. It's a claim that gets less valid each year.
On the other hand, the Web can be/should be criticized as well. Who develops the browsers and other applications that format and structure our info? Since Andreeson's Mosaic, that would be a smallish corporate clique, not the W3 Consortium. Does a simple link structure suitable for commercial info-processing suit them? I suspect that it does, at least in the short run. Are other things possible? You bet, and Joyce spotted possibilities early on that may be integrated yet.
hypertext fiction, Michael Joyce, commodification
Joyce is radical, alright. But Eastgate (his company)made some pretty nonpopulist and anticommunist decisions. They sold and sell "serious hypertext" at some pretty serious prices. The price for Storygate editing software was nearly $250 in 1995, and the whole program fit on a floppy. It was buggy on Windows, too -- not only cut out when one was working, without saving, but actually eradicated previous days' previously saved work. Ouch.
Even in the '80's, Eastgate could have used some version of SGML -- they could have gone open-source, essentially. They didn't and haven't. Joyce's argument over the inadequacy of the Web comes disturbingly close to Eastgate's marketing hype about the superiority of its product.
On the other hand, the man deserves a lot of credit. He was interesting and insightful about this for years when people were saying he was nuts. Betting long sequences of a promising creative career writing things in a medium no one could read must have taken some guts, so I'd bet a lot of what he's doing here is pretty sincere, and he'd like to see a kind of liberty that he legitimately sees threatened. He's pushing for a kind of complexity that allows for creation, nuance, individuality, even if he doesn't altogether understand it (& who does?). Other folks try to make it uniform.
After all, who designs the browsers that structure our information? Does Microsoft want us to have more nuanced information or to have easier access to advertising. Look at people like Jakob Nielson, for example.
One thing we might get from this ancient Eastgate software is just the realization that those browsers organized information in different ways, and that information could be organized differently, and mean differently again -- and that it's all just extremely consequential.