Thanks to a conference trip that occupied most of last week, I have fallen hopelessly behind on my blogging commitment. I wish I had the time to revisit Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg’s “Personal Dynamic Media” (prophecy fulfilled — I carry my iPad almost everywhere!) and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” (I once spent an entire session of a graduate seminar discussing the distinctions between “message” and “massage”), but I’ve decided to cut my losses and jump ahead to this week’s reading: “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?”, by Bill Viola.

I was intrigued by Viola’s discussion about “interactive video discs” and the potential for what sounds like the video equivalent of hypertext, which struck me as remarkably advanced for a 30-year-old article. Even in 1982, Viola suggests that the technology needed to realize his vision was in place; the problem lay with the users of the technology:

“After all these years, video is finally getting ‘intelligence,’ the eye is being reattached to the brain. As with everything else, however, we will find that the limitations emerging lie more with the abilities and imaginations of the producers and users, rather than in the tools themselves.” (p. 467)

Whether or not we had the tools to accomplish what Viola describes as “branching,” “visual footnoting,” and variable playback speed in 1982 (p. 468), we certainly have them today. The question remains, though, whether we have the imagination to embrace a new style of video. There is some evidence that nonlinear/hypertextual/etc. video is catching on; see, for instance, Kutiman’s ThruYOU remixes.

For that matter, see almost any video on YouTube, which has made video-within-video ads and embedded links to other videos standard practice in the past five years. YouTube’s innovations, of course, are primarily profit driven, but the fact remains that audiences are much more accustomed to fragmented, nonlinear viewing experiences than they were in 1982. And even without YouTube, shows like VH-1′s Pop-Up Video have trained us to expect visual interruptions and narrative detours while watching television.

The one place where this type of storytelling hasn’t taken root is full-length feature films, which are prefaced by endless advertisements and previews (and even cluttered with product placement), but still exist primarily as cohesive, linear stories. Sure, some movies are told nonlinearly (e.g., Christopher Nolan’s excellent Memento and Inception), but they are still arranged by the filmmaker, not the viewer. Some DVDs offer viewers the chance to rearrange portions of the movie or view alternate endings, but we tend to think of these as “bonus features,” not integral aspects of the movie-watching experience.

A truly hypertextual movie might not work in a traditional theater (which lucky audience member gets to control the arrangement of the film?), but one could certainly work online. Perhaps something like this exists already — I need to do a little more searching — but I suspect we’re still waiting for Viola’s perfect video to be created.

Douglas Engelbart’s plans for the future, as outlined in Augmenting Human Intellect, are incredibly ambitious, but as I read this selection I couldn’t stop my mind from returning to something much more mundane: my ongoing quest for the perfect software program.

I don’t rely on anything as complex as Engelbart’s “hand-operated, edge-notched card system” (p. 99), but I’d like to think that my attempts to organize my research notes, academic articles, to-do lists, etc., follow in his footsteps. Here’s Engelbart explaining the motivation behind his DIY system:

“If my mental processes were more powerful, I could dispense with the cards, and hold all of the card-sized concept structures in my memory, where also would be held the categorization linkages that evolved as I worked (with my feet up on the artifacts and my eyes closed). As it is, and as it probably always will be no matter how we develop or train our mental capabilities, I want to work in problem areas where the number and interrelationship complexity of the individual factors involved are too much for me to hold and manipulate within my mind.” (p. 100, emphasis mine)

Do I flatter myself by comparing my intellectual endeavors to Engelbart’s? Definitely. But don’t most of us feel like the problems we are trying to solve are often beyond the reach of our mental capabilities? (And if they aren’t, then what’s the point?) And for those of us who are digital packrats, each passing year produces more stuff we need to sort, tag, and archive. All of which is to say that I spend an inordinate amount of time looking for the perfect tool(s) to augment my human intellect.

An abbreviated list of the programs I have tested in the past few years, in no particular order:

• DEVONthink
• Tinderbox
• Yojimbo
• Scrivener
• Together

That list doesn’t include academic reference managers like EndNote, Zotero, and Mendeley, and I won’t even mention the endless stream of iPhone and iPad apps I’ve tried. These days, I’m fond of Dropbox (for keeping files in sync on several devices), nvALT (for jotting down quick notes), Pinboard (for collecting and sharing bookmarks), and Papers (for storing academic articles). After watching my wife use Evernote for a year, I’m about to give it a try, too.

Here’s the worst part: None of these applications does exactly what I want, which means that (like Engelbart) I end up devoting a lot of time to building and maintaining my personal human augmentation system and not enough time to using the system.

Perhaps what I really need is a good set of edge-notched cards.

Last week I learned that it is much harder to lead a reading discussion with faculty members than it is to lead one with undergraduate students. Everyone had smart things to say about Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream Machines, but I struggled to keep the discussion lively and on topic. (Gardner makes it look so easy!)

Even more frustrating was my failure to articulate my negative reaction to Nelson’s piece. During our discussion, I think I came across as dismissive or even hostile toward Nelson, but that wasn’t my intention. After thinking about it for a week, I’ve come to the conclusion that Nelson’s writing rubs me the wrong way because he packages amazing ideas in antagonistic prose. Yes, Nelson is a visionary, and we owe him a great debt for kickstarting the development of hypertext and the internet. But he’s also a bit of a bully, unwilling to compromise or acknowledge the contributions of others. He positions himself against the “computer priesthood,” the experts who “generally enjoy putting people down,” (p. 304), but he fails to see how his own combative approach alienates those who might have been his allies.

Consider just a few (admittedly decontextualized) examples:

• “Any nitwit can understand computers, and many do” (p. 303).
• I am ‘publishing’ this book myself, in this first draft form, to test its viability, to see how mad the computer people get…” (p. 303).
• “Engineers and ‘human factors’ people speak as though there were some kind of scientific or determinate way to design control systems. Piffle” (p. 322).
• “Be prepared for every possible form of aggressive defensiveness from programmers, especially, ‘Why would you want that?’ The correct answer is BECAUSE, damnit!’ (p. 326).

I recognize that Nelson designed Computer Lib / Dream Machines to be a manifesto, and I’m not suggesting that all writers should permanently adopt a conciliatory stance, but I do think Nelson’s lone-genius-in-the-wilderness approach directly affected his ability to turn his vision into reality. I wonder how the history of hypertext might have been different if Nelson had been willing to compromise and collaborate. It took Nelson 38 years—years!—of working on Project Xanadu to release an unfinished product. And even after 47 years of development, XanaduSpace exists as an abandoned Windows-only application.

It’s a shame that Nelson is known primarily as “the guy who coined the word hypertext” when his dreams for the future were so grand. In addition to showing us what could have been (and what still might be coming), Computer Lib / Dream Machines stands as a reminder that it’s not enough to be a genius — you have to play nicely with others, too.

The consensus during last week’s seminar discussion seemed to be that J.C.R. Licklider’s “Man–Computer Symbiosis” was a much better read than Norbert Wiener’s “Men, Machines, and the World About.” Although I agree that Licklider is the better writer, it’s Weiner’s piece that has been stuck in my head all week. I can’t stop thinking about genies and idols and impending punishments.

I know very little about Wiener’s life story, but I trust Gardner and Matt, who both reported that Wiener was not a man of religious faith. For a nonbeliever, Wiener sure had a knack for weaving religious language into his writing. Take this passage, near the end of the article:

We shall have to realize that while we may make the machines our gods and sacrifice men to machines, we do not have to do so. If we do so, we deserve the punishment of idolators. It is going to be a difficult time. If we can live through it and keep our heads, and if we are not annihilated by war itself and our other problems, there is a great chance of turning the machine to human advantage, but the machine itself has no particular favor for humanity. (p. 72)

Gods! Sacrifices! Idolators! Not to mention Wiener’s earlier reference to our gadgets as “the brass calf” (which, as William pointed out, probably should have been “golden calf”). Perhaps Wiener was simply using these Biblical allusions as throwaway rhetorical devices, but there seems to be something deeper going on here. Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s introduction to this piece highlights Wiener’s commitment to social justice and his refusal to accept military funding to support his research, factors that characterize Wiener as a deeply ethical, if not religious, scientist. Wiener had witnessed first-hand the devastating power of science and technology; he knew that scientists could become “arbiter[s] of life and death” (p. 66). Is it any surprise, then, that his message to the New York Academy of Medicine and Science feels like an Old Testament warning?

My interactions with technology, of course, are laughably pedestrian compared to what Wiener had seen. But as I think about my relationship to my gadgets (the iPhone that is never far from my hand! the sleek laptop on which I type these words!), I realize how lopsided these relationships can be. Wiener’s prediction (prophecy?) won’t stop ringing in my ears: “[T]he machine itself has no particular favor for humanity…. Gentlemen, when we get into trouble with the machine, we cannot talk the machine back into the bottle” (p. 72).

I can’t remember exactly how I first encountered Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article “As We May Think,” but I know I started using it in my teaching in 2007, when I got lucky enough to take over “Computers in the Study of English,” the introductory technology course for English majors at Iowa State University. Bush’s vision of the future struck me (and still strikes me) as uncannily prescient, and I was positive my students would share my enthusiasm for the piece.

They didn’t.

Where I saw obvious connections between Bush’s memex and today’s internet, my students just saw a big, clunky desk. The image of Bush’s “camera hound of the future” with his walnut-sized camera on his forehead called to my mind the ever smaller cell-phone cameras of today (and also, oddly, Jewish tefillin, but that’s another story), but my students just pointed out how silly Bush was for thinking people would actually strap cameras to their heads. (Never mind the cell phones that rarely left their hands.) Maybe I didn’t push them hard enough, or maybe I didn’t spend enough time in class discussing the essay (I’ve taught it several times since, and I think I’ve gotten better at it), but I remember feeling disappointed that “As We May Think” didn’t click for my students the way it clicked for me.

Reading the article again for last week’s seminar meeting, I was reminded why I like it so much, but I also realized why some of my students don’t like it. First, Bush’s writing is highly situated within context of World War II, and if you haven’t studied the Manhattan Project or aren’t fascinated by role scientists played in the war, Bush’s ethos and his motivations for writing may be hard to discern. Second, parts of the article are remarkably detailed, and if your idea of a good time doesn’t involve pondering the fundamental differences between analog and digital technologies, Bush’s description of microphotography or his explanation of how “trails” work in the memex could easily put you to sleep.

I plan to keep teaching “As We May Think,” and I’m confident that our seminar discussion last week will help me convince a few more students that Bush’s article is the fountainhead of contemporary internet studies. Yes, Bush gets many of the details wrong (all that microfilm!), but he gets so much right. Here’s a man writing in 1945 who essentially envisioned personal computers, the internet, web browsers, Wikipedia, and a dozen other technologies we take for granted today. A man who witnessed (and helped) science “throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons” yet hasn’t lost hope for those people to “find objectives worthy of their best.” Who needs a new iPhone? I want a memex in my office.