Hyperintertextuality?

Malmesbury Bible

By Gerard Brils, of Belgium (1407 AD)

Latin Bible, Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire, England

Intertextual Image: First Epistle of Peter

Peter holding a book in the book of books...

...and the hypertextual key!

(Image from Wikipedia)

Scott Nokes of Unlocked Wordhoard has posted part two of a response to a question that I posed to him when he was in Seoul last November 10th and 11th:

It's been about a month now since Jeffery Hodges of Gypsy Scholar asked me about hypertext and medieval studies at a conference, and, since it was drawing close to lunch, I dodged the question and promised to answer it later. In order to get closer to answering the question, I posted an historical model to use in thinking about the development of textual technologies.

When I posed my question about the scholarly uses of hypertext (of which this blog itself is an example), I was expecting a reply along the lines of "Yeah, it's useful. You can click on a word that you don't know instead of having to tediously thumb through a dictionary," but from Scott's two-part response, I see that he'd already been doing a good deal of thinking about the issue, for he has subsumed the category "hypertextuality" under the larger category "intertextuality":

With hypertext ... the important element is intertextuality -- the connections between one hypertext and other texts. In manuscript culture this could be achieved through interlinear glosses, and in print culture this could be achieved through footnoted references....

Scott then quickly adds that "neither [gloss nor footnote] matches electronic culture for emphasis on non-linear reading," and this point is one that I'd like to see developed, though Scott also rightly notes "[t]the difficulty of speculating ... [because] it often relies on straight-line thinking that tends to obscure [the ways] that new technologies change us."

But the fact that this new technological medium changes us tempts me to quote Marshall McLuhan's mantra, "the medium is the message" -- and I guess that I just did -- which McLuhan coined in his book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (and which I read in Baylor University's Honors Program way back in the 70s), and ask if we're becoming the medium itself.

What do I mean by this?

Not something literally Cyborgian (though things may, through a more intimate human-machine interface, eventually come to that), but metaphorically Cyborgian ... yes, something like that.

I think that there's a difference between the learning that takes place in either manuscript or print culture. They both requires us to move through large spaces to acquire information. If I'm sitting in a library looking at a book, and some obscure word has me puzzled, I have to get up, walk over to the nearest dictionary, and take that tedious time to look the word up. Multiply that by all the times that one has to go to the shelves for additional texts -- maybe to check a footnote, maybe to learn more about some intellectual point -- and we're describing the typical day of a traditional scholar in a library. This eats up both time and energy. The intertextuality of glosses and footnotes leads one to move around a lot to look further.

The intertextuality of hypertext, however, reduces this expense of space, time, and energy to the click of a button.

This 'hyperintertextuality' -- and I emphasize the hyper -- fuses us, metaphorically speaking, to our computers, and I think that we begin to learn differently, which may be what Scott was getting at in his remark about "electronic culture['s] ... emphasis on non-linear reading," for I've noticed that I'm more willing to follow up my associative, lateral, nonlinear thinking because I know that I don't need to expend as much time and energy traversing spaces to do so (e.g., no need to go hunting among the shelves for that book that somebody may have misplaced anyway).

But maybe I'm just obscuring things with my speculations. Perhaps all that I mean to say is that a hypertext's use of intertextual linking allows me to follow up my interests faster and therefore to learn and to work more efficiently.

Any thoughts, Scott ... or others?