CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

I'm thrilled that Engelbart can be traced back as one of the progenitors of hyperlinks, because he gives me the chance to take Manovich to task for claiming that "the popularity of hyperlinking exemplifies the continuing decline of the field of rhetoric in the modern era" (77). Manovich argues that hyperlinking makes information randomly ordered, of the same importance, or chaotic, then goes on to claim that the Web is flat and operates under the same principles that govern RAM--all data is equally accessible. He says that unlike a book, where the reader is guided by an author's carefully arranged (dispositio) designs, the Web is access-neutral.

Hardly.

The Web may appear flat and random (kind of like western Nebraska), but the landscape is certainly at least a little bumpy; certain pages are obviously more prominent than others, and while in theory all pages are equally accessible, one has to know of their existence first to access them. Popular search engines only index so much, and the rest (sometimes called The Deep Web or The Invisible Web) remains hidden and, for all intents and purposes, useless. One has to know how to organize, arrange, and present one's site to stand out as knowledge to users amidst the flood of meaningless information. This might involve manipulating the code for search engine optimization or positioning oneself as a viable piece of interest on social news sites like Digg or reddit. Dispositio, therefore, comes back into play in a very different way than in the traditional narrative Manovich is quick to point to as the death of rhetoric. Pssht, pshaw and harrumph.

Bush and Engelbart, meanwhile, are obvious technological enthusiasts, though not necessarily determinists. They believe that advances in consumer media goods--photography, television, radio, fax--are inevitable and inevitably beneficial, if for no other reason than for the great reduction in time it takes to process "lower order" mental tasks.

I don't have a hard time fathoming the processes and purposes of their many descriptions; I do, however, have an exceedingly hard time grasping the mechanical execution of these tasks. Perhaps because I'm on the very edge of digital nativism, but I can imagine these processes taking place in the abstract much more easily than I can picture them being carried out by a physical machine. I'm wedded to a digital interface in which objects never truly exist in a tangible manifestation that I can touch: Manovich would call this paradigmatic and syntagmatic (230). I suppose you could say I'm technological but not mechanical, and it's nearly impossible to reverse engineer the methods that led to our new media age, or at least those that predate the PC.

It was very interesting to me to see how amazingly accurate some of Bush and Engelbart's predictions were at times, and how horribly misplaced their technological enthusiasm (hesitant to call it determinism) was at other times. The memex evolved in a very tangible way into the database/interface workstation of the personal computer, while the walnut-sized, miner's helmet-esque scientist's photographic camera sounds like a whimsical invention from a subterranean Willy Wonka. Still further, Engelbart's predictions of an augmented machine haven't yet come to fruition, at least as I conceive of his design. The reason we all don't have a mechanized/technological augmented intellect device is the same reason we accepted a radical proposition like the memex: as a culture, we need to rely on previously established, familiar paradigms to adopt new technologies.

Mac's GUI interface of the early 80's is evidence of this. In considering the interface design, Jobs et al. realized that workers would be lost in the computerized ether of nothingness if they couldn't anchor their experience to something in their past. Hence, we have a "desktop" on which we work and store "files" in "folders" or in the "trash" (for more on this subject, see Joan Greenbaum's Windows on the Workplace). To circle back: the PC is born out of the memex because the memex was born out of the desk, microfilm, "dry photography," etc. A trail can be observed that traces the development of acceptable cultural technologies; indeed, the office worker's physical desk operates as what Manovich calls a "cultural interface" (69) of HCI, despite the fact that the tool far predates the computer. In contrast, Engelbart's vision has yet to materialize because it calls for a significant paradigm shift in the way people think, work, and act in, on, and around cultural interfaces.

All is not lost for clever Douglas, however, as the rumblings continue on what the next iteration of the Web might look like. The Semantic Web (or Web 3.0, if you must) is an ongoing and slowly emerging dream of Web founder Tim Berners-Lee, in which computers become intelligent agents (or Engelbartian "clerks") that can better sense the needs of their users in order to turn information into knowledge. Such a system obviously relies on better organized databases (back-end) to drive its artificial intelligence, and more intuitive browser interfaces (front-end) to present users with their desired knowledge. It'll be interesting to watch if Manovich pays as much attention to the interface/database parameters of new media as they apply to the Semantic Web.

Whether or not Manovich asserts his relevance in Web 3.0 studies, I think we'll see a strong resurgence in Bush's associative trailblazing principles. This idea is especially relevant to the semantic nature of next-generation Web use, and its crude beginnings can be seen in e-commerce UI design. For example, you might be at Target.com, looking for something to spruce up your bed. You could search the site index, or browse your way through to find it. At the product's page, a link-path above the image shows the associative trail you took to get here: Target > Bedding > Fashion Bedding + Accessories > Damask Duvets > 450 Thread-Count Damask Stripe Duvet - Brown. (A quick aside: this practice is known to Web designers as "breadcrumbs"). While decorative bedding was perhaps not the original intention of Bush, nor the updated vision of Engelbart, we can see the beginnings of a system of associative paths that could someday prove just as useful to researchers as to online shoppers. Of course, Manovich claims that these linkpaths don't actually represent any kind of narrative or trailblazing, but rather just a random and unconnected bushwhacking through the virtual underbrush (228). I'll spare the reader another round of harrumphs, but suffice it so say that should the Semantic Web develop as some say it will, largely fulfilling Bush and Engelbart's vision, Manovich will be choking on a healthy dose of comeuppance, courtesy of digital rhetoricians everywhere who use intuitive new media to turn information into knowledge.

Alternate titles for this blog post:

• "The Fanciful Techno-Prognosticators of Yesteryear and their Magical Memex Machine"


• "Why Rhetoricians Will Bludgeon Lev Manovich with a Pillowcase Full of Batteries"