Conclusion

Summary

Everything is deeply intertwingled. I have always loved that particular Nelsonism (and there are many to choose from); it has stuck with me for twenty years. In this book we have looked at several early, pre-Web attempts to represent intertwingularity, to represent the deep connections that criss-cross and interpenetrate human knowledge. They were built at different times and from different technical components; two of them (Memex and Xanadu) were never built at all. As a series of machines, they are a motley crew. With the exception of Storyspace, they are also obsolete – had Bruce Sterling continued his Dead Media Project beyond 2001, they would belong properly to that collection.

There are, however, hypertexts created in the '80s that are still read and edited today. George Landow's Victorian Web, originally created in Intermedia, then ported to Storyspace and the Web, is one of the oldest scholarly hypertexts. It is still used as course material in Victorian literary studies. Numerous hypertexts created in Storyspace, among them afternoon and Victory Garden, are still read, studied and argued about in critical literature. We have inherited more than just technical designs from the history of hypertext – we have inherited works of literature.

The '80s was also a period of great critical foment for hypertext theory. Theorists began enthusiastically exploring hypertext from a literary perspective in the late '80s, claiming that the interactive nature of hypertext invites us to reconfigure our conceptions of ‘text’, ‘narrative’ and ‘author’ in a fashion more suited to the nature of the medium (Landow 1992, also Landow and Delaney 1995).