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To argue the position that hypertext will affect society as much as printing has, without reducing the importance that printing has enjoyed for 500 years.

Bill Gates makes both of those points.

Wired magazine does (several time each issue). So did the magazine Business 2.0 in its premier issue (July 1998).

Sven Birkerts wrote an entire book on the subject. (He liked the changes printing brought, but he doesn't like these.)

Supporting citations are at the bottom of the essay.

Contents

Let's look at each of these.

Distribution. Once the expense of installing equipment is overcome, hypertext costs less to produce and distribute than print materials. This gets hypertext to more people than print, including people who have previously been "out of the loop". Or to a more target audience than ever before. Or only to those who have requested it. And it gets there faster -- which has huge political implications.

Concentration/Dispersal. The history of Western civilization has been that of concentration: wealth (16th-17th C mercantilism), power (17th-19th C nationalism), production (18th-20th C industrialism), and demography (19th-20th C urbanization). Some mega-mergers apparently accepted, hypertext and telecommunications are reversing that: money is mobile; the Soviet Union is gone; customized production is commonplace; and telecommuting occurs between such places as Cut Bank, Montana, and Wall Street.

Note:

The merger exception is more apparent than real: largely because of telecommunications and hypertext, the constituent parts are often semi-autonomous and their structures are flexible.

Agility/Flexibility. These new entities are able to change direction rapidly. Behemoths IBM and GM reinvented themselves in time (barely) because their crises came when the Old World Order still had some validity, and they had huge resources behind them; we Americans can only hope the US will be able to do so as well. The new rules (see citations for Business 2.0; and Kevin Kelly) won't allow much of that in the future: when product life cycles are 6-24 months, and capital moves halfway around the world in milliseconds, multi-level debate and leisurely decision-making will become wistful memories.

Note:

Finding a way to inject reasoned judgement into such circumstances is a pressing, vital, and as yet unsolved problem.

Content. Some things (like complex schematics, linear arguments, and spellbinding novels) don't work as well in hypertext as in print; but news, reference works, catalogs, some training materials, and interactive/customizable presentations work much better.

Thought. It's been observed (and pretty well documented academically; see Benedict reference at the end of the essay) that literate peoples think differently from preliterate peoples: preliterates have far better memory, for example. The same readers approach hypertext much more assertively and critically than they do print, partly because they know they have some control. (Nielsen) There's reason to believe that hypertext will, slowly, bring significant changes to the ways consumers of hypertext think.

We'll consider these in detail in other essays. If they are valid, hypertext truly is a change of huge proportions.

The Survival of Printing

Print can do things hypertext will never do as well -- at least not in the foreseeable future: foldouts, complex schematics, field guides, "touchy-feely" things, and anything (like philosophy, cause-and-effect, or traditional story-telling) requiring linear thought that the reader follows and analyzes.

Note:

I recently addressed an audience for which proceedings were only on CD ROM. Attendees were busily note-taking, not listening, because they didn't know how much they'd find on the CD. (Many of those who looked at the CD later felt that the resolution wasn't fine enough and that too much scrolling was required.)

Clearly print has tremendous advantages, and will for the foreseeable future. It's been noted that:

• Attempts to put all software documentation online are rarely successful.
• Users complain at having to scroll too much (particularly horizontally).
• People use the hypertext features of online map software to compose a customized map -- and then print it for actual use.
• Attempts to put traditional novels online haven't really caught on.
• Most people still say "I love you" one of the old fashioned ways.

• 16th-17 C concentration of capital (mercantilism)
• 17th-19th C concentration of political power (nationalism)
• 19th-20th C concentration of production (industrialization)
• 20th C concentration of population (urbanization).

That is a huge impact.

Citations

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Next essay in series (#3: Development)