12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
An important but highly flawed book., September 19, 1996
By A Customer
This review is from: Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society) (Paperback)
Landow's _Hypertext_ is one of a handful of books that has
defined academic and popular discussion of hypertext.
The book argues that hypertext represents a radically
new way to both read and write, that promises to redefine
our experience of and ideas about literature. It will
bring an end to linearity and traditional narrative,
replacing both with webs of "lexica" without predefined
beginnings or ends. The concept of the "author" as a
distinct individual will vanish, as texts are knitted
together by hyperlinks into a vast "docuverse."
Readers, meanwhile, will become partners with authors
in creating meaning out of texts. Finally, all of this
represents a "convergence of contemporary critical
theory and technology" in which the works of Derrida and
Lacan are instantiated in software-- or as Landow puts
it, "contemporary theory proposes and hypertext disposes."
Despite its popularity, however, the book has serious
problems that limit its real utility as a guide to
thinking about new writing technologies. First, the
book underestimates the variety of printed texts, and
the ways in which people read. In _Hypertext_, "texts"
means literature, and a manner of reading specific to
that genre; it never means reference works, which are
read in very different ways-- browsed and searched rather
than read from start to finish-- or more ephemeral texts
like menus, street signs, and the like. The world of text
in which most of us live is not simply contained in books:
it is all around us, like a cloud, and we interact with it
in ways much more complex than _Hypertext_ admits. Second,
the book bases its argument on the capacities of a hypertext
system that doesn't really exist, except perhaps in a few
academic laboratories: certainly the World Wide Web does not
allow readers to create links from other other pages to their
own, an important feature in Landow's technology. A guide to
the impact of technology on "print culture" should be more faithful
in its representation of both artifacts. Third, the now quite
large literature on the relationship between technology, culture,
and politics goes unmentioned and unused, save for a few ancient
books. Had _Hypertext's_ literary criticism been as old as its
history of technology, it would have talked about F. R. Leavis,
not Jacques Derrida. Finally, evidence from the real world of
hypertext writing suggests that rather than being liberating,
the new technology can be constraining and deskilling: the recent
_Harper's_ article on "the sorrows of a multimedia hack" indicates
that if the author does disappear, it's going to be because of
multimedia project management methods and a lack of respect for
the written word, not because of the exhilirating and liberating
qualities of hypertext. The freedom Landow sees in hypertext,
rather, are the freedoms of the tenured professor, who owns the
means of his product and is free to do what he wants with his
time and energy.
_Hypertext_ is a highly influential book, and is required reading
for anyone interested in the Web or multimedia. Just don't believe
it.
(A fuller version of this review can be found at
http://www.eb.com/editors/apang/hyper/landow.htm)
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