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The New Media Reader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort (MIT Press)
This volume, according to its editors, is an ‘effort to uncover and assemble a representative collection of critical thoughts, events, and developments from the computer's humanistic and artistic past, its conception not as an advanced calculator but as a new medium, or as enabling new media’. Their phraseology suggests a dichotomy — between ‘critical thoughts’ on the one hand and ‘events and developments’ on the other. Is The New Media Reader a collection of criticism and theory in the new media field, or a history of the hardware and software developments which have made it possible for us to regard computers and the Internet ‘as a new medium, or as enabling new media’? To some extent it is both, and there are good reasons for this.
The theory of new media art — especially hyperliterature, which this collection deals with more thoroughly than any of the other forms — cannot be properly understood without tracing the technological developments which have taken place in computing over the last fifty or sixty years, and the surprisingly philosophical ideas which have often underpinned them. Vannevar Bush's famous essay ‘As We May Think’, from 1945, sets the tone by suggesting that computerised information should not be filed away in predetermined categories, but linked together by individual users into ‘associative trials’, because such an arrangement will be more sympathetic to the workings of the human mind:
Our ineptitude in getting at the record is largely caused by the artificiality of systems of indexing. When data of any sort are placed in storage, they are filed alphabetically or numerically, and information is found (when it is) by tracing it down from subclass to subclass… The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association.
Very similar ideas reappear in Ted Nelson's book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, which he originally self-published in 1974: ‘One of the remarkable things about the human mind is the way it ties things together.’ For Nelson, Vannevar Bush's principle that the mind ‘operates by association’ leads to a tirade against the education system, and thence to the proposition that people should be allowed to educate themselves, with the help of computers,...