The Hypertext Years?

This talk begins with the crazy notion that we might think of hypertext as a signature for the period 1985-2020. The claim is more plausible technically than culturally, but the talk is perversely addressed to culture. Among other things, the discussion revisits Moulthrop's previous ACM Hypertext keynote in 1998, in which he distinguished between "exoteric" hypertext - the then-novel adaptation of the World Wide Web by Amazon and other online retailers - and "esoteric" applications in things like hypertext fiction and digital art. The talk updates this insight with reference to later developments such as Jill Walker's "feral hypertext" thesis, the rise of social media, and the recognition of computer games as legitimate channels of ideas. While these phenomena have arguably displaced hypertextuality in the popular imagination, Moulthrop points to the major interest in complex narratives, counterfactuals, and multiverses as places where the hypertext aesthetic survives. Turning from aesthetics back to the technical, the talk focuses on Twine, the popular text-gaming application that marries what Alexander Galloway would call the "proctological" openness of web technologies with the structure-mapping affordances of graphical hypertext systems. In some ways portraying Twine as a second coming of hypertext is a clear and perhaps intentional misreading. The talk ends by wondering what this misreading might reveal.