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This mode of publishing draws on aspects of the traditional book (a coherent body of information packaged in a single volume), the magazine (a diverse collection of disconnected pictures and texts), and television (a medium of electronic spectatorship grounded in the luminous presence of the moving picture). Since the 1950s, television has been alternately condemned as marking the death of literacy and celebrated for delivering an enhanced literacy of the eye. Today, the convergence of electronic texts, images, and information technologies is leading to a new form of "book" that combines the electric allure of the video screen with a capacity for storing and accessing data that far exceeds that of conventional print.
The theory of hypermedia was first articulated in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, a computer scientist who proposed a system called "Memex," a desk-sized device for the storage, retrieval, and authoring of information. The Memex unit would employ enhanced versions of technologies that were then current, including microfilm, voice-recognition, keyboard entry, automated data sorting, an array of mechanical buttons and levers, and a system of "dry photography." The core of Bush's proposal lay not in these specific technologies--which seem quaint in retrospect--but in the principle of "associative indexing," by which the user of the Memex device could build links between diverse data stored on microfiche within the body of the desk. Bush wrote, "When numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly....It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book." Computer scientist Ted Nelson expanded Bush's theory of the "new book," giving it the name "hypertext" in 1960.
Hypermedia publishing did not become commercially viable until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the various technologies it requires became available for use on desktop computers. Building on ideas pioneered by computer scientists and designers of video games and computer interfaces, several companies began producing hypermedia "publications" on laserdisc and CD-ROM. In the emerging conventions of the electronic document, metaphoric "buttons" and "windows" replaced the mechanical levers and microfilmed pages envisioned by Bush in 1945.
The mixing of ready-made material is central to the production of hypermedia. In the words of designers Bob Cotton and Richard Oliver, "In twenty years' time, one definition of 'literacy' may be the ability to put together an interactive communication (using sound, images, animation and live action video as well as text). If this is the case, it will be largely because hypermedia is the supreme medium for bricolage,...the bringing together of existing elements to create something new." The on-line magazine Blender, founded in 1995 by Felix Dennis, borrows its evocative title from the domestic countertop to convey the principle of electronic mixing. The promise of hypermedia is, ultimately, to put the disk jockey's turntable into the hands of the dancers on the floor.
© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum