“Unplanned hypertext sprawl is wilderness: complex and interesting, but uninviting. Interesting things await us in the thickets, but we may be reluctant to plough through the brush, subject to thorns and mosquitoes.” - From Hypertext by Mark Bernstein
Purpose
As technology advances and information becomes exponentially quicker to access, we may be experiencing a diminishing capacity for introspection and an increase in linear patterns of thinking. This shift could have significant implications for our ability to understand ourselves and the world around us.
Taking my own experience for example; If not given something to do, my brain tends to have fleeting bursts of ideas, reflections, and conviction. The short lived aspect of these patterns of thought can be frustrating and making me feel scattered. I have kept a personal “Flow of Consciousness” journal for a number of years in an attempt to try and let some of my thoughts and feelings just-go. For certain applications, such as dealing with human emotion, I have found this practice to be incredibly beneficial. However, I never found much utility in other aspects of my life. And while those emotions were allowed to exit my mind and body onto the pages in my journal, I never really solved anything. Those feelings just were.
As part of a period of reflection heading into 2025, I decided that its time to “tend to my garden;” the garden of my mind. By working on this little plot of the land in cyberspace, I can put down seeds of thought, nurture them, watch them grow, and give space to a little mental arboretum of my own design. Here, I can sit idly or actively within it, and observe my thoughts and ideas as they develop; both as a part of me, and as an emergent entity of their own. I am the keeper and the watcher of this garden forest. These thoughts are mine and I am theirs.
What is Hypertext?
“Technically”, hypertext is just digital representations of text that contains references or (hyperlinks) to other text that can be immediately accessed by a reader. It’s a pretty unique way of presenting information in that it allows readers to navigate documents non-linearly, following links to related content as the please.
While most reading takes place in a linear fashion (think reading a book cover to cover), hypertext is jumpy, random, thoughts and ideas lead to each other and connect. With enough information spanning across multiple categories, some pretty interesting systems begin to form.
If each note acts as a node in this system, the whole thing starts to look and sound a lot like the internet. Believe it or not, the idea of hypertext predates the internet by a good few years.
History
In 1945, Vannevar Bush, who headed the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, wrote an article called “As We May Think” in which he described a hypothetical machine called the “Memex”, or “memory-expansion” This machine would allow users to store and retrieve information through associative links of microform documents, laying the groundwork for the idea of hypertext. He imagined such a device could store all of our books, records, ideas and communications. This idea laid the groundwork for networked internal thoughts with external documents.
Then in 1960, American philosopher and information technologist, Ted Nelson, coined the term “hypertext” while working on a computer based writing system called Project “Xanadu”. His idea was to design a system that would allow for the creation of a vast, interconnected network of documents. Laying the groundwork for hypertext as we know it today.
Then comes the 1980s, the development of personal computers and graphical user interfaces made hypertext more accessible. Apple’s HyperCard, released in 1987, was a popular software program that allowed users to create and navigate hypertext documents.
Finally, The World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the 90s, brought hypertext to the masses. The web is based on hypertext, with web pages containing links to other pages, just like this one, creating a global network of information.