Abstract
This article explores the historical development of hypertext, arguing that we have seen a transition from early visions and implementations of hypertext that primarily dealt with using hypertext to gain greater control over knowledge and ideas, to today’s messy web. Pre-web hypertext can be seen as a domesticated species bred in captivity. On the web, however, some breeds of hypertext have gone feral. Feral hypertext is no longer tame and domesticated, but is fundamentally out of our control. In order to understand and work with feral hypertext, we need to accept this and think more as hunter-gatherers than as the farmers we were for domesticated hypertext. The article discusses hypertext in general with an emphasis on literary and creative hypertext practice.
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Notes
- 1.
Google interprets links from one website to another as peer endorsements of the linked-to website, so a website with more links pointing to it will rank higher in the search results. Tagging is the practice of assigning freeform keywords to an item, whether its a photo, a website, a video or something else. Tags are chosen by the user as he or she wishes, whereas conventional keywords, as in a library database, for instance, are usually part of a controlled vocabulary, so new keywords cannot be added at will.
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Rettberg, J.W. (2009). Feral Hypertext: When Hypertext Literature Escapes Control. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9789-8_29
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