#NetNarr Discovery: Lost In Hyperland (A Fantasy Documentary)


Hypermedia flickr photo by Dominik W. Neuffer shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

Thanks to some sharing of an article by Wendy in Networked Narratives a few weeks ago, I stumbled on this 1990 film about where hypertext might be going, with novelist Douglas Adams.

The Internet Archive site explains a bit more about Hyperland:

In this one-hour documentary produced by the BBC in 1990, Douglas falls asleep in front of a television and dreams about future time when he may be allowed to play a more active role in the information he chooses to digest. A software agent, Tom (played by Tom Baker), guides Douglas around a multimedia information landscape, examining (then) cuttting-edge research by the SF Multimedia Lab and NASA Ames research center, and encountering hypermedia visionaries such as Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson. Looking back now, it’s interesting to see how much he got right and how much he didn’t: these days, no one’s heard of the SF Multimedia Lab, and his super-high-tech portrayal of VR in 2005 could be outdone by a modern PC with a 3D card. However, these are just minor niggles when you consider how much more popular the technologies in question have become than anyone could have predicted – for while Douglas was creating Hyperland, a student at CERN in Switzerland was working on a little hypertext project he called the World Wide Web…

Peace (link it beyond),
Kevin

4 Comments
  1. Hi Kevin

    I took a workshop in Canada on Metissage – mixing several people’s stories together. I found a digital update:

    “Digital metissage is based on the idea of literary metissage as outlined by Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers and Leggo (2009). Literary metissage is the process of creating stories that are braided together and rooted in history and memory, as well as being stories of be-coming. Literary metissage provokes engagement with dominant discourse(s) in order to challenge and change them. Digital metissage captures the idea of blurring genres, texts, histories and stories in digital formats that recognise the value and spaces between and across cultures, generations and representational forms. The notion of metissage (French meaning hybridization or fusion) brings with it the sense of braiding, so that the process of digital metissage requires co-production and co-creation with participants in ways that braid data and stories. Through collecting stories, researchers and participants undertake digital braiding, so the data and representation are both individual and collective. Such metissage enables researchers to work in innovative participatory ways that enable the creation and illustration of visual and emotional aspects of the stories, artefacts and research. The focus on ‘the digital’ also recognises the importance of connectivity as a complex and contested concept. In Chambers et al. (2008), notions of curriculum, language, culture, place and identity are explored:”

    Place and space, memory and history, ancestry and mixed race, language and literacy, familiar and strange are braided with strands of tradition, ambiguity, becoming, (re)creation, and renewal.
    (Chambers et al. 2008: 152)

    The authors use poetry, pictures, storytelling and narrative, and mixed and braided genres. The inked examples in this text also illustrate how this can be transferred into digital forms online.

    From: Research Methods for Education in the Digital Age By Maggi Savin-Baden, Gemma Tombs

    Mark

    • Cool.
      I like this quote: “Digital metissage captures the idea of blurring genres, texts, histories and stories in digital formats that recognise the value and spaces between and across cultures, generations and representational forms.”
      Kevin

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *