Not to detract from some intriguing observations.

Although I found myself arguing, almost out loud, with more than a few of Vandendorpe's claims about hypertext, there were also many with which I agreed, or even better, said to myself "hey, that's interesting!". It seems, however, that, for me at least, the more interesting observations dealt with the transition from oral to written transmission of information, rather than with the emergence of the digital. Vandendorpe notes, for instance:

Incidentally, Aquinas wonders "whether Christ should have committed his teaching to writing" and he answers negatively because "men would have had no deeper thought of His doctrine than that which appears on the surface of the writing"; the visual mode was thus deemed very inferior to the oral one, a situation that would eventually begin to change in the Renaissance. (p. 57)

A bit later in the book he hints at how extensively print changed our priorities:

Such a perspective, however, is unlikely, for it is difficult to imagine that our civilization would abandon the dominance of the eye to return to the oral culture of "hearsay." On the contrary, the computer will encourage the ever-increasing preeminence of the visual, exacerbating the dynamic tensions between oral and written language. In the past, this tension has been creative. According to Richard Lanham, it is at the root of our civilization: "From the contrast, the oscillation between the two kinds of culture, flows the power that has dynamized Western expression." (p.99)

What was once the basis for deeper thought becomes little more than hearsay. And when we recognize that transition we're compelled to raise the question of what happens when we move from print to digital, with the ascendance of a difference sort of visual than printed text. But while a series of asides such as this is for me an integral part of writing a Boidem column, a part that for me makes this writing a challenge, I also have to ask myself whether anybody really cares about hypertext anymore.

Go to: Looking, of course, for something else, or
Go to: Things were different back then, or
Go to: It's in its DNA, or
Go to: How to write a Boidem column.