You could probably call that one the “Dan Brown Method”.

-A benevolent guru expounding on a useful theme, laying traps to swat away the undisciplined to fritter away their attention on other primitive topic paths, and,

-A tentative blogger, eager to have sufficient references in the post, but afraid of making them too attractive and losing eyeballs too soon.

Footnotes are like the strict meeting chairperson, who flags every possible need for additional information exploration with a stern, “Could we take this question offline please?”

There is room enough in this world for the exploration and updating of both the letter and spirit of Bush’s original ideas. To claim that “HTML links and hypertext “theory” (Bush) have little to do with each other” is misguided on two levels.

First, Bush’s original article is not about either theory or practice. It is visioning pure and simple, which inspired Doug Licklider and Robert Taylor to drive forward the agenda of the original Internet architecture, and then Tim Berners-Lee with the www, and most recently, the idea of the wiki. That speaks to the breadth and scope of the vision.

Second, to the extent that there IS a scholarly hypertext “theory,” (both technical and literary-critical), that derives from Bush, it has no claim to being the one true faith. Both the theory and practice are important lines of investigation, and to stick to narrow technical readings of the original vision is rather limiting.

So long story short: I think Bush deservedly gets quoted in broader discourses. The theoretical disciplines he spawned aren’t the exclusive inheritors of his legacy.

But there is also a force beyond Bush, powerful though his thinking was. This is the Web user’s behavior, which has driven the real, practical Web to evolve in ways he never thought of. Yes, semantic, dynamic and bidirectional linking are all valid subjects to explore. That shouldn’t blind us to the possibilities opened up by the evolution of hyperlinking as it is actually practiced, and the improvisations and creativity people are bringing to its use. To dismiss it as “static, hardwired and authoritorial” is to deny its profound impact. The hyperlink isn’t a broken, incomplete implementation of Bush’s idea. It is a fertile concept that is evolving in open-ended ways.

Yes, Berne did come up with that terminology in the transactional model, but since few people get the reference these days, and PAC is essentially the same as superego-ego-id at zeroth order, I usually just cite Freud unless I am diving deeper. I have a couple of pieces on games and scripts pipelined though

Venkat

small suggestion – when you refer to parent-child interaction changing to adult-adult state, the reference is Bernian (from Eric Berne) rather than Freud. Freud talked about sex and aggression, Erickson about thye stages of development of identity, but it was Eric Berne who spoke of the Parent, Adult and Child Ego states (check out ITAA-org.net).

Anupama

I would love it if people stopped referring to Bush and HTML in the same breath.

whoa, as they say, saara ramayan sunne ke bad poochte ho lakshman kaun tha?

That’s the literal use of footnotes in the ‘glorified footnote’ mode. My point is that the instant availability changes the way you write the original, that’s the premise of the whole article. Being able to click-click-click is a continuous cognitive experience in a way that repeatedly going to a paper library and checking out a citation trail is not.

Venkat

Interesting to see that many people seem to be thinking about such things.

Jack: I did think that Understanding Media did follow its own theories moderately, but you are right. With a lot of folks analyzing the properties of a new medium, it is a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” Their own ability/lack thereof to execute shouldn’t be taken as proof/disproof of anything. It is one thing to appreciate a point/insight theoretically and objectively, and quite another to apply it in practice. I think it takes a generation or two for “native” practitioners of a medium to emerge. Until then, everybody is a bumbling explorer.