Week 6 - Hypermedia

"Hypertext as Subversive?" - David Kolb - 1997

I'll give it to Kolb, in 1997 this essay was likely revolutionary, but with websites like Wikipedia and tools like Twine, the concept of linking doesn't sound as novel as it once did. Indeed, Kolb has likely contributed, via research, to hypertext being what it is today.

Still, the essay has some tackleable arguments, such as links suggesting binary movement which Kolb attempts to challenge by setting links inside the text -- much like this reading response. Yet amongst Kolb's experimentation, I find the lack of coherency difficult to read, I fail to form a mental map of Kolb's main points besides a focus on universities, mentions of a certain "Kwinter", critiques of the coming panoptic, modernizing, freedom reducing, unstoppable, capital and profit driven digital age, and attempts at hypertext fiction.

Other potential issues, such as brightly colored links encouraging scanning, have already been solved. If you didn't notice, the "links" in the previous sentence is an actual link, the style has just been stripped with CSS.