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Subject:Re: Is hypertext more productive? From:Andreas Ramos <andreas -at- NETCOM -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 24 Mar 1994 12:41:26 -0800
On Thu, 24 Mar 1994, Stephen Bernhardt wrote:
> There's no comparing our hypertext with a paper equivalent, because there
> can be no equivlent.
Of course there are similarities. It's text, it's written by text-centric
authors, and it's based on text principles (general vs. specific types of
logical information.) (there aren't general vs. specific images; an image
of a seashell is an image of a seashell.)
Movies are a wholly different communication media from text: the moving
images, the extremely reduced "dialogs" ( TV sitcom script is only
several hundred spoken words). That's a "different" media. The conversion
of any book into a movie is like the translation of British English into
Colombian Spanish: the referents are diffferent, or wholly missing.
Hypermedia is probably different, and will at some point be taken as a
different media, with its own criteria, "voice", and style. Currently,
it's an animated mish-mash of everything the producers can get their hot
hands on. In the same way that photography imitated painting for the
first seventy years, hypermedia will imitate books for a while.
yrs,
andreas
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Andreas Ramos, M.A. Heidelberg Sacramento, California
