The Self-Indulgent Hacker

The development of hypertext has been a slow, plodding process, which still hasn’t yet revealed its full potential. In Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article, “As We May Think,” he describes a mechanism for the organization of information that is distributed, associative and loosely coupled. Further elaborated by Ted Nelson, these ideas inspired Tim Berners-Lee to create what we now know as the World Wide Web. The web has been the most successful implementation of hypertext because it minimizes traditional gatekeepers to authorship such as cost and expertise. However, authorship on the web has been hamstrung by its poor user interface. With the development of weblog and wiki software, non-programmers are finally using cheap, powerful and easy-to-use tools to self-publish in great numbers. But despite its increasingly successful reception from the mainstream, the web has still not fully realized Bush’s original idea of “information trails.” Interestingly, the existing web infrastructure readily accommodates these missing pieces and a few projects are under way to implement them.

The web has an active contingent of those working to augment and extend its functionality, destroying the assumption of an exclusive authorship of web content. Wikis and, to a lesser extent, weblogs can be seen as examples of collaborative authorship in action [1]. These are specific and limited forms of what has led to the Remixed Web, intentionally inviting audience participation. This dimension of permission should not be dismissed, however we need not limit ourselves to communal authorship only in the instances when it is sought. Bookmarklets, snippets of JavaScript code stored and executed through browser bookmarks, are perhaps not the first instance of a more general Remixed Web, but they are far more open and decentralized than earlier attempts. By clicking on a bookmarklet in the context of a particular webpage, the visitor becomes page DJ: capable of manipulating its contents and structure with impunity. Greasemonkey, and subsequent efforts such as hoodwink.d and Mousehole, extend this idea by allowing users to automate the process of remixing. These technologies may come closer to realizing Bush’s idea of trails and will allow a greater number of users to contextualize, share and filter digital media to a far greater degree.

We live in an era where the notion of authorship is being challenged. Music, literature and many other media have long been sampled and remixed to create new works. Since its invention during the renaissance, the idea of the individual and by extension “perspective” have led to a de-legitimizing of sampling. Musicians like Negativland and DJ Dangermouse have explored this tension between author and remixer, giving new context and meaning through the deliberate selection and orchestration of existing ideas. Information trails, as envisioned by Bush, involve combining material “as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book” [6]. This differs from the current practice of hyperlinking, where each original work might refer to the other, but there is no higher context within which the two are joined. More importantly, the creation of links between web resources is the exclusive domain of the author. This limits the potential for the association of ideas to those by a single person with a limited scope of experience and inherent bias.

The idea of remixer-as-plagiarist is important to consider as unauthorized modification of online materials will likely come into conflict with legal copyright protections. As digital media becomes better understood by the legislative and judicial branches of government, our system of laws will need to evolve to accept remixed works as a legitimate and protected form of speech. This will be a messy and difficult process as traditional power structures from the last century are replaced by more relevant ones. However, this process of replacement seems inevitable as the current “consumers” of information internalize the read/write-potential and everything-is-a-copy implications of digital media. The Remixed Web also exacerbates some existing problems of online content. When everyone can annotate and remix everything online, one will face an increasing problem of spam, information overload and breeches of privacy. These risks are profound and deserve careful consideration, however I believe the potential value in the Remixed Web make them worth facing.

One meaning of the prefix “hyper-“, is “above” or “beyond”. The current notion of hypertext in the World Wide Web, as autonomous interlinked nodes, lacks this quality of “above-ness.” Ideas can be associated with other ideas by the use of hyperlinks–and this is a powerful thing–but associations are limited by being a part of the original work. The Remixed Web suggests that the realm of possible associations for a particular web page need not be confined to that of a single individual author. The original work is a starting context with the potential to be elaborated on. Most certainly this possibility for collective authorship will lead to conflicts and a plethora of new challenges beyond those described here, but it is worthy of exploration. The tools of the Remixed Web are still in the midst of being realized while at the same time society adjusts to the range of implications of a deeply intertwingled media. Big innovations are coming, I think, and it will be fascinating to see them play out.

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[1]: Weblog technologies such as commenting and trackback allow for participation in a structure ultimately controlled by the author

This entry was posted on Friday, March 10th, 2006 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.