253 Novel
2014
The head of Engineering at my company got tired of the untended garden our Redmine wikis had become and cloned the jeckyl project on github. I had a fun couple of hours getting it to work locally and playing around with it. I put in a few pull requests and the unexpected pleasure of it all made me think back to the first things that really excited me about the www.
About 17 years ago (when cicadas last in the eastern US bloomed), I was working in Korea. I had my first internet connected computer a noname 486 based grey box cobbled together from YoungSan Market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yongsan_Electronics_Market) parts by one of the Canadian teachers working at the Korean/ American joint venture where I was a manager. The only thing I remember about the computer setup in the office was the A/B switch that had to be toggled if either the American or the Korean director wanted to print.
I remember Amazon from that time - but only for books; Persian Kitty and Jane’s List; hotmail - all these were fun diversions. But not quite ‘paradigm shifters’.
Since hearing about Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMonde I followed cycling - particularly the big tours. Following this sport consisted of reading terse snippets a day after the fact in the New York Times Sports section - back before it was a seperate section and when the NYT editorship seemed to take pride in having malnourished sports coverage.
The website www.letour.fr was great. Back in 1997 when Ullrich crushed the tour and in 1998 when Bobbly Julich was in the race until Il Pirata blew by him in the mountains - I became obsessed with the sport. Instead of aneimic stuffy reports from the NYT but the website gave you cross sections of the mountainous stages and statuses of all the jerseys so the complexity of it all appealed to the ‘baseball card collecting’ mania for statistics and minutae.
More than anything else - the race reports thrilled me. There were these 2 minute updates on the race that would drive you insane with anticipation. Especially in the mountain stages there would be all kinds of conflicting information and corrections. It made me think of people listening to radio reports or telegraph relays of events like Lindbergh’s Transatlantic Flight. Later they would seem like a precursor to twitter.
The site which really blew me away was one called ‘253 - a novel’:
http://www.ryman-novel.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/253_(novel)
It is the first internet site where I understood that hyperlinks were a game changer and though this wasn’t the heir to Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow in terms of quality, this was pretty cool, undeniably new. The experience of reading 253 was that you did not have to go to the next chapter. Each link (corresponding to 253 people on a London metro) was connected to others in various thematic ways - place of work/ school; familial or social relationship, etc. You could jump around and read the story in any number of ways. An idea that thrilled me at the time.
Years earlier I had read the Cortazar novel Hopscotch. It presents a similar possibility for lateral readings - but it was still a book.
Also years back, in political theory classes I had learnt about Walter Benjamin’s Passagenwerk - which I think was not made into a book until years later. Orignially it was interconnected 3x5 cards and ther eis an implicit way of cross-referencing that was very hyperlink-like.
A few years after that I would stumble upon everything.com (later everything2.com) which would have a simiar impact. You could free associate and follow the links at the bottom of an article and after a few hops you could be on some vastly different topic. A precursor to ‘6 degrees of wikipedia’
About the same time I was trying my hand at being a webmaster for the Brooklyn Rail - using Frontpage98 I believe… until i discovered Homesite.