Next time you log onto MySpace or YouTube, take some time to reflect that social networks like these owe everything to the genius of Ted Nelson, who in the 1960s invented hypertext, the technology that allows you to navigate between documents on the web. Mike Holderness sat down with Nelson to explore a few of the networking websites that his ideas have enabled
What is the connection between hypertext and online social networking?
It’s all built on a certain kind of hypertext. Whenever you post a comment on someone’s web page or link it to yours, for example, you make a sort of hyperlink.
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Why should we care about what kind of hypertext underpins it all?
Because this determines which ways of using social networking are easy, which are hard, and which are impossible.
Let’s look at , which is a page in the MySpace network run by someone who is promoting a club night. What do you make of it?
So this person has been given the ability to name his own space within MySpace? OK. I see it says on the right that he has 1024 “friends”. But over here on the left there is a link labelled “Add to Friends”. Can we be a friend uninvited? Let’s try it. “An email has been sent to the user,” it says. They have to say that we can be their friend.
Let’s follow a link to one of his friend’s pages.
Why is it pink? It’s hard to know whether we are still inside MySpace. I think we are. “You can rate your evenings by the number of bruises you come home with,” one of her friends has written on her page. “You may say I’m too old to crowd-surf but when your boy’s nowhere to be seen it’s the only legitimate way to get your bum felt by strangers.” It’s so hard to know what is happening in this world! But look, one of her friends is the National Cynical Network. I like that.
What social networking sites have you explored?
Second Life is interesting – a three-dimensional world in which people pay to play house. They build and decorate their own “homes” and “visit” each other.
What strikes you most about these sites?
They are all about real estate. You set out your stall, stake out a territory. The whole World Wide Web is about a sense of ownership, starting from those company web addresses. But what I envisioned and built is about sharing media and acknowledging sources, without walls or boundaries.
How do you feel, using the web?
I use it all the time. I’m one of the more extreme users, though I mourn it and I rage at it. The format seems so fundamentally broken. It’s based on document delivery where a document is one file, with all the links embedded in it. The term “information technology” has everyone anaesthetised into thinking that the way it is now is necessary and beyond question.
There are three areas – at the very least – where the techies who designed the web are naive. First, they impose hierarchy. Then they simulate paper, when the point should be to improve on it. After all, Henry Ford didn’t try to build a mechanical horse. And finally they assume that the human world is a world of fact and can be represented without the “says who?” information that is built into my way of doing things.
How is your vision different to theirs?
My style of hypertext would allow you to create your own mesh of insightful structures in a live document, as you explore. A document is not a file and nor is it necessarily a sequence. It is a structure. The central feature of the Xanadu system I proposed in the 1960s is that when a document quotes another, it pulls in the actual text from the source, wherever that lives. I call this “transclusion”.
That implies that anyone posting a Xanadu document grants the world a licence to quote from it, charging the reader a one-time fee if they wish – a principle I call “transcopyright”. The links are two-way: each document links back to all the places that quote it. And, crucially, it can all be dynamic. Every change you make is immediately propagated and clarified and resolved. The document is never out of date.
Does that mean documents are never finished?
Finishing is a political act. What deadlines are about is resolving all the pieces and references that have to be fixed when a document is frozen, and freezing it makes it a policy. You could always do more investigation unless you decide not to.
What could Xanadu do for social networking?
Transclusion would make a huge difference. You could follow through from a comment someone put on your page to see at once what they said to everyone else, and then ask “Is is it only me you love or are you spamming everyone else?”
And what about the economics?
With transcopyright, artists could start to make a living. I have a friend who hears her albums played on the radio and the musicians’ collecting societies say they can’t pay her because the number of plays is “statistically insignificant”. Micro-sales might be a huge market, but we don’t know until we try.
What are you working on now?
One thing is FloatingWorld, a system for displaying documents, including their transclusions and the links between them, in three dimensions. Envision social networking done this way: imagine your personal profile as a flying document in space, with thousands of connections streaming off in all directions, where you can spin various wheels or whatever to zoom in and have different parts of the network light up or disappear.
What else do you see in the future?
I met some programmers at a party in Tokyo and they showed me a system of connectible virtual 3D spaces built, like FloatingWorld, with the Open Graphics Library software. You could buy real estate from the owners and build inside it, and you could connect up to others’ spaces. So I thought of my other current project, ZigZag, which is a generalised database, a way of building a linked complex mesh of data items. Each could be an edit of a document, or an entry in a family tree. You could think of it as like a spreadsheet in which only the cells that have contents are stored, but in as many dimensions as you please.
Explore the other features in New Scientist’s guide to the social networking revolution:
This is your space – Discover how social networking evolved, how it works and how it is already revolutionising the way we live, socialise and work
I’ll have to ask my friends – Instant messaging, Wi-Fi and cellphones allow us to be constantly plugged into our social networks. Sociologist Sherry Turkle worries this is transforming human psychology
The end of privacy? – You wouldn’t tell a stranger on the bus about your sexual habits, so why do people reveal this stuff on websites available to everyone? Will their openness return to haunt them?
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Google – A short story by Bruce Sterling
Give it a try – Feeling left out of the social networking revolution? There are many ways you can get involved, so take a look
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Theodor Holm Nelson is a philosopher, sociologist and IT pioneer originally from the US. He coined the term hypertext in 1963. His Xanadu project, which he started in 1960 and is still pursuing, aims to create an information network with a deeper structure than the web (). He is a visiting fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford.
