Originally published at: Retrofitting the Web - Summer of Protocols
Hypertext, which we generalize as hypermedia, is text plus links: an extra degree of freedom to move around, other than starting at the beginning and reading all the way to the end. By this definition, the ubiquitous World-Wide Web is a mediocre specimen. True, the Web is a cosmopolitan system of unprecedented scale, with instantaneous…
Thanks for this work @dorian. I’m curious about seeing this expressed in intertwingler.
I’ve been paying more attention to stories, myths, fairy tales and speculative fiction, and I’m now craving for the storytellers. I read about songlines from Tyson Yunkaporta and David Abram, and now I’m fascinated about the idea of carrying the knowledge in the body, in the mind, in the limbs, in the stomach, and also in the landscape. Hearing my ancestors in the wind.
I felt sad when you said that the median story presents almost nothing to learn. I’m not sure I want more training in protocols.
But well, maybe it would be relevant to have both. Become a better story teller and more model-literate.
I wonder if you have received recently a story that has been surprisingly far from the median, and if so, what did she taught you?
Also, the description in the intertwingler website got me thinking that maybe these personal sites of partial knowledge that quickly get outdated, that rot because of lack of care, maybe they are still relevant components for the new stories that we can write. And what’s missing is the ritual to weave them together. Maybe intertwingler is that ritual, it’s how we compose the new digital songs.