Ted Nelson
Biography
Theodor Holm Nelson (b. 17 June 1937) is an American sociologist, philosopher and pioneer of information technology. He coined the terms "hypertext" and "hypermedia" in 1963 and published them in 1965, and is credited with the first use of the words transclusion, virtuality, intertwingularity and teledildonics. The main thrust of his work has been to make computers easily accessible to ordinary people.[1]
The son of the director Ralph Nelson and the actress Celeste Holm, he took a BA in philosophy at Swarthmore and an MA in sociology at Harvard, where the term hypertext was conceived during a graduate course. He later took a doctorate at Keio University. His motto: "A user interface should be so simple that a beginner in an emergency can understand it within ten seconds."
Projects
Although Nelson had many projects and platonic ideals for what the web should be, many never made it through to completion — in part because "he did not possess the technical knowledge to tell others how his ideas could be implemented, and so many people simply ignored him (and have ever since)."[2]
The Xanadu® model. An alternative form of deep document, and the longest-running project in the history of software. Xanadu was conceived as a tool to preserve and increase humanity's literature and art: a world-wide network storing information not as separate files but as connected literature, where documents remain accessible indefinitely, users can create virtual copies of any document, and — instead of copyright enforcement — owners are automatically paid a micropayment for the virtual copying of their work.
Parallel hypertext. Fundamentally different hypertext viewing, in which connected documents are displayed side by side with their links drawn as visible bridges between them, rather than one document at a time with links as hidden jumps.
ZigZag® structure. An alternative form of deep non-hierarchical structure, based on multidimensional crossed lists, intended to escape the file-and-folder hierarchy Nelson regards as an unnecessary imposition borrowed from paper.
Why the Web Is Not Xanadu
Nelson has been a consistent and public critic of the World Wide Web, which he regards as a degraded imitation of what hypertext should have been. His objections are specific and worth stating, because they identify real losses: web links are one-directional, so a document cannot know who cites it; links break, because they point at locations rather than at content; there is no transclusion, so quotation is copying rather than inclusion with provenance intact; there is no version history at the document level; and there is no rights or payment mechanism, which left advertising as the only available business model.
Further Reading
- Computer Lib / Dream Machines (1974)
- Literary Machines (1981)
- Possiplex (2010), his autobiography
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
Nelson is the field's most useful counterfactual. Every property of the web that feels like a fact about hypertext — one-way links, link rot, copies rather than transclusions, no provenance, no micropayment — is a design choice that someone had already argued against before it was made. Reading him is the fastest way to see the present arrangement as contingent, which is the same service Cunningham's wiki performs for authorship.
External Links
References
- ↑ Ted Nelson, Wikipedia.
- ↑ Ted Nelson, ibiblio Pioneers.
