he hypertext link is the first significant new form of punctuation to emerge in centuries, but
it is only a hint of things to come. Hypertext suggests a whole new grammar of possibilities, a
new way of writing and telling stories. But to make that new frontier accessible, we need more
than one type of link. Microsoft and Netscape may be content with the simple,
one-dimensional links of the Web's current incarnation, but for the rest of us, it's like trying to
write a novel where the words are separated only by semicolons. Fortunately, the world
of hypertext has a long history of low- level innovation. As a general interface convention, the
link should usually be understood as a synthetic device, a tool that brings multifarious
elements together into an orderly unit. In this respect, 
the most compelling cultural analogy
for hypertext turns out to be not the splintered universe of channel surfing, but rather the
damp, fog-shrouded streets of Victorian
London, and the mysterious resemblances of Charles Dickens.
"Links of association"--actually a favorite phrase of Dickens-- play a major role in the narrative
of Great Expectations. The link usually takes the form of a passing
resemblance, half-glimpsed and then forgotten. Throughout his oeuvre, characters perceive
some stray likeness in the faces of strangers, something felt but impossible to place. These
moments are scattered through the novels like hauntings; this ethereal quality brings them
close to the subjective haze of modernism and the stream of consciousness. Consider Pip's
ruminations on his mysterious playmate and love-interest Estella: "What was it that was borne
in upon my mind when she stood still and looked attentively at me?... What was it? ...As my
eyes followed her white hand, again the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp,
crossed me. My involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly the
ghost passed once more and was gone. What was it?"
These partial epiphanies serve as the driving force behind the suspense of Dickens' novels.
Resolving the half-resemblance, connecting the links, putting a name to the face--these actions
invariably give the novel the sense of an ending. They restore a certain orderliness in the face
of tremendous disorder (mirroring in one way the "synthetic" connections of hypertext prose).
The associative links unite Dickens' two major thematic obsessions: orphans and inheritances.
In the Dickensian novel, the plight of being orphaned at an early age has the same sine
qua non quality that marital infidelity had in the French novel: You simply can't imagine
the form surviving without it. The more complicated later novels (Bleak
House, Our
Mutual Friend, Great Expectations) are teeming with abandoned children,
surrogate parents, anonymous benefactors. The Victorians have a reputation for family-values
conservatism, but their most gifted novelist dissected and recombined the family unit with an
inventiveness that would have impressed the Marquis de Sade.
For all the experimentation, of course, Dickens's novels eventually wind their way back to
some kind of nuclear family. And with this "rightful" restoring of the family unit comes
another restoration, this one financial. Like most 19th-century British novelists, Dickens
incessantly structured his narratives around troubled inheritances. There are enough contested
wills, anonymous benefactors, and entangled estates to keep all the lawyers in Chancery busy
for another century. Reuniting the dispersed family and discovering links of filiation are
bound up in the rightful disposition of some long-contested estate. What better way to
tantalize the reader--haplessly trying to connect those long-separated family lines--than by
offering up a suggestive but unfulfilled resemblance, a hint of filiation?
What makes these links striking--to the 20th-century reader, at least--is that they
straddle radically different social groups (the family at the end of Great Expectations
include an escaped convict, a servant, and a young woman of means; in Bleak House,
an aristocratic baroness, an opium-addict law stenographer, and an orphan girl brought up by
a haute bourgeois uncle). There is a strong vein of sentimentality in these reconciliations, of
course, but also something heroic. Dickens attempted to see a social whole, building a form
large enough to connect the lives of street urchins, captains of industry, schoolteachers, circus
folk, ladies in waiting, convicts, shut-ins, dustheap emperors, aging nobility, and rising young
gentlemen. No novelist since has cast such a wide net, or even dared to try. That is partially
because the forces unleashed by the industrial revolution had an enormously dissociative
power. Dickens inherited the burden of a society in which roles were no longer clearly
defined, where the codes of primogeniture and noblesse oblige had given way to a bewildering
new regime. He built explanatory narratives within the genre of the novel, but the divisions
were too severe for ordinary storytelling to broach. To see the relationship between a street
orphan and a baroness, you needed a little magic.
Dickens understood that a culture so divided against itself could only seek resolution in fairy
tales. The "links of association" were the building blocks of that fantasy. Their high-tech
descendants serve an equivalent purpose today. Where Dickens's narrative links stitched
together a torn social fabric, hypertext links attempt the same with information. Today's
imaginative crisis comes from having too much information at our fingertips. The modern
interface is a kind of corrective to this multiplying energy, an attempt to subdue all that
teeming complexity. On the Web, it is the link that finally supplies that sense of coherence.
Today's orphans and itinerants are the isolated packets of data strewn across the infosphere.
The question is whether it will take another Dickens to bring them all back home again. Like
so much of the digital world, linking originates in the creative aftermath of World War II as a
response to the research explosion of the war years. With so much new data, how would
scientists make sense of it all? Vannevar Bush, in his 1945
essay "As We
May Think,"1 conceived the problem as one of
discontinuity: Our knowledge-creating tools had advanced faster than the
knowledge-processing ones. Plenty of information was being generated; we just didn't know
where to find it. Fifty years before Netscape Navigator, Bush drew on a nautical metaphor,
hinting at the provocative idea of information space: "The summation of human experience is
being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the
consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of
square-rigged ships." As a corrective to this plight, Bush proposed an information speedboat,
half microfiche machine and half computer, storing vast amounts of written and graphic
information and allowing the user to connect items at will. He called it the Memex.
Bush's proposed solution should probably go down in history as the birth of hypertext. Only
he chose to imagine the "links of association" connecting all that data as "trails," not links. At
one point, he even refers to experienced Memex users as "trail blazers"--a term that would
have fit well with the "new frontier" rhetoric of recent
cyber-boosterism. At first glance, trails resemble the modern link; they serve as a kind of
connective tissue, an information artery, that threads together documents with some shared
semantic quality. Trails, in other words, are a way of organizing information that doesn't
follow the strict, inflexible dictates of the Dewey decimal system or other hierarchical
conventions. Documents can be connected for more elusive, transient reasons, and each text
can have many trails leading to it. Our traditional ways of organizing things--library books,
say, or physical elements--are built around fixed, stable identities: Each document belongs to a
specific category, just as each element has a single block on the periodic table. Bush's system
was closer to those half-resemblances of Dickens's novels: tantalizing, but not fully formed.
This was a profound shift in the way we grapple with information. The previous century had
been dominated by the encyclopedic mentality--famously parodied in Flaubert's Bouvard
and Pecuchet--in which the primary goal of information management was to find the
proper slot for each data package. Bush turned that paradigm on its head. What made a
nugget of information valuable, he suggested, was not the overarching class or species that it
belonged to, but rather the connections it had to other data. The Memex wouldn't see the
world as a librarian does, as an endless series of items to be filed away on the proper shelf. It
would see the world the way a poet does: a world teeming with associations, minglings,
continuities.
What Bush described was essentially a literary view of the world, one probably best realized in
Bloom's rambling internal monologue in Ulysses and the associative
free-for-all of most Surrealist writing. But subsequent advances in neuroscience suggest that
Bush's connective model may be a mechanical analog of the way the brain works: an intricate
assemblage of neurons, connected by trails of electrical energy, generating information out of
connections, not fixed identity. It's not like the brain reserves a specific space for the idea of
"dog" and another for "cat." The ideas emerge out of thousands of separate neurons firing, in
combinations that reorganize themselves with each subtle shift in meaning. The connections
between those neurons create the thought; the individual neurons are just building blocks.
Bush's promise of "information-at-your-fingertips" works better on paper than it does in real
life. (The gap is probably forgivable, considering that the Memex itself was the ultimate in
vaporware.) But if part of Bush's vision anticipates the present-day Web, another part greatly
exceeds it. Despite the fury of innovation and the massive R&D expenditures of the past
decades, one of the Memex's essential features remains off limits to most contemporary Web
browsers. Consider this description:
The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin
and properties of the bow and arrow... He has dozens of possibly pertinent books and articles
in his memex. First he runs through an encyclopedia, finds an interesting but sketchy article,
leaves it projected. Next, in a history, he finds another pertinent item, and ties the two
together. Thus he goes, building a trail of many items. Occasionally he inserts a comment of
his own, either linking it into the main trail or joining it by a side trail to a particular item.
When it becomes evident that the elastic properties of available materials had a great deal to
do with the bow, he branches off on a side trail which takes him through textbooks on
elasticity and tables of physical constants. He inserts a page of longhand analysis of his own.
Thus he builds a trail of his interest through the maze of materials available to
him.
Anyone who has spent any time roaming across the Internet will immediately recognize the
difference here. Bush's Memex owner literally builds that "trail of interest" as he explores the
information space on his desk. Surfers, as a rule, follow links assembled in advance, depending
on the charity of others for their associative links; the "trail blazer" rolls his own. Most
importantly, the trails have genuine duration. They remain part of the Memex's documentary
record; the connection between the bow and the principles of elasticity aren't simply strung
together momentarily, only to be discarded hours later. The connection remains permanently
etched onto the Memex's file system. Five years after this initial research, a return to the
material on elastics might send our Memexer off to the bow-and-arrows article, or deliver up
his long-forgotten notes. That accumulated record of past trails means that the device grows
smarter--or at least more associative--the more you use it.
The Memex was designed to organize information in the most intuitive way possible, based
not on file cabinets or superhighways but on our usual habits of thinking--following leads,
making connections, building trails of thought. Bush wanted the Memex to respond to the
user's worldview; the trails would wind their way through documents in varied, idiosyncratic
ways, threading through the information space at the user's discretion. No two trails would be
exactly alike. The Web has realized much of Bush's vision, but the core insight--the need for a
trail-building device--remains unfulfilled. The Web should be a way of seeing new
relationships, connecting things that might have otherwise been kept separate. Clicking on
other people's links may be less passive than channel-surfing, but until users can create their
own threads of associations, there will be few honest-to-god trail blazers on the net.
