(Hyper)mediations and the rationale of hypertext
- "Hypermediations as a set of socio-technological processes and experiences: When we talk about hypermediations, we are not referring to either a product or a specific media but to the complex network of social production, exchange and consumption processes that take place in an environment characterized by a large number of social actors, media technologies and technological languages. The Greek prefix hyper means not only ‘excess’ or ‘exaggeration’, but also ‘over’, so hypermediation is more than a high number of interconnected media and subjects; the concept includes the political and social conflicts already detected by JMB in the 1980s in his analysis of popular and mass cultures. Like Fidler’s mediamorphosis (1997), the analysis of hypermediations leads us to investigate the emergence of new social, political and cultural configurations beyond those generated by traditional broadcasting media.
- Hypermediations as a theoretical field and a research programme: If we consider that theories are conversations that are expressed in papers, articles, books, classrooms, research laboratories and conferences, in the last two decades hundreds of Latin American researchers have joined the conversation about the ‘new media’ from a perspective more or less inspired by JMB’s contributions. However, hypermediations reconfigure communication research with respect to the mediations in the 1980s, introducing new objects, methodologies and challenges." (added emphasis)
He examines several poets and their works (e.g. Robert Burns’ ballad and Landon’s picture poems) to show the necessity, which indicates the whole idea of HyperText (including HyperEditing and HyperMedia) is not limited to scientific aspect and/or recent times. I particularly like his example of Dickinson, which all of her poetry was produced as handicraft work. It illustrates how the texts alone fail to address the textual medium and the context in general. Also, it shows the possibilities of how handicraft work can be shown/demonstrated better in the relatively new HyperText form than the codex-based form. In my opinion, this HyperMedia also provides the opportunities for different bodies of knowledge/literature to interact with each other, as different works can somehow be linked together. (However, at the same time, thinking through the formal characteristics of "The Rationale of HyperText", such as the font size, layout, codex-based form, or even the reference style (e.g. Endnotes), these may all imply a certain established structure of thinking.)
