Reflections

The future of ACM Hypertext - and hypertext as a field of study - seems precarious. Like so many things in our world, hypertext is this beautiful, meaningful thing that requires care to be taken to ensure it doesn’t wilt away. There needs to be a next generation of hypertext researchers, authors, artists, tooling developers, and enthusiasts. INTR/HT seems critical to this idea - show a new generation of people how beautiful this plant is, and teach them to water it.

I thought it was interesting to see the slight crisis of clarity regarding overlapping fields. Some, like the web, are subsets of hypertext that have long since grown out of control, developing their own communities and practices that threaten to narrow hypertext’s focus towards themselves. Others, like the ever relevant Artificial Intelligence field, feel almost like a species introduced to an environment to solve a problem that now may engulf it. There are beneficial uses of AI in hypertext - I am fascinated by SPORE and its pinpoint focus on meaningfully augmenting human creativity, rather than replacing it. Contrast to that, there were some presentations that felt totally out of place, like they were only there because hypertext let them in rather than because they wanted to be share a space with us. Misunderstandings of what creativity is, tools that fail to consider their end user, it feels like there’s a rich debate to be had that I am simply not informed enough to participate in yet.

Attending ACM Hypertext was, truly, meaningful to me. On some internal level I feel a lot clearer about how I want to steer my life, what I want it to look like in a year or two or five or ten or fourty. On the other hand, I have so many more questions to think about. There’s the material, like “where would be a good place to do a Masters?” or “will I be able to afford to go to the Chicago conference in 2025?”, but also some more broad: what kind of future could I envision hypertext having? How can I do my part to guide it to that future? Can I embody what I find enthralling about hypertext in my life - the connections between science, art, and humanities, between the written word and the computer, between disparate and contrasting viewpoints?

The narrative of your life will be made up of lexia, it’s your job to find the links.