LINKS

Eastgate Systems Inc

Interviewer: So why don't you talk a little bit about Eastgate Systems?

Mark Bernstein: Eastgate started in 1982 as a software company that was built around three technological ideas. One was hypertext, one was direct manipulation interfaces and one was literate computing. Of the three, direct manipulation interfaces have become ubiquitous and are now fairly well understood. Literate computing has, unfortunately, not made much progress. And so hypertext is the one was talk most about because it is the one that has changed the most and is most active.

We started building hypertext systems that got built into products. Starting around 1989 we started publishing hypertext. This was for a variety of reasons. One important reason was this was the first period when people had multiple hypertext systems and were thinking seriously about hypertext that many people would read.

At this time the research community was faced with a real methodological challenge. People were still building hypertext systems in the laboratory. They would write sample hypertext for their hypertext systems. And then they would do studies of user behavior by recruiting some of their students to read the hypertext they had written for the study on the hypertext system and whose merits they were examining. This is obviously a methodological problem. But there was no alternative.

And so one reason we started publishing hypertext was so that there would be some common hypertext that people could discuss.

Over the years we discovered, to our delight, that there is an audience for hypertext, especially for hypertext fiction. An area which we were originally somewhat skeptical, but which has turned out to be quite active.

And this audience changes and, in fact, the kinds of rating that we seen have changed enormously over the past decade.

Back in the early hypertext conferences, most people believed that the major obstacles were either technical or political. Either hypertext systems would be very hard to build and very fragile and unless we organized a standard, they would go obsolete instantly. Or that the main problem was building a large enough hypertext system to make it attractive to a wide range of people, the problem with building a docuverse.

Ten years later, the terrain was quite different. In fact, the docuverse happened and not only did you not need to find a way to get the government to pay people to make their information widely accessible, it turned out that people would gladly pay for the privilege of giving their information away.

And so the Web burgeoned faster than anyone would have believed in the old days. Also, while progress in building software systems has been very disappointing, it has turned out that building hypertext systems is easier than it once seemed. And they last a lot longer than we once expected them to last.

So the systems problem, while still an active area of research is not nearly as frightening. What has turned out to be much more complicated than we appreciated in the old days is the problem of hypertext writing.

When we were concerned primarily with file formats and data structures, lots of people (and I, too, was guilty of this) thought that writing would take care of itself. In fact the problems of rhetoric for these odd new digital media, of ways of writing, of ways of talking about the writing and of figuring out how the craft works and how it might be done better, have proven to be much more difficult. Writing is harder than people think.

Interviewer: That is probably an understatement. But in thinking about evolving interactivity, we have to move past stories that are made in the context of confined authorial voice speaking to a listener that stays in the position of listening until the author shuts up, so to speak.

And this idea of interactivity must be where some of the complications exist, re-defining how we have been socialized to think of our roles as tellers or listeners.

Mark Bernstein: We shouldn't overemphasize novelty here. There are other areas of art that have also been exploring new formulations of author and audience. Especially in the past fifty years.

Certainly theater has been very interested in this, and we have seen a host of explorations from the revival of stand-up and improvisational theater, and performance art as distinct from theater. Also the revival of oral storytelling as a venue art. It is something that people go out to a coffee hour, or a bar, or a theater, to see. And similarly there have been revivals of interest in these ideas in music.

But, yes, clearly the dialogue that takes place in an electronic text when the reader is offered choice, opportunity to participate, is something that always establishes a tension. Managing that and taking advantage of it are the essence of the challenge of creating a good hypertext.