Aporias of _Wilson_: Staging Hypertext

Only a fraction of today's critical discourse on technological innovation manages to avoid the pitfalls of techno-euphoria, and this despite the 'hypermediacy' of the new media. Paradoxically so, since no medium ever functions in isolation. Along Bolter and Grusin's 'remediation'-concept (2000) I argue that every medium is intrinsically a hypermedium on behalf of its reliance on other signifying systems to establish itself by contrast. Even hypertext, with its eminently 'poststructuralist' capacity to offer 'nonlinear' access to information, at heart is processed in 'traditional' linear fashion. Simultaneously with the explosion of 'new media' hybrids, we are witnessing the funnelling of all pre-existing media into a single virtual hypermedium based on hypertext: the Internet. More than a mere software protocol and an unwieldy database, the World Wide Web directly affects the vast majority of new technological applications, with digital coding quickly becoming a lingua franca for McLuhan's 'global village.' The first potential global democracy, the Internet was designed to transcend state regulations, top-down agencies of control, as well as the information oligopolies of multi-medial broadcasting companies. In practice, however, matters are markedly different. As demonstrated here by a critical analysis of Wilson, David Mamet's hypertextual caricature of academic essentialism, not even the internet can claim authentic 'meta-mediality' because hypertext - its root algorithm - is understood by an ever-decreasing amount of people. Eliminating the digital interface, as Wilson so theatrically does, though, simultaneously imposes and ridicules the need to construct strings of associations and frameworks of meaning by means of (hyper)textual word play, visual presentation, and auditory associations. Forcing us to look beyond the hype, it presents us with a less 'automatized,' and therefore all the more constructive perspective.