The invention of moveable type by Gutenberg in the 15th Century transformed society, allowing for the dispersal of information to the masses.  Publishing became a vital link to the great thinkers of the centuries.  Over 500 years later, Berners-Lee conceived the World Wide Web in order to transfer text-based information among scientists.  Through the Web, publication is now a possibility for all, and a global audience is merely a "click" away.

The potential for the Web to develop as a text-based medium is becoming well known to a select group of writers, who are now able to share, in real time, their creativity, ideals, and opinions.  Sychronous and asynchronous discussions enable thoughts to develop through participatory experiences from a broad based community of authors.

Through this, a new energy has arrived to the medium.  Within the next ten years, I imagine schools to take full advantage of discussions, both synchronous, and asynchronous, in developing collaborative works by students.  Although many schools are now using the web as a tool for teaching and research, I expect a larger trend for furthering online group efforts among students.  In a near synchronous environment, students can critique and contribute to the improvement of each other's writing.  Allowing variety of cultures worldwide to interact may result in a powerful tool for teaching and learning composition, furthering the creative process, while developing a larger understanding and tolerance for different ideologies.

There are a growing number of schools involved in online collaborative writing efforts.  Software is being offered to the public that makes the process easier and allows for easy access and additions to published web sites.  By creating links between writers on the Web, students can learn to discourse with others and take more seriously their contribution to the academic community.
 
 

TIM BERNERS-LEE DIDN'T INVENT HYPERTEXT, BUT HE DID INVENT THE
World Wide Web. In 1989, the mild-mannered Berners-Lee was working at a high-energy physics lab in Switzerland. He had already written a few database programs to store information via random links, but those were only for his personal use. Then the idea came to him-Click!-to create a hypertext structure that would span the globe via the Internet, accessible to anyone with a mouse....

Out of Order: Hypertext's Past, Present, and Future

The Web is only five years old, but the basic concept behind it-hypertext-is not. Hypertext can be defined loosely as an interconnected set of words and images that can be "browsed," instead of simply read in a particular, fixed order. Hypertext can be traced back to examples from the middle ages and to novels starting in the mid-eighteenth century. The World Wide Web is the most fully developed form of hypertext that is widely accessible. As a living, breathing, hypertextual organism, it continues to develop in a typically messy and chaotic fashion.

Technology rarely ends up where people expect it will. For every article, such as Vannevar Bush's pivotal 1945 piece "As We May Think" for The Atlantic Monthly, which foresaw today's desktop computers, there are hundreds of articles describing a future filled with food pills, jet packs, and vacations on the Moon. Bush proposed that we automate access to knowledge, before we drowned in it. In an astounding feat of extrapolation, he predicted microfilm (which would allow a million books to fit on one end of a desk), digital photography, speech recognition systems, and personal computers that could access hypertext databases. He called his hypertext links "associative trails," but the concept was essentially the same as our Web. Bush's article inspired many in the computer field, including Douglas Engelbart. Starting in 1963 at Stanford Research Institute, Engelbart proposed an online hypertext system that linked and cross-referenced all the documents in a workspace shared by users at different physical locations.

Project Xanadu, begun in 1960 by Ted Nelson, was even more ambitious. Its end goal was nothing less than a "docuverse," a document universe where all writing is linked and referenced, and where nothing can be deleted. Once something was published, it would exist in the document universe forever, accreting annotations, links, and revisions. Nelson's lofty goals have yet to be achieved with current technology. He is viewed by some as a trailblazing genius-and by others as a pie-in-the-sky crackpot with a penchant for neologisms.

The desktop publishing and personal computing boom of the early 1980s let the cat out of the bag. Personal hypertext database programs and languages became available for both Macintoshes and IBM-compatibles. Electronic hypertext novels began to appear; by choosing which links to follow, the reader determined the order of the episodes in the overall narrative. Hypertext as a literary form was met with skepticism, but a few authors have gained recognition by exploring the form beyond its "choose your own adventure" beginnings. Hypertext literature is now taken more seriously, and many university English departments offer courses on it.

The inventor of the Web had a purely practical objective: alleviate the information overload he suffered, along with others in the field of high-energy physics. In the early 1980s, London-born physicist/programmer Tim Berners-Lee was working at the CERN European Particle Physics Laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, when he wrote a personal information manager he called "Enquire." It could handle random associations by linking database files. A new version of this program, one that could run on any computer and be used by multiple users on a large network (the Internet), was the obvious next step. It would incorporate codes within the text that would permit both text formatting and hypertext links. In 1989, he floated a proposal for such a system.

He was met with considerable skepticism. After all, maybe he was just another Ted Nelson or Vannevar Bush....

"There were two years of solid pushing, of persuading everyone against solid pressure," recalls Berners-Lee. "They thought it was too complicated, that people would get lost in hypertext, that it [interpreting the formatting tags for display] was too slow." But he eventually won some converts, and work began in the latter part of 1990 using students as staff. Berners-Lee wrote the first Web browser and Web server programs on his NeXT machine (Mosaic, developed by the folks who later formed Netscape, would not exist until 1993). Immediately, reality diverged from his original vision, which assumed that users could add links to the material they were viewing (as Bush envisioned in 1945).

For Berners-Lee, the promise of his "web" was that users would be shielded from the inner workings of hypertext, and that all users were created equal-everyone could act as content providers or editors. "You could make links very easily, in a collaborative environment, and you never saw format codes," Berners-Lee recalls of his vision. "It aimed to be universal, like paper. There would be a continuum of hypertext from personal sites to the president's site and everything in between, a place where people could build a common knowledge space," he says. But this proved impractical, so the system had to be broken into separate "server" software, which stored and allowed access to Web files on Internet computers, and "browser" software to display the files on user's desktops. More and more people have set up their own home pages, but the basic distinction between the Web server and the Web browser is still in place. Links still only work in one direction-if I'm a fan of rock musician Warren Zevon, I can add a link to his official page on my home page. This does not mean that Zevon's page will feature a link to mine, however. The basic power hierarchy of the real world is maintained, which is counter to Berners-Lee's original democratic vision.

By the end of 1990, the Web consisted of one server at the CERN lab in Switzerland, and one file, the CERN phone book. Today, the number of files is approaching 30 million, and there are more than 200,000 servers. Berners-Lee now is married, has two small children, and has little time to surf the Web. "I guess I am proud of it," he says of his creation. "But now I worry about the negative aspects. The Web is the great equalizer since everyone has access to the same information, but you do have to have access to it. If information providers begin relying on it, other sources, such as 800 numbers, may be turned off.

"And I expected to see a more heterogeneous mix on the Web. Instead of carefully edited papers, I expected to see groups and families using hypertext to keep track of what they were doing from day to day," Berners-Lee adds. As the father of the Web, he now seems both perplexed by how his baby has grown, and worried about its future development. It is doubtful that he could have imagined the Pamela Anderson Lee Fan Club home page when he was carving out the initial specs for the Web.

Today, he is the head of the World Wide Web Consortium in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The organization acts as a sort of steering committee for the Web, proposing and maintaining standards in the face of increased pressure from companies seeking to dominate the Web with proprietary standards.

His current wish list for the future of the Web includes: interactivity, so a user can add content to another's files (his original vision); "Seals of approval" to vouch for accuracy, or suitability for children; more automation, with "software agents" that would act as souped-up, personalized versions of today's Web search engines.

However, the future rarely turns out the way it is planned. Today's buzzword is tomorrow's has-been. But hints of where hypertext might yet go -- among future writers, educators, programmers -- abound. After all, in a world where a database program written by a modest scientist in Switzerland evolves into the World Wide Web, anything can happen.

The first "artistically successful" hypertext novel was Michael Joyce's 1989 Afternoon: a story, says
Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems, a hypertext publishing company. Duplicating this artistry on the
Web is hampered by the "stateless" nature of Web transactions. Web servers can't track which
pages you have already seen and the path you have taken. "It turns out it is extremely helpful in
writing any kind of large narrative hypertext to know what the reader has already seen," Bernstein
says. He uses the analogy of the ancient Homeric rhapsody relating the tale of the Trojan War: at
some point Troy has to fall. The audience may be slavering for just such an action scene. But maybe
you just got through with a battle scene, and you don't want to pile intensity on intensity, so it's time
for a boudoir scene with Paris and Helen. While such pacing is commonly employed with on-disk
hypertexts, it is currently out of the question when you're just servicing anonymous hits on the Web,
Bernstein notes.
 
 

The Age of Printing (the illusion of an objective voice)
1455: Gutenberg's Bible using moveable type
    In 1450 Gutenberg formed a partnership with the wealthy burgher, Johann Fust of Mainz, for the purpose of completing his contrivance and of printing the so-called "42-line Bible", a task which was finished in the years 1453-1455 at the Hof zum Humbrecht (today Schustergasse, 18, 20).
http://www.knight.org/advent/cathen/07090a.htm

The Era of Big Iron (allowing coarse projections of human reason)
 1945: Vannevar Bush proposes Memex; ENIAC completed
 1948: Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley create first transistor
 1954: Skinner's behaviorism inspires 'programmed learning' approach
 1957: ARPA formed in response to Sputnik
 1960: "Spacewar" first videogame on PDP-1 at MIT
 1960: Donald Bitzer initiates PLATO computer-based education project
 1962: Nabokov's "Pale Fire" disguises novel as footnotes to a long poem
 1963: Doug Engelbart's "A Conceptual Framework"
 1963: Quillian lays AI groundwork for semantic nets
 1963: ASCII 7-bit standard digitizes alphabet; first 'teletext'
 1964: McLuhan's "Understanding Media" postulates global village
 1965: Ted Nelson coins the term "hypertext"; Englebart invents the mouse
 1966: Cortazar's "Hopscotch" published-- multi-path novel
 1968: Englebart's "Augment/NLS" hypertext sys; Brown's HES (Nelson & van Dam)
 1968: Alan Kay's "DynaBook" cardboard prototype; SCRIPT?

The Network Era (a radically new dimension in human communication)
 1969: ARPANET;  Ritchie & Thompson's UNIX operating system
 1969: FRESS developed at Brown U
 1969: Ernst, Newell & Simon's General Problem Solver
 1971: Intel 4004 microprocessor
 1972: Tomlinson invents email
 1972: ZOG development begins at Carnegie Mellon (distributed hypertext)
 1973: PLATO Notes early groupware; Waterloo Script?
 1974: Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines"
 1974: TCP proposed by Cerf and Kahn
 1974: Minsky reifies the 'frame' as data structure for AI
 1976: Don Woods adds fantasy to Wm Crowther's '72 cave adventure -> 1st IF
 1976: TROFF?; Michael Shrayer writes Electric Pencil for Altair
 ?: Pong

The Micro Era (personalized computing brings a burst of innovation)
 1977: Apple ][ personal computer
 1977: UUCP networked-copy program distributed with Unix
 1978: First BBS created by Ward Christensen and Randy Suess
 1978: MIT's "Aspen Movie Map" hypermedia videodisc
 1979: Truscott & Bellovin's Usenet news; Bartle & Trubshaw first MUD
 ?1979: choose-your-own-adventure books
 1979: WordStar word processing software
 1980: Infocom ports Zork to the Apple
 ?: Atari's PacMan
 1981: Xerox debuts the Star, with mouse and windows
 1981/2/3: Development-- KMS (Knowledge Sys.)/ Guide (U Kent)/ TIES (U Md)
 1981: Nelson's "Literary Machines"- Xanadu, centralized hypertext archive
 1981: French Telecom pioneers nationwide Minitel network
 1982: Netnews distributes 500 msgs/day to 100 sites in <100 newsgroups
 1983: TCP/IP replaces NCP, defines "Internet"
 1983: Randall Trigg's PhD on hypertext "TEXTNET" at U of Maryland
 ?: Doug Adams translates "Hitchhiker's Guide" for Infocom

The WYSIWYG Era (conflicting standards for esthetic computation)
 1984: Apple Macintosh bundled w/WYSIWYG word processor MacWrite
 1984: Gibson coins 'cyberspace' in "Neuromancer"
 1984: Knuth's "Literate Programming", TeX
 1984: Guide implemented commercially by Office Workstations
 1984/5/6: Devel-- NoteCards (Xerox)/ Intermedia (BrownU)/ Writing Env. (UNC)
 1984: Doug Lenat begins Cyc project at MCC (common sense -> logic)
 1984: DNS Domain Name Server, Internet hosts break 1000
 1985: Adobe Postscript; CD-ROMs; Windows 1.0 [Windows Help?]
 1985: The WELL offers Silicon Valley a community BBS
 1985: Janet Walker creates Symbolics "Document Examiner"
 1986: Goldfarb's SGML standard adopted
 1986: NSFnet backbone opens Internet access to all; NNTP speeds netnews

The Hypertext Era (personal hypertext generates excitement)
 1987: Apple bundles HyperCard with every Macintosh
 1987: Hypertext '87 Workshop held in North Carolina
 1987: Conklin's "Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey"
 1987: Internet hosts break 10,000; 1000 news msgs/day in 300 groups
 ?: Wayne Davison adds threading to rn -> "trn"
 1989: Tim Berners-Lee proposes WorldWide Web
 1989: 100,000 Internet hosts; ?4,000 news msgs/day in ?500 newsgroups
 1989: Autodesk funds Xanadu project development (dropped 1992)
 1989: IBM's LinkWay & IRIS Intermedia 3.0 released commercially
 1989: Schneiderman & Kearsley's "Hypertext Hands-On"; Joyce's "Afternoon"
 1990: ECHT (European Conference on Hypertext)
 1990: HTML; Deutsch, Emtage, & Heelan's Archie; Lotus Notes?
 1991: Sony's Data Discman; Franklin's Electronic Bible
 1991: Lindner & McCahill's Gopher; Kahle's WAIS

The WWWeb Era (global hypertext with minimal imposed structure)
 1992: CERN ?releases WWWeb [http?]
 1992: 1,000,000 Internet hosts; 10,000 news msgs/day in ?1000 newsgroups
 1992: Ed Krol's "Whole Internet Guide" is a bestseller
 1992: alt.hypertext newsgroup created
 1993: Int'l Wrkshp on Hypermedia & Hypertext Standards, Amsterdam (April)
 1993: NCSA Mosaic 1.0 for X Windows (June)
 1993: WWW dvlprs conf, Cambridge MA (August); Hypertext Conf, Seattle (Nov)
 1993: "A Hard Day's Night" CD-ROM from Voyager; US White House on WWWeb
 1993: "Myst" by Robyn and Rand Miller, "Doom" by ID released
 1994: WWWeb byte-traffic passes Gopher byte-traffic on NSFnet (March)
 1994: Confs: Geneva, Intl WWW; Vancvr, Ed Multimed; Edinbrgh, Hypermed Tech
 1994: Clark & Andreessen form Mosaic (-> Netscape), release 1st beta

The Netscape Era (NHTML evolution driven largely by user-gee-whiz factor)
 1995: ?10 million Internet hosts; ??250,000 news msgs/day in ?10,000 newsgroups
 ?1995: Lycos WWWeb search engine; Yahoo WWWeb category index
 1995: Comp.infosystems.www.*. reorg creates 18 groups; alt.culture.www
 1995: Netscape IPO goes stratospheric, Wall Street goes nuts for the Net
 1995: Java makes applets net-portable
 1995: DEC's Altavista search engine word-indexes 15 million pages (Dec)
 1996: 24 Hours in Cyberspace documentary project (Feb 8?)
 1996: US telecom bill outlaws indecency on Net, immediate court challenges

The Age of Hype (buzzword-of-the-month usually flops)
1997-1998: push, network computer, Java, portal, community, XML, etc

addendum:  Hudson
The Age of Creatve Exchange
2010:  Authorship takes a new form.  Publishing is done solely on the web, mostly through collaborative efforts.
 
 

"Communication is the process of the construction of meaning in society. The structure, not just the content, of a communication has an impact on the message and the meaning. McLuhan (Neill, 1993) has suggested that media, and particularly technological media, affect the ways in which people communicate. Seeing artifacts as part of language, the way in which objects are used alters the ways in which people communicate. McLuhan views communication as a process of transformation; the use of an object, or medium of communication, is part of the experience. In conjunction with medium, the content, and the viewer a meaning is formed. Grounding in conversation takes place in within the medium of communication used by the conversational participants. Clark and Brennan (1991) suggest that participants tend to use the medium that requires the least effort. They characterize different media as having a number of constraints and costs which affect interaction and communication.

Csikszentmihalyi (1981) explores the socializing effect of artifacts. Objects in a person's environment tend to create a commonality, helping to create, express and communicate personal qualities. Inanimate objects can be considered an "other" in a social situation, playing a role in defining the identity of people who interact within that situation. Objects affect what a person can do, expanding or restricting the person's scope of actions and thoughts. Objects help to create shared meanings; there is a development of a common sense of objects, a community around objects. Objects convey information about the object's owners, surroundings, and context. Artifacts can be used to control and shape the world, and to get in touch with it. This is especially true for technology.

Turkle (1984) argues that technology catalyses change, not only in what we do but in how we think. Computers can be seen as an expressive medium. The computer plays a role in the construction of our physical and psychological world. From the symbolic interactionism perspective, the computer has a place in the interaction and negotiation that creates the world around us. Computers as artifacts have become a part of our culture and society, playing a role in the construction of self, as people come to define themselves as different from the computer. Turkle sees the computer as a kind of Rorschach; it allows the expression of personality, and is both a projective and a constructive medium. The computer acts as a marginal object, not separate from our expression of self, evoking unconscious memories of the zone between self and nonself. As a new expressive medium, the computer is a challenge, a mirror in which to reflect ourselves and with which to create shared meaning in society.

Students learning to construct collaborative writing pages.
"This website was created by three students in Dr. Resta's Computer-Supported
Collaborative Learning class in the fall of 1998. This project was designed to help
learners collaboratively write a research problem statement using asynchronous and
synchronous computer-mediated communication tools, such as TeachNet and
Daedalus. Upon the completion of this activity, students will know not only how to use
Daedalus or TeachNet, but also how to write a good research problem statement."
http://www.tapr.org/~ird/Collab_Writing/
 
 

Authors links for collaborative efforts:
http://www.artsforge.com/wordforge.html
 

There are a number of sites on the history of hypertext, with timelines.  Included in this list is:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/history.html