[Overview]
Like many artists, Jean-Paul began exploring the internet and searching
what hyperlinks could offer to expand his writing towards new
directions. He switched from being a print author to being an
hypermedia author, and created Cotres furtifs (Furtive Cutters), a
website telling stories in 3D. He also enjoyed the freedom given by
online self-publishing, and wrote in August 1999: "The internet allows
me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies, publishers
and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize what I have
in my head: the print medium (desktop publishing, in fact) only allows
me to partly do that." He added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like
radiating in all directions (I am interested in something and I click
on all the links on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click
to another, as the links appear). You can do this in the written media,
of course. But the difference is striking. So the internet didn't
change my life, but it did change how I write. You don't write the same
way for a website as you do for a script or a play."
[In Depth (published in 2000)]
I interviewed Murray Suid, a writer of educational books, who was
living in Palo Alto, California. Back in Paris, I interviewed
Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, who wrote some interesting comments
about digital literature.
= Educational Books
In 1998, Murray Suid was living in Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon
Valley. He was writing educational books, books for kids, multimedia
scripts and screenplays. He was among the first to choose a solution
that many authors would soon adopt. He explained in September 1998: "If
a book can be web-extended (living partly in cyberspace), then an
author can easily update and correct it, whereas otherwise the author
would have to wait a long time for the next edition, if indeed a next
edition ever came out. (...) I do not know if I will publish books on
the web -- as opposed to publishing paper books. Probably that will
happen when books become multimedia. (I currently am helping develop
multimedia learning materials, and it is a form of teaching that I like
a lot -- blending text, movies, audio, graphics, and -- when
possible -- interactivity)."
Murray added in August 1999: "In addition to 'web-extending' books, we
are now web-extending our multimedia (CD-ROM) products -- to update and
enrich them." A few months later, he added: "Our company -- EDVantage
Software -- has become an internet company instead of a multimedia
(CD-ROM) company. We deliver educational material online to students
and teachers."
= Hypermedia Writing
In 1999, Jean-Paul, an hypermedia author, was the webmaster of
cotres.net, a site telling stories in 3D. He really enjoyed the freedom
given by online publishing. He wrote in August 1999: "The internet
allows me to do without intermediaries, such as record companies,
publishers and distributors. Most of all, it allows me to crystallize
what I have in my head: the print medium (desktop-publishing, in fact)
only allows me to partly do that. Then the intermediaries will take
over and I will have to look somewhere else, a place where the grass is
greener..."
Jean-Paul added in June 2000: "Surfing the web is like radiating in all
directions (I am interested in something and I click on all the links
on a home page) or like jumping around (from one click to another, as
the links appear). You can do this in the print media, of course. But
the difference is striking. So the internet didn't change my life, but
it did change how I write. You don't write the same way for a website
as you do for a script or a play.
But it wasn't exactly the internet that changed my writing, it was the
first model of the Mac. I discovered it when I was teaching myself
Hypercard. I still remember how astonished I was during my month of
learning about buttons and links and about surfing by association,
objects and images. Being able, by just clicking on part of the screen,
to open piles of cards, with each card offering new buttons and each
button opening onto a new series of them. In short, learning everything
about the web that today seems really routine was a revelation for me.
I hear Steve Jobs and his team had the same kind of shock when they
discovered the forerunner of the Mac in the labs of Rank Xerox.
Since then I have been writing directly on the screen. I use a paper
print-out only occasionally, to help me fix up an article, or to give
somebody who doesn't like screens a rough idea, something immediate. It
is only an approximation, because print forces us into a linear
relationship: the words scroll out page by page most of the time. But
when you have links, you have a different relationship to time and
space in your imagination. And for me, it is a great opportunity to use
this reading/writing interplay, whereas leafing through a book gives
only a suggestion of it -- a vague one because a book is not meant for
that."