Introduction

We are in an age of hypermedia. Communication is often fragmented, and comes to us collaged by its very density and its multiple media including text, sound, image and motion. Individual communication is losing its identity, and our focus is moving from the isolated work to the network. This transformation from text to hypertext is proceeding, as we increasingly rely on symbolic manipulation and recombination to construct economic and cultural life. Understanding fragmented and linked communication is more than an academic matter.

The hypertext of current communication is not the hypertext envisioned by its pioneers, nor is quite like the hypertext of postmodern literary criticism, in which the linearity of text is equated with the power of authorship and the break-up of the linear text is equated with the liberation of the reader. Current hypertext is multimedia, and it includes a range of communications from books to ATM transactions. At the bank, we are not trying to reinterpret ATM's (Automated Teller Machines) to suit ourselves but to figure them out.

Introduction
Intelligibility

Hidden underneath the litcrit discussions lie more subtle and difficult questions of intelligibility. As competent readers, we handle linear texts by taking notes, reordering and analyzing writings for our own needs. In reading current hypertext: web pages or interactive computer games and applications, our tasks also include figuring out what it is that we might take notes on, or reorder and for what purposes we might use it. These problems are often referred to in terms of navigation and orientation (what is it? how can I get around it?).

We are literate readers: accustomed to genres which encode the reader, author and purpose of the communication into their forms; we are accustomed to the outline as our model of intelligible structure in printed texts. That sense of outline enables us to linearly traverse complex structures (we go from I.b.2. directly to II.A.1). To that model, hypertext adds the topical link-node diagram which is offered as an intelligible data structure. Current media add the situated speech of conversation, image, sequence, motion and structures of interaction. These are different and new: there are few genres that provide us with the expectations we need to navigate and orient ourselves..

The Art of Memory, a mnemonic tradition that began in ancient Greece and persisted through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century gives us an account of how people could hold and organize thoughts, making of themselves walking books without using the written word. It may also point toward ways for developing visual and narrative models of intelligibility to apply to new media.

Introduction
Assertions

In this article, we are concerned with five basic points:

1. The notion of hypertext needs to include interactive media in general including multimedia.
2. Intelligibility is the most fundamental problem of all multimedia.
3. The computer age notion of information is a cultural construct that presents both a means and a barrier to understanding hypermedia.
4. The application of postmodern literary theory to hypertext has often involved critical confusions and is misapplied when one steps out of hypertext based literature.
5. The Art of Memory provides us with way to open up questions of intelligibility through structure, visible form, metaphor, and narrative.

Hypertext is as much a term for understanding as it is an objective phenomenon. It is perhaps the best ready-made method for considering the problems of interactive media. The history of hypertext has been shaped by theories and attitudes that are already realized in the work produced. Many characteristics of hypertext are socially constructed; the common understandings make communications intelligible. It is important to work toward constructing those common understandings. When we consider "common understandings," we know that they may not be universally held and are often distinctly not those of leading thinkers. Common understandings are often not explicitly documented; they are vague, inferred and debatable. For example, this article asserts that computer information is commonly understood to be disembodied, scientific and objective. To the contrary, Richard Coyne, in Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age asserts that "Éthe operative philosophy of the computer world is not logical positivism, or even analytical philosophy, but liberal pragmatismÉNeither is the computer world inhuman, driven by a kind of 'techno-rationalism.'"1 The computer world may no longer be considered scientific and authoritarian by its developers, but it once was and it has been popularly thought of that way until very recently. These issues open up a number of questions. Whose beliefs shape media like hypertext? Are outmoded opinions still important? Does the malleability of beliefs make artifacts like hypermedia malleable, or will hypermedia remain fixed in some respects by the body of products produced?

While it is quite beyond this paper to discuss these possibilities, they are relevant questions. Will change be revolutionary, continuous or will the forms remain fixed? We have some historical precedents: cars, bicycles and radio electronics all show the tendency to change in ways that resemble plate tectonics, i.e., to coalesce from a period of fluidity into a fixed form which remains until stresses force a change, which results in another period of general or special quake and confusion, coalescing into another period of fixity. The modern bicycle took shape near 1880, and has changed little since. Broadcast has three major periods: am, fm and television. Cable and digital appear to be the fourth and fifth. We are certainly in a quake zone within communication, and the ability to form the next stage will be a matter of social power, and a matter of establishing a set of concepts adequate to analyze current pressures.

Within this context, it is not possible to be definitive about the proper interpretation of hypertext and its nature, but, again in the words of Richard Coyne, to "open up a space" in which questions and possibilities can be organized and discussed.

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