New thinking, old thinking: December 09, 1996 issue of New Thinking

December 09, 1996 New Thinking:
New thinking, old thinking

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December 09, 1996

New thinking, old thinking

By Gerry McGovern

Nothing can go forward without reaching back.

William Carleton was a master of hypertext. He had the way with words, with stories, with how the mind travels many paths to reach what needs reaching. He would not have considered himself as a hypertext master, because spinning his words as he did in the early-to-mid Nineteenth Century, terms such as hypertext did not exist.

I read ‘Ned McKeown’ from his “Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry” and I’m half-way down the first page when he mentions “the famous Beal Dearg.*” There’s a star beside it, yes. Near the bottom of the page is a line and underneath that line is the star’s twin. And from there we are ‘linked’ into a long description of what made Beal Dearg so famous.

And so Carleton’s stories weave a journey rather than a plot, bring me to a sense of place, leave me with a taste of how things were, allow me to imagine that I am sitting at a fire, listening.

Multimedia and hypertext are in many ways like a return visit to the oral tradition. And it is in the bridge between the oral and linear tradition where we can find many useful lessons with regard to how to use these ‘new’ tools to their maximum potential.

If you examine the works of oral-based story tellers such as William Carleton you will see an ancient tradition making its first tentative steps onto the page. If you read closely you will see the art of the oral tradition laid out on bare pages of linear text.

It doesn’t really work, of course, because the oral story tellers were dealing with a medium in which they could not show off their strengths, in which they didn’t really belong. As the years passed, and the printing press hummed, these story tellers either adapted their technique or else faded into folk memory.

It’s about time we stopped adapting to our tools.

Like a farmer’s hand grew a leather feel from using the spade, so too our minds have grown a linear feel from reading books. Too often we have invented a tool only to be forced to adapt to it.

For a while, people forgot that cities are supposed to be for people too and not just for cars, that buildings are for living in and not some high-rise monolith to modern architecture, that governments and bureaucracies are for helping people and not some monument to order and filing.

The oral tradition reflects how our mind works in its natural state; a sea of ideas, an ocean of spreading-out possibilities, a vast water of links and unlinks, a place where to think is to set free waves of electricity that ripple in unexpected places.

The book thought us how to think linear. It unquestionably served a purpose as it brought us the many gifts of straight logic.

But the mind is a multi-place. And we are at the edges of a true return to this multi-place. Sure, some of our steps are faltering, like the oralist faltered when faced with that line, but I think the future is rich like the mind is rich with possibilities.

Gerry McGovern

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The oral tradition reflects how our mind works in its natural state.