Untitled - witz cultural

42HYPERTEXT 3.0 used to sell toothpaste in the 1950s and aloe was used to sell hand lotion andother cosmetic products in the 1970s and 1980s, interac-tivehas been used tosell anything to do with computing, and the word certainly played a supportingrole in all the hype that led to the dotcom bust. The first time I heard thetwo terms criticized, I believe, was in 1988, when a speaker at a conference,who was satirizing false claims that computers always give users choices, projecteda slide of a supposed dialogue box. To the question, "Do you want meto erase all your datal" the computer offered two choices: "Yes" and "OK"'18Espen Aarseth, who has particular scorn for inleraclive and interactivity,quite rightly points out that "to declare a system is interactive is to endorse itwith a magic power" (aS). He proposes to replace itby ergotic, "using a termappropriated from physics that derives from the Greek words ergon andhodos,meaning'work' and'path.' In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is requiredto allow the reader to traverse the text. Ifergodic literature is to make senseas a concept, there must also be nonergodic literature, where the effort to traversethe text is trivial, with no extranoematic responsibilities placed on thereader except (for example) eye movement and the periodic or arbitrary turningof pages" \1-2\. Ergodic, which has the particular value of being new andthus far not used in false advertising, has received wide acceptance, particularlyby those who study computer games as cultural forms. Still, Marie-LaureRyans Nanative as Virtual Reality (2001), one of the most important recentbooks on digital culture, retains "interactive," and a glance through the proceedingsof 2003 Melbourne Digital Arts Conference reveals that peopleworking with fi1m and video also prefer the term.leErgodic,whenused as a technical term, has its problems, too, since it's notclear that the reader's "eye movement" and turning pages, which result fromintellectual effort, are in fact trivial-apoint Aarseth himself seems to acceptwhen he emphasizes Barthes's point that readers can skip about a page (78).Ergodic nonetheless appears a useful coinage, and so is the word interactivewhen used, as in Ted Nelson's writings, to indicate that the computer user haspower to intervene in processes while they take place, as opposed to thepower to act in a way that simply produces an effect, such as flipping a switchto turn on a light. The wide misuse of an important term is hardly uncommon.After alI, deconstructionhas been used in academic writing and newspapersto mean everything from "ordinary interpretation" to "demolition"while the term classicalhas rneant everything from a "historical period," to an"aesthetic style," to an "eternal principle found throughout human culture."Before writing these paragraphs I checked the earlier version of Hypefiertand found only four uses of interactive other than in quoted material; this one