“a Something overtakes the Mind”

The allusions to Star Trek in the above paragraph seem more than appropriate in this context. Gene Rodenberry, the show’s creator and guiding light, envisioned a computer-driven world that offered limitless possibilities across time and space. Rodenberry’s vision foreshadowed the limitless world of the Internet and New Media. A particular incident in the Star Trek chronicle may well serve to illustrate this point. In the film, Star Trek IV, The Voyage Home, the crew of the Enterprise find themselves in 20th century San Francisco desperately trying to save a doomed whale. Along the way, Scotty, the intrepid engineer, has to solve a problem using – of all things – an ancient Macintosh computer. With an instinctive sense of computer hypertextuality, he manages to re-program the Macintosh and decipher a digital code needed to save civilization, as we know it. This brief episode in a mostly forgotten Star Trek film offers insight into the meaning and significance of New Media in the digital age. Across time and space, Scotty was able to access new information on a then ancient computer-driven device to solve a real-time problem of critical proportions. He did, in this film, what, many are trying to do now – i.e. derive new solutions and new conclusions from New Media. Scotty’s success mirrors the successes of some – though not all - in the digital age.

As a case in point, one might well examine "The Difference Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities. This web site seems to come close to Rodenberry’s vision of an instinctual, hyper-textual universe that somehow overtakes the mind to provide an almost limitless view of an historical problem. Centered on the question of “how slavery divided American society and culture in the years before the Civil War,” it provides a myriad of links, maps, and images to inform and enrich current discourse on the era of the Civil War. The site is multi-faceted and interactive. One may enter at any point and emerge at a far distant destination, using both intuition and prior-knowledge to arrive at an unforeseen destination. This, it seems to me, is the true strength of hyper-media and what distinguishes New Media from traditional print media. This web site, while made up of individual linear narratives, is itself non-linear and surprisingly non-narrative. The user may well search and define a unique parameter of questions, sources, and narratives to arrive at a conclusion unique to his or her own methods. That said, “The Difference Slavery Made” has its own embedded bias – i.e. that the differences between the North and South were less significant than commonly thought and that the theory of “modernization” deserves re-examination. Such bias is workable in this case as the web-authors are up-front in telling their own bias and motivations. If one accounts for this, “The Difference Slavery Made” can become a valuable and unique New Media resource for understanding and interpreting the Civil War era.

A less successful attempt at New Media and the interpretation of history may be found at "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" by Louise Krasniewicz and Michael Blitz. This essay, featured in the American Quarterly, an on-line publication of the Center for History and New Media, appears to be far less than the sum of its parts. Proclaiming that “the sheer magnitude of disparate data about our subject requires a nonlinear and flexible approach to the presentation of arguments and ideas,” the authors then proceed to give a more or less linear approach to the question of Schwarzenegger and his appeal as a public icon. Yes, there are hyper-links. Yes, there are little pop-up windows that one may click on. Yet, at the end of the day, this is not all that different from traditional book-referenced scholarship with its footnotes and bibliographies. One enters the story at the beginning and emerges somewhere near the end as though in a pre-modern book or encyclopedia. (The one real attempt at New Media – the “Virtual Bedroom” link – was not working and could not be evaluated for this review.) This is not altogether evil. There is much to admire in "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" and much to be learned from this essay into Terminatorville. But is this what New Media is all about? Probably not. Hasta la vista, baby.

That said, the real questions posed by both of these web sites are questions of argument and interpretation. This question has been addressed by Randall Bass - "can you make an argument in hypertext? Can you create something that moves forward toward an overarching idea (or set of ideas) in an environment that intrinsically lends itself to digression, juxtaposition, dissolution, interconnection, and supplantation? If you can make an argument what would it look like? Surely it would not--and need not--look like an argument in print."

Bass concludes that essays such as "Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" represent a “promising beginning” by changing the relationship between argument and artifact. He defends “Dreaming Arnold Schwarzenegger" as an essay where “all parts conspire to create not an argument but an environment for the reader to construct his or her own reflexive meaning.” Indeed, in the their introduction to “Dreaming” Krasniwiecz and Blitz warn the reader that only the essay must be "read wrong" if it is to be read right. “It is simply (or not) an effort to show you how to see things differently."

Ideally. this is what historians are all about – getting people to see things differently. But historians are also about making arguments and defending them against all comers. To a greater or lesser degree, web essays such as “Dreaming” appear to be side-stepping this question if not avoiding it all together.

Randall Bass asks a very important – perhaps crucial question. Can one make an argument in hypertext and what would it look like? The answer may be a very tentative yes to the first question. As for the second question, we will have to wait and see.