Hypertext can be thought of, generically, as information/objects/files arranged in a generally hierarchically nested fashion that is connected by a structure of links. These links may be thought of, only somewhat metaphorically, as road ways. For exampl e, there are (1) main highways vs. back roads; (2) two-way streets vs. one way streets; and (3) (multiple) forks in the road vs. dead end streets. Using ideas borrowed from network analysis, we can evaluate the density of a hypertext network, specify agg regate level properties describing the nature of its connectivity (e.g., centralized vs. decentralized networks), and distinguish between open networks and closed networks (with the latter ones that constrain movement to be within some previously delimited space of information/ objects). Also, individual links in hypertext can be evaluated in terms of the extent to which they serve as bridges across different data segments (cf. Granowetter's notion of the strength of weak ties).1 The glue that binds together many of the ideas in Calise and Lowi, "Hyperpolitics: Hypertext, Concepts and Theory Making," is their view of hypertext as an organizing tool to provide/impose structure on a set/space of concepts. But theirs is a radically different view of the properties of hypertext than what is offered by the literary left -- indeed I find the C&L view much closer to the educational establishment's older notion of hypertext as the ideal tool for programmed learning, to be implemented i n computer form as CAI (computer-aided instruction).

For C&L, the Internet is an enemy to wisdom because it fragments knowledge and lacks a viable authority structure that would allow the user to separate wheat from chaff. They note that "unlimited and unguided access to massive amounts of resources is equi valent to hardly any access at all. An excess of freedom can be a one-way ticket to chaos."2 They plan to use hypertext to impose a structure on (political science) knowledge to guide students and their fellow scholars. C&L see hypertext as a way of leading students through an analytically determined set of linkages that will direct students to make the connections that the authors see as most important among previously identified key political science concepts. While there are numerous multiple routi ngs in their set of hypertext connections, it is not serendipitous connections which are to be celebrated, but rather the value of the authors' own overarching organizational scheme linking concepts that their carefully planned hypertext structure of links instantiates.

The very features of Internet linkages among a humongous and constantly growing set of sites that worry C&L are some of the features that are most admired by the literary left. The literary left looks to the Internet and hypertext to provide an open (or at least constantly expanding) system of knowledge acquisition that is left (with the possible exception of a perceived need to excise sites that express demeaning views toward historically subordinated groupings) unregulated by society. Moreover, ideally i t is to be a two-way system in which the viewer of any site/source is as privileged (or certainly almost as privileged) as the author in terms of adding information to the site.

With little loss of accuracy (and a large gain in fun), we may speak of the literary left as arguing for: (1) democratizing the communication process,3 (2) pluralizing the available perspectives, and. perhaps most importantly, (3) contextualizing knowledge, so that it is to be viewed only as knowledge "from the perspective of some particular source" -- a process of what we might call alternativization, intended to make legitimate (4) dethroning the dominance of the author with respect to both authorship and authority (note the similarity of these two terms) and thus subverting the hegemony of both text/textbook. In addition, the literary left has seen hypertext as fostering (5) liberating the mind from the confines of linearity (especially linear narrative), and (6) expanding the sensorium from the confines of black and white text by creating text/pictures/sound expositions/performances/arguments.

It would appear that, while the literary left views hypertext as a counter-hegemonic tool, C&L, to the contrary, see it as a tool that can be used to aid the forces of wisdom/authority/non-arbitrary order. Or to put in a more flattering light, C&L seek to use hypertext to build knowledge; the literary left seeks to use hypertext to deconstruct knowledge. However, it is also important to recognize an important similarity between the views of C&L and those I've been ascribing to that amorphous (but still quite real) entity, the literary left. Both C&L and the literary left ascribe great importance to hypert ext -- albeit for different reasons!

In contrast, my own view is that hypertext documents (or, more generally, a WEB browser) are simply often somewhat faster and sometimes easier to use mechanisms for looking up information than consulting the printed version of an encyclopedia (with cro ss-references) or physically going to a library and trying to find relevant sources in its printed materials. Putting a child (or even an undergraduate) alone in the middle of the best library in the world is no way to assure that s/he will receive a first-rate education. In like manner, providing Internet access is no royal road to wisdom; and any hypertext document, like any printed textbook, is no better than the efforts put into it and the competence of the people who wrote it allows. While I do not share the debunking notion that the Internet is trivial or irrelevant,4 most of what has been written about it (or about hypertext) is best characterized as just plain hype.5

For example, when C&M write that hypertext makes connections with "a width of scope and clarity of intent that a mind is unlikely to obtain," they are quite confused about what hypertext can and cannot do. It is a mind (or, in this case, two minds) that created specific hypertext links, and just as computer programmers say GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), for hypertext, we might say both GIGO and MIMO (mind in, mind out), since any hypertext document bears the imprint of its creator(s). Similarly, when they suggest that hypertext can identify, with the least amount of arbitrariness, the key concepts of a field, that assertion can best be characterized as nonsense. There are many ways to identify key concepts of a field, e.g., current frequency of use i n professional publications (perhaps restricting ourselves to major journals), selection as a bibliographic entry in dictionaries or encyclopedias within the field, longevity of use, degree of interconnectedness with other important concepts, use by/association with seminal figures, etc. Scholars make choices about criteria for determining the importance of concepts, and there are invariably multiple and non-concordant criteria from which to choose. The notion that hypertext will somehow "do it for you" is absurd.

As a former member of the Board of the Society for Orwellian Studies, I am, in principle, highly sympathetic to the notion that choice of words matters, and that we may need to engage in rectification of names if we wish to think clearly. I also think tha t the notion of looking for connections among concepts is a very sensible one. But, for my taste, although I recognize that one must begin somewhere, the particular way in which this is done by C&L (a) rests too heavily on using dichotomies (e.g., it lea ves no easy place for the famous trichotomies: {party in the legislature, party in the electorate and party as organization} or {rule by the one, rule by the few, rule by the many}); (b) rests too heavily on particular pairs of oppositions used to determi ne the structure of links from some central concept. While these choices of dichotomies (paired oppositions) make sense to the authors, they were less than transparent to me in reading them and are unlikely, in my view, to be accepted by other scholars wi thout a lot of debate(even given further clarification)-- for example, how exactly do we understand the (possible) relationhips between, say, market and class , or elections and corporate actors; (c) uses as its central terms concepts some of which cannot readily be converted to variables (because they cannot readily be conceptualized as being found lying along some continuum, or, even if dichotomies, they may lack a clear antonym -- for example, for some purposes the opposite of public may be non-governmental,while for other purposes the opposite terms may be private, private and non-governmental are not synonymous with one another).

I would like to encourage C&L to go off in a somewhat different (although closely related) direction, by emphasizing links that allow the tracing of a concept's intellectual history. I see this as a way in which the linkage structure of hypertext can be invaluable. I regard Hannah Pitkin's book Representation, which provides both intellectual history and an analytic interpretation of that term (in the Wittgensteinian sense of a family of resemblances) as a great book, one of the most important works ever written on representation, even though Pitkin does not discuss representation from a directly empirical perspective. No computer can substitute for Hannah Pitkin! Nonetheless, on-line full text data bases of classic and contemporary political writings can help the next Hannah Pitkin to do an even better job of bibliographic search, because the meaning of concepts may be more readily studied in terms of the full context in which they are embedded and their changing patterns of use.

FOOOTNOTES

1. Computer operating systems offer analogues to hypertext's linkage structure in html. For example, places that can be reached directly from, say, a root directory in WINDOWS, can be thought of as on a main road, and WINDOWS allows multiple routings by creating shortcuts (while on the MAC this is done by creating aliases).

2. I might say that, by and large, I agree with them about this.

3. Indeed, the political left sees the WEB (like the Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolutionary period) as an organizing tool.

4. Indeed, well before the WEB was an in-thing I taught a large (now required) course on "Computer-Based Research Methods for the Social Sciences" that introduced students to bibliographic and other search tools and to the use of the hypertext program, HY PERCARD. More recently, in this course, HYPERCARD has been replaced with html and my students are taught how to create their own home page with links to other material of interest to them. (In addition to teaching about bibliographic and WEB searches, this one quarter course for freshmen also introduces students to techniques that will help them use the computer to write better research papers (such as use of the outlining tool), spreadsheet use for data analysis and graphics, and to an elementary stat istics package (as >precursor to a year-long also required course on statistics.)

5. Most use of Internet appear to be rather prosaic: e.g., allowing easy access to pictures of contestants in Korean bathing beauty contests, minimizing telephone charges, selling used cars, and locating Bed and Breakfasts in Nova Scotia.

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Updated: 20 November 1998