Hypertext

This originally appeared as part of my Prime Lenses Newsletter. You can sign-up for a weekly update here.

At the weekend I sat with a coffee and a notebook trying to work out what to make the newsletter about this week. 

Regular readers will know that I’ve been inspired by paper notebooks recently. Pens and paper, they feel great to use, never run out of battery and get me away from a screen and other distractions. I don’t subscribe to a minimalist approach to work, if I don’t want to be distracted by a notification or an app it’s probably on me to have the strength of will to not open it but I do think that having a different space to write in is good for the brain/ soul and I spend so much time in front of a computer that it’s nice to embrace the limitations of a pen and paper once in a while. 

As luck would have it when looking for a newsletter through line, I discovered a recent episode of The Vergecast, where David Pierce interviewed the author of a new book about the history of writing on paper which I’m really enjoying. I’m extremely jealous of David, because as a podcast host he can find an excuse to talk to anyone about anything from videogames and gadgets to bullet journals, but here I am having boxed myself in with photography! ;) I have no excuse to get in touch with Roland Allen for the show so instead will have to settle for messaging him on some sort of social media platform to tell him how great I think his work is.

All this instant frictionless communication got me thinking. I love that I live in a time where I can share a link to some form of media almost as easily as I think about doing it. One of my favourite human inventions ever is hypertext. An incredible concept that dates back far further into the past than you might think. Just imagine a world where text is completely static, trapped on printed sheets. Unable to change later. A fixed point in time. Then suddenly there’s hypertext, words can be connected to other words, and back again! 

With an invention like print or hypertext you get humans forming social groups around them and Webrings were invented, a virtuous social media promotion cycle from before the time of social media. If your website was part of a popular photography web ring, ohhh that was it, you were going viral, which in the 90s meant you’d get 10 emails from people who’d found the same typo or dead link on your website. Nothing like the world today where my six year old can come to me and say “I can’t scan the QR code to connect to the servers on Minecraft”. That just happened, literally as I type this. 2024 is a wild place to live, when you think about it.

So all of this led me to the notion that this week I’d send a newsletter that’s just full of links in a glorious celebration of the wonder that is the World Wide Web! I get the feeling that friends at The Verge will be supportive ;)

Two final links then to send us on our way. As mentioned above, The Notebook by Roland Allen goes deep into where the human history of writing on paper comes from, why paper was such a revolution and why as James Bareham said of vinyl, a notebook “feels better”.

And finally, carrying on from my recent recommendation of Last Stop Coney Island, readers in the UK can enjoy Tish now on iPlayer. If you’re outside the UK this is the trailer. It’s a great doc and well worth a watch about a photographer who was uncompromising in her desire to draw attention to her community.