What's Different About Cybermedia?

The foundation for cybermedia is being laid today in the same way that Marconi laid the foundation for television when he transmitted the first wireless telegraph signals. Thirty years passed between that transmission and the first demonstration of television, in 1926, and it took a decade more for the first regularly scheduled telecasts to be made.

Although cybermedia should not take forty years to develop, it will be some time before it is available, especially in a mass-market, or public, form. Because it is nearly impossible to reshape a medium and the policies that control it once it has become established, discussion should begin now about what the new medium will be, how it will work, and how it will be used.

The online database can be expected to lead to cybermedia just as the manuscript led to the printed book. The difference between the old and the new is a difference not only of form but also of content, production, and use.

Online databases are specialized in subject area and are often designed to serve the needs of a single academic discipline or industry group. They are expensive to create and to maintain, and gaining access to their content is also expensive, discouraging frequent and heavy usage. They presuppose knowledge of complex commands and are structured so that after the desired information has been located, the person who receives it must treat that information almost exactly like printed media (Pfaffenberger, 1990).

Cybermedia will offer a vast collection of information, stored in electronic form, that will encompass a wide variety of subject areas with a range of difficulty levels in each, encouraging schoolchildren and specialists alike to use it.

• Production will continue to be expensive, but so is production of television programs; a mass audience will make access to cybermedia at least as cheap as a local telephone call.

• Command structures will be self-explanatory and simple.

Most important, cybermedia will break with the print tradition of finite packaged texts:

• It will include sound and images, both still and moving, as well as printed text.

• It will enable the people using it to compare multiple sources side-by-side, linking excerpts from numerous texts and moving among them as easily as television viewers skip among channels.

• A unilinear progression from beginning to end within a single source will be the exception instead of the rule.

• Each person will move through an open field full of pieces of data in the way that best meets his or her immediate individual needs.

Many of these ideas were first expressed by Ted Nelson, who coined the word hypertext in 1965.

It is fitting to characterize cybermedia as a merger or hybrid of the library, the newspaper, and television, implemented on a small computer. The online database, by comparison, is a limited, specialized library with a very versatile automated card catalog. Like all specialized products, the online database assumes a certain expertise of its users that prevents it from becoming a mass medium.

Related ideas at other Web sites:

• "As We May Think," by Vannevar Bush (1945): This was the advent of hypertext theory.
• Xanadu: In the 1960s, Ted Nelson had a vision of hypertext.
• For history buffs: a hypertext timeline.
• The Media History Project: Computing.

Introduction

Wiener

• Nelson, Theodor Holm. Literary Machines 90.1. Sausalito, Calif.: Mindful Press, 1990.

• Pfaffenberger, Bryan. Democratizing Information: Online Databases and the Rise of End-User Searching. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990.