hyperlinks, tags, and stumbles - progressing in Ada's footnotes/footsteps

"All, and everything is naturally related and interconnected. A volume I could write on this subject."
- Ada Lovelace

Information and its need of organization and structuration, serves as an elusive topic of discussion throughout Sadie Plant's Zeroes + Ones. It appears to be a both a central concept, treated as a static object whose manipulations occur via systems of use but never in it's "nature," and also as an item of shifting value, meaning, and form- the sort of treatment we have seen it take in Catherine Hayles. In fact, it is this exact tension, between the static and the dynamic nature of information, that Plant points out in the work of Ada in translating Louis Meabrea's text on Babbage: "When Ada wrote her footnotes to Menabrea's text, her work was implicitly supposed to be reinforcing these hierarchical divisions between centers and margins, authors and scribes... but her notes made enormous leaps of quantity and quality beyond a text which turned out merely to be providing the occasion for her work" (8). Indeed, in this example, Plant shows how the secondary information can overthrow the primary information of a text. In the process, not only is the ordering of a hierarchy overthrown, but the hierarchy itself is undone. Information, in the example, is not an additive commodity that builds up, but a material whose expansion seems to actually overwhelm any regime structuring it's previous permutations.

One of many questions that emerges here, is how then how (or should) information be structured. Plant posits, almost immediately after demonstrating Ada's subversion of traditional information patterns, that information must be related. In cannot existed as the bounded and separated text and footnotes (which Ada overthrows) but as related texts, engaged in one another, but without hierarchical considerations. This is the hyperlink, the "from here to there" link that follows the lead of footnotes, in pointing from one text to another. "Only by 'criss-crossing the complex topical landscape' can 'the twin goals of highlighting multifacetedness and establishing multiple connections' even begin to be attained. Hypertext makes it possible for 'single (or even small numbers) of connecting threads' to be assembled into a 'woven interconnectedness..." (11).

While the hyperlink seems to be a step past the footnote, it is unclear how far it really progresses Plant's idea of a "woven interconnectedness." Not only does the hyperlink still remain in the world of the one-to-one, the A to B, the expression of a linear teleology, but it also seems to remain embedded in the ideas of separated (bounded) texts, distinct from one another, bridged only in a single note or link. In this way, the hyperlink alone does not seem to fulfill the dreams of Ada and Plant, a structure which will assist rather than close down pathways of connectedness. The world that Plant, at least, hopes for is one in which the "master copies lose their mastery," and in the hyperlinked world, the "central" text is only bolstered by its amount of connections in (which Google privileges as a primary component of page rank) and out. When paths must exist in this way through texts, there is the danger that "All roads lead to Rome."

Something that Plant does not consider is the "tag," the emergence of the metadata culture which enables information to be linked by type (species) rather than teleology. In "tag" culture, there is no progression, no linearity, but rather and in or an out, a reinscription of a the 0/1 binary. If the information is 'in,' then there is no differentiation between the objects, save for other groups designated by tags, to which they belong. Tags, like markers of identity, work by creating categories of inclusion (and thus exclusion). But in that potential, they can often show in what way two informations are related, rather than requiring explicit hypertext links. In this capacity, the tag seems to be an ideal way of working towards depicting Ada's maxim, that "all and everything is related."

Tags, however, are necessarily unable to be related to everything. Like Saussure's semiotic scheme, which required showing that a given is signifier is not everything except what it "is," the tag gains meaning by bounding off information from another piece of information, relating texts with pre-programmed relationships. Here, it seems clear that one flaw in the premise of relating information is that our ideas of relatedness exist in a world in which relation is opposed to "not related" a state/situation for things seen as entirely (or at least categorically) differentiated. So Ada's maxim is a sort of paradox. If all and everything is related, then nothing is not related, which means the whole idea of relation becomes somehow meaningless. Right?

The differentiation of information, across categories of "tags," or through teleologies of hyperlinks, demonstrate the fact that we can still not escape entirely from the paradigm of in/out, here/there, 0/1. But Plant does point at a nuerological phenomena that may be the overturing of those distinctions. She calls them "intuitive leaps, the 'aha-experience' and the sudden 'insight' ... surprising phenomena arising from situation of fluctuations and instability" (168). In other words, the overcoming of relational connections, defined by their associative qualities, to the irrationality of connections beyond relationships, a terrasect through the network if you will, that tests Ada's idea that all information is related by showing that no information is not related. The connection can be made, even if the connection does yet exist, because their is a way to connect all things.

You've seen this in practice before. The genius cannot find a way to solve his/her problem, so he goes out for a beer, a walk, to the movies, for coffee, has sex, etc. And in the process of this unrelated activity, a connection not yet imagined emerges and allows the breakthrough.



This is the experience of being exposed to information rather than persuing it (and in the process controlling it), and it seems to posit (as per Plant's obsession with the hysterical and DID) that only in a fundamental break with pathways of information can true interconnectedness be realized. Or, to answer my own question, the structure that can best show the interconnectedness of information is the only which erases difference and strives to connect the random, the arbitrary.

This is stumble. The digital flaneurship plugin that allows you to take quantum leaps around the internet. While you can control pathways (more like genres) of pages to be directed to, the random 'stumbling' of pages makes these connections thin to almost the point of breaking through to Plant and Ada's idealization of the everything related. In this moment, the perusing of the internet becomes like Plant's "neural nets" which "have less to do with the rigors of orthodox logic than the intuitive leaps and criss-crossing once pathologized as the hysteria of a thinking marked by associations between ideas which are dangerously 'cut off from associative connection the other ideas but can be associated among themselves'" (173-174).