Electronic Ruins: Virtual Landscapes out of History by Dave Youssef begins by outlining the design plan for Paris under Hausmann and brings up the notion of ‘ruin value’ coined by Nazi chief architect, Albert Speer. What do these two have in common? In envisioning the design of their cities and empires, Hausmann and Speer both took into account the eventual demise of humanity and the end of the civilizations they were originally planning for. Similar to how monuments are blocked off from people to climb on, live in, or otherwise, Hausmann wanted the design of his Paris to have the streets free of the poor and homeless as they would be a blight in the face of the greater city. Speer envisioned the Reich to instill the same sense of power and grandeur of the Roman Empire. They considered how their creations would be viewed in the eyes of the future. A future with or without people.
This applies to the world of electronic literature because in the nebulous of the web, material is constantly shifting and changing. The web ten years into the future will be a radically different place that it is now. Webpages, like this one, that aren’t tended to will fall into oblivion and will fade into memory.
As Katherine Hayles states in her essay “Electronic Literature: What is it?”
Over the centuries, print literature has developed mechanisms for its preservation and archiving, including libraries and librarians, conservators, and preservationists. Unfortunately, no such mechanisms exist for electronic literature. The situation is exacerbated by the fluid nature of digital media; whereas books printed on good quality paper can endure for centuries, electronic literature routinely becomes unplayable (and hence unreadable) after a decade or even less
Youssef then takes a look at Stuart Moulthrop’s ‘Reagan’s Library’ and its design as an example of the ever shifting face of the net. Moulthrop’s idea was to create a work of electronic literature composed of hypertext links, where the user will be guided through a virtual narrative in a virtual geography. The user is constantly linked to new frames of reference adding to Moulthrop’s procedural rhetoric. These frames provide an omni-directional vantage point; a panoramic of the other ‘world states’ in the library. Often times, the user will visit a site up to four times before the site becomes stable. The point of all this is to provide a historicist framework where the user recalls coherence throughout their virtual journey in the narrative.
The Matrix. Google Images
As the sites congeal, their previous forms fade away. The site shifts again, but in a historicist framework. Moulthrop wants to bring to attention that the idea of projecting a monument in the future is futile because it will not be maintained with the same vision, intent, or purpose and people will essentially become disconnected. The monument will become meaningless to the dismay of people like Speer and Hausmann.
The content of the net is so expansive that the landscape that is created won’t be able to recall its own history. The inverse relationship of web content and its longevity is akin to a dying sun; growing larger, but fading at the same time. The digital medium is more easily prone to tampering, destruction, and eventual outpacing by new innovations in the medium itself as opposed to printed material (Youssef).
He closes by pointing out that the library being bounded by hypertext link is like the what binds us to the present when we view monuments of old: time. The instantaneous nature of the links in the library effectively filter out crucial pieces of information which as a whole disintegrates the collective meaning as the user forges their own. So as much as we may think we know what we know, we may never know. We can only point and guess.