About The Color of Television

WHAT
IT IS
"The Color of Television" is a collage or collusion of words and images telling several stories, or perhaps one story in particular, in a carefully arranged random sequence.

It is hypertext of a certain low sort. Ted Nelson once memorably insisted that hypertext afford "free AND KNOWING user movement" -- suggesting that works in this line might pose a direct challenge to Western consumerism, this life of linear reductiveness, and among other things, television. Because in hypertext and hypermedia, as Nelson still dreams them, you would know where you're going, instead of bouncing up and down on "divingboards into the darkness," which is Nelson's gloss on most Web pages.

Well, boing-boing, your experience here will be neither free nor knowing, and it may feel more like cliff diving than a casual moonlight swim. Freedom's just another word / For product we must move, as Kristofferson maybe should have said. This hypertext made with pride in U.S.A. Still, there may be some justification even for efforts in the lower mode. As we write, the marvelous year nineteen-ninety-six is drawing toward its end. The World Wide Web as we (briefly) knew it may not last much longer, changed beyond recognition by swelling bandwidth, cable modems, and... WEBTEEVEE.

Meanwhile we're living here at the edge, watching the sky above the port, waiting for the next show. The color of television. It lights up your life. Actually, we never watch. Do not attempt to adjust. Well, hardly ever. You would have been instructed. In the late age of video. A node's as good as a link. Please stand by. To a dead channel. In the coming age of video. Where to tune. Had this been an actual emergency. Free and knowing. Further information. Zick!

HOW DO I WORK THIS?
The text as it now exists is woven from several threads, some of them stories, some of them documents of various kinds. Each thread has its own color.

Threadbare thanks to Jim Rosenberg, John Perry Barlow, Neil Postman, Jean-François Lyotard, "FC," McLuhan pére et fils, and parties to the 1988 Dryden Mini-festo.

The threads are cut up into bits. The bits are connected by links. In the story bits, the links cues are small graphics that look like this, or this, or this, or this. Or sometimes like this. Colors indicate the thread you will take up if you follow the link. Though each documentary thread has its own text color, the graphics pointing to them are always gray. In the documentary threads you will find familiar HTML text links, which may take you either further along the document thread or into one of the storylines.

At the moment, the stories are strongly linear. It is possible to read them from beginning to middle to something that could be an end. "Possible" does not imply "simple," however. Begin where you begin, go where you can go. You are done when it is over for you.

TEXT IN PROGRESS
In hypermedia as in most things there is always more to say, or do, or bring to bear.

"The Color of Television" is a project ongoing. We'll be writing more in a week or two. More links, more stories, more images, animations, and associated Webberei. Watch this space; see it expand. We will also be folding the text back upon itself, building links and contours that celebrate the same, yet different. Paths fork ahead, expect rapid changes in context. If the text right now is decidedly linear, we hope to make it more or less fractal.

We will try to post last-update notices on the entry page, but life is short. Besides, if we do our job right, you'll never be sure you've seen this before...

The project should be permanently undone some time in the spring of 1997.

· · · October, 1996 / sam

THIS

WAY

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