Hypertext and Informand

The informand is not itself an object but rather a socially distributed, virtual text comprising an unspecifiably dense network of propositions and links. The informand is not an object or an autonomous system but a medium, both in the conventional sense of a communications tool and in McLuhan's specialized sense of prosthesis or extension of human function (1964). Thus a true artificial intelligence would not qualify as an informand, but some kinds of expert systems might: what distinguishes the informand is its lack of objective closure. The informand is not created for independent operation. It does not exist outside the context of its use.

Informands are relevant to hypertext research because certain kinds of hypertext are also species of informand. These would be hypertexts of the type referred to by the Boeing group: distributed, collaborative, and multimodal. Such hypertexts also fall within the purview of Joyce's "constructive" hypertext, which are "versions of what they are becoming, a structure for what does not yet exist" (1988, 11).

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