A Book Lover Longs for Cyberdrama
by Janet H. Murray
The Introduction to Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
The MIT Press ‑ Cambridge, Massachusetts, Second printing, 1999
Reprint. Originally published: New York: Free Press, 1997.
Pages 1-10

 All media as extensions of ourselves serve to provide new transforming vision and awareness.

—Marshall McLuhan

Our various improvements not only mark a diminution of the function improved upon ... but they also work to dissolve some of the fundamental authority of the human itself. We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion ... of the species itself.

—Sven Birkerts

The birth of a new medium of communication is both exhilarating and frightening. Any industrial technology that dramatically extends our capabilities also makes us uneasy by challenging our concept of humanity itself (Are people meant to move across the ocean like the fish? Are people's words supposed to be transmitted by dead paper or cold wires?) The boat, car, and airplane are seemingly magical extensions of our arms and legs; the telephone extends our voices; and the book extends our memory. The computer of the 1990s, with its ability to transport us to virtual places, to connect us with people at the other end of the earth, and to retrieve vast quantities of information, combines aspects of all of these. And as if that were not amazing enough, it also runs our warplanes and plays a masterly game of chess. It is not surprising, then, that half of the people I know seem to look upon the computer as an omnipotent, playful genie while the other half see it as Frankenstein's monster. To me—a teacher of humanities for the past twenty‑five years in the world‑class electronic toy shop of MIT, a Victorian scholar, and an educational software designer—the computer looks more each day like the movie camera of the 1890s: a truly revolutionary invention humankind is just on the verge of putting to use as a spellbinding storyteller.

It is somewhat surprising to me to find myself on the optimistic side of this pervasive new cultural divide. When I first trained as a systems programmer, as an IBM employee in the late 1960s, I was only biding my time and saving up money for graduate school in English literature. I found the clean logic of computer programming satisfying, and I enjoyed deciphering the mysterious 0's and 1's of a "core dump" to reveal what the machine was up to when a program crashed (as they so often did). But there seemed no deeper purpose in this work than there had been in the intriguing geometry proofs I had enjoyed in high school and then promptly forgotten. For me at the age of twenty, the only activity worthy of serious human effort was reading novels.

Only once during my time at IBM did I catch a glimpse of a more inspired use of the computer. Although we did not use the terms at that time, the corporate world was clearly divided into "suits" and "hackers." The suits were running the company (better than they would in later years), but the hackers were running the secret playground within the company, the world of the machines. Computer systems in those days were mammoth arrays of cumbersome appliances kept isolated in ice‑cold rooms. The tape drives alone (the equivalent of today's floppy disks) were the size of refrigerators. The noisiest component was the card reader, which jangled and thumped like a subway train full of bowling balls as it processed stacks of the punch cards that were the main form of human‑to ‑computer communication in that era. Dealing with this machine was an unpleasant daily necessity. But one day the icy, clamorous cardprinter room was turned into a whimsical cabaret: a clever young hacker had created a set of punch cards that worked like a player piano roll and caused the card reader to chug out a recognizable version of the Marine Corps Hymn: bam‑bam‑THUMP bam‑THUMP bam‑THUMP THUMP-THUMP All day long, programmers sneaked away from their work to hear this thunderously awful but mesmerizing concert. The data it was processing was of course meaningless, but the song was a work of true virtuosity.

When programming was fun, it was a lot like that performance. Creating a successful machine code program made me feel as if I had communicated with some recalcitrant, stupid beast deep inside the refrigerator cabinet and taught it a new little tune. But my real work was waiting for me somewhere else, in the form of a long, thoughtful walk down an endless shelf of books. When I was offered a fellowship for graduate school at Harvard, I did not hesitate to accept it. My IBM manager wanted me to take just a temporary leave of absence. He gave me an article about how computers were being used to study English literature (someone was putting all of War and Peace—to me the pinnacle of human wisdom—into electronic form in order to count the number of words in each of Tolstoy's sentences). The article ended by referring to literature as "man's greatest output." I told my manager to write me up as a permanent resignation.

I began reading my own way down that long shelf of books. I agreed with D. H. Lawrence that the novel was the one "bright book of life," [See endnote 1.] the measure of all things, although I much preferred the work of Jane Austen and the Victorians. My favorite critic was Northrop Frye, who combined detailed analyses of the structure of stories with a profound appreciation of their mythic power. Reading Frye it was possible to believe that the formal beauty of literary art is an expression of its deeper truth. Yet the more I read, the clearer it became that stories did not tell the whole truth about the world. As I researched the lives of women in the Victorian era, I (like others of my generation) was struck by the fact that much of what I was learning had been left out of the great novels of the era. Although my faith in the deeper powers of literature was unshaken, I learned from the feminist movement that some truths about the world are beyond the reach of a particular art form at a particular moment in time. Before the novel could tell the stories of women who did not wind up either happily married or dead, it would have to change in form as well as in content.

For the stories I wanted to hear, I looked in other formats, in feminist magazines and maverick novels. [See endnote 2.] I compiled an anthology documenting the experiences of Victorian women—prostitutes, medical students, circles of women friends—who had not found a place in classic fiction. [See endnote 3.] But the anthology format was as limiting in its way as the marriage plot. Frustrated by the constraint of producing a single book with a single pattern of organization, I filled my collection with multiple cross‑references, encouraging the reader to jump from one topic to another. I simply wanted the reader to understand Mary Taylor's exhilaration in opening a dry goods store in New Zealand in the context of her friendship with Charlotte Bronte as well as in relation to the range of Victorian opinion on women's work. I did not think of this cross‑referencing as hypertext because I had not yet heard the term.

Though I had been teaching at MIT since 1971, I was not drawn to computers again until the early 1980s. While I had been exploring social history and raising my two children, literature and academic feminism itself seemed somehow to have fallen into the hands of the suits. The new theoreticians no longer saw the novel as the "bright book of life" but as an infinite regression of words about words about words. Joining in this conversation involved learning a discourse as arcane as machine code, and even farther from experience. Truth and beauty were nowhere in sight. But at the same time that literary theorists were denouncing meaning as something to be deconstructed into absurdity, theorists of learning methods were embracing meaning as the key to successful pedagogy. One conference paper after another celebrated the fact that students wrote better papers and learned to speak foreign languages with greater fluency when they actually had something they wanted to communicate to one another. [See endnote 4.] The new research in cognition and sociolinguistics seemed to define what those processes of communication entailed. Thinking about teaching was much more satisfying to my earnest Victorian temperament than thinking about literary criticism. And the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if these practical and process‑oriented methodologies could be transported into the world of the computer.

I was at that time the humanities faculty member in the Experimental Study Group (ESG), in which conventional courses were taught in an individualized manner. ESG attracted some of the most creative and self‑directed students at MIT, many of whom were also ingenious computer hackers. They wrote their papers on‑line, explored imaginary dungeons filled with trolls, exchanged wisecracks with computer‑based imaginary characters, and engaged in a perpetual telnet tour of the globe by playfully breaking into other people's computers. They believed the particular programming language they were learning was both the brain's own secret code and a magical method for creating anything on earth out of ordinary English words. [See endnote 5.] They saw themselves as wizards and alchemists, and the computer as a land of enchantment. MIT was paradise for these hackers, who were largely engaged in navigating through an elaborate fictional universe. With such students as my guides, I got myself a network account and renewed my acquaintance with the digital world.

I had left computing in the age of punch cards and came back to it in the age of video display terminals and microcomputers. Nevertheless, educational computing had not advanced very far beyond the days of quantifying Tolstoy's "output." The computer was mostly seen as a drudge, a workhorse for word frequency analysis and for drill and practice teaching. However, to my students and my MIT colleagues, it was clearly something considerably more nimble. Seymour Papert had developed the LOGO programming language that allowed children to learn mathematical concepts by choreographing the actions of magic sprites that raced across the screen. A follower of Piaget, Papert believed that computers are tools for thinking and should be used to create "microworlds" where inquisitive students can learn through a process of exploration and discovery. [See endnote 6.] Nicholas Negroponte's group had created a suite of dazzling demonstration projects (the seed work for the Media Lab) that included a "movie map" of Aspen, Colorado, and a "movie manual" for car repair. [See endnote 7.] The combination of text, video, and navigable space suggested that a computer-based microworld need not be mathematical but could be shaped as a dynamic fictional universe with characters and events.

My interest in creating narrative microworlds coincided with the interests of foreign language teachers in creating immersive learning environments. Together we designed multimedia applications for learning Spanish and French, which motivated students by giving them a role in an unfolding story and allowing them to move through authentically photographed environments as if they were on a visit to Bogotá or Paris. [See endnote 8.] These projects and others that I have worked on in the past fifteen years—including a Shakespeare archive and a film art digital textbook—as well as many kindred efforts pursued by others elsewhere, have confirmed my view of the computer as offering a thrilling extension of human powers. I say this despite the often agonizing uncertainties of software development and the continual frustration over the gap between what designers want the hardware and software to do and what they actually support. [See endnote 9.] For my experience in humanities computing has convinced me that some kinds of knowledge can be better represented in digital formats than they have been in print. The knowledge of a foreign language, for instance, can be better conveyed with examples from multiple speakers in authentic environments than with lists of words on a page. The dramatic power of Hamlet's soliloquies is better illustrated by multiple performance examples in juxtaposition with the text than by the printed version alone. Discussions of film art make more sense when they are grounded by excerpted scenes from the movies being discussed. Computers can present the text, images, and moving pictures valued by humanistic disciplines with a new precision of reference; they can show us all the different ways a French person says "hello" in a single day or all the passages Zeffirelli chose to leave out of his production of Romeo and Juliet. By giving us greater control over different kinds of information, they invite us to tackle more complex tasks and to ask new kinds of questions. Although the computer is often accused of fragmenting information and overwhelming us, I believe this view is a function of its current undomesticated state. The more we cultivate it as a toot for serious inquiry, the more it will offer itself as both an analytical and a synthetic medium.

My experiences in educational computing have also offered me evidence of how frightening the new technologies can be. Several years ago I was invited to talk with the committee that was then overseeing the production of a variorum Shakespeare, a set of editions of individual plays with extensive annotation covering all known textual variants as well as notes on the significant critical commentary on the plays. [See endnote 10.] The variorum format dates back to the nineteenth century and was still an endearingly Victorian endeavor. The pace of production was glacial, with many of the editors collecting their notes in stacks of index cards and filling hundreds of shoe boxes with twenty years' worth of investigation before publishing. The night before my appearance I was invited for a drink in a high‑rise New York hotel room by two of the most computer‑friendly committee members. I had already received an irate note from another member of the committee, and my hosts, an English woman and a Southern man, were anxious to prepare me for the kind of opposition that others might offer. My scrupulously polite colleagues displayed a courtly commitment to moving the variorum into the digital age while avoiding offending anyone. With the naïveté of someone who had spent much of the past twenty years in the company of engineers, I told them that my remarks would be limited to the obvious practicalities of their work. Clearly, the pages of a book were a poor match for the task at hand. Often the text of the play took up only a single line at the top, with the rest of the page covered with endnotes in several numbering schemes, many of which were condensed to cryptic abbreviations that conveyed no information to the uninitiated. Thus, commentary for a line of text often appeared a dozen pages away from the line it referred to. The effort of compiling a variorum edition was clearly heroic, but the arbitrary limitation of the printed page was a disservice to the depth of information and expertise involved. At this point in my preview of the next day's presentation, my genteel hostess started to shake in her chair. "I love the book!" she cried. "If you are coming to talk against the book tomorrow, I will throw you out the window." And though she was considerably smaller than 1, she looked quite prepared to do so.

Why should the prospect of a scholarly CD‑ROM bring a mild-mannered Shakespearean editor to such paroxysms of violence? To my mind it was because she could not separate the activities of research from the particular form they had historically assumed. Her love of books (which I share) momentarily blinded her to the true object of reverence: the creation of a superb reference work. Her reaction was a sign that the new technologies are extending our powers faster than we can assimilate the change. Even when we are already engaged in enterprises that cry out for the help of a computer, many of us still see the machine as a threat rather than an ally. We cling to books as if we believed that coherent human thought is only possible on bound, numbered pages.

I am not among those who are eager for the death of the book, as I hope the present volume demonstrates. Nor do I fear it as an imminent event. The computer is not the enemy of the book. It is the child of print culture, a result of the five centuries of organized, collective inquiry and invention that the printing press made possible. My work as a software developer has made me painfully aware of the primitive nature of the current digital medium and of the difficulty of predicting what it can or cannot do in any given time scheme. Nevertheless, I find myself longing for a computer‑based literary form even more passionately than I have longed for computer‑based educational environments, in part because my heart belongs to the hackers. I am hooked on the charm of making the dumb machines sing.

Since 1992 1 have been teaching a course on how to write electronic fiction. My students include freshmen, writing majors, and Media Lab graduate students. Some of them are virtuoso programmers. Some of them do not program at all. All of them are drawn to the medium because they want to write stories that cannot be told in other ways. These stories cover every range and style, from oral histories to adventure tales, from the exploits of comic book heroes to domestic dramas. The only constant in the course is that every year what is written is even more inventive than what was written the year before. Every year my students arrive in class feeling more at home with electronic environments and are more prepared to elicit something with the tone of a human voice out of the silent circuitry of the machine.

As I watch the yearly growth in ingenuity among my students, I find myself anticipating a new kind of storyteller, one who is half hacker, half bard. The spirit of the hacker is one of the great creative wellsprings of our time, causing the inanimate circuits to sing with ever more individualized and quirky voices; the spirit of the bard is eternal and irreplaceable, telling us what we are doing here and what we mean to one another. I am drawn to imagining a cyberdrama of the future by the same fascination that draws me to the Victorian novel. I see glimmers of a medium that is capacious and broadly expressive, a medium capable of capturing both the hairbreadth movements of individual human consciousness and the colossal crosscurrents of global society. Just as the computer promises to reshape knowledge in ways that sometimes complement and sometimes supersede the work of the book and the lecture hall, so too does it promise to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression, not by replacing the novel or the movie but by continuing their timeless bardic work within another framework.

This book is an effort to imagine what kinds of pleasures such a cyberliterature will bring us and what sorts of stories it might tell. I believe that we are living through a historic transition, as important to literary history as it is to the history of information processing. My sixteen‑year‑old son will no doubt look back upon the moment at which we (finally!) got our home computer hooked up to the World Wide Web with the same delight with which my father recalled plucking voices out of the air with his home‑made crystal radio set. My paternal grandmother, who started life in a Russian shtetl, jumped in terror when she heard that disembodied speech, thinking it must be a dybbuk or ghost. Yet only a few decades later, I sat in my crib, as my mother fondly reports, calmly enraptured by the voice of Arthur Godfrey. Today, my husband collects tapes of old Bob and Ray programs, which we listen to on long car trips, savoring the intimacy of what now seems like a touchingly low‑tech format. Those of us who have spent our lives in love with books may always approach the computer with something of my grandmother's terror before the crystal radio, but our children are already at home with the joystick, mouse, and keyboard. They take the powerful sensory presence and participatory formats of digital media for granted. They are impatient to see what is next. This book is an attempt to imagine a future digital medium, shaped by the hacker's spirit and the enduring power of the imagination and worthy of the rapture our children are bringing to it.

Notes

1. Lawrence, "Why the Novel Matters," (p.105). In D.H. Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism, edited by Anthony Beal. New York: Viking Press, 1966.

2. For instance, I wrote about the works of the feminist Victorian novelist George Meredith and edited reprint editions of The Englishwoman's Review, the Victorian feminist magazine of record, and of Miss Miles, a feminist novel written by Charlotte Bronte's closest friend, Mary Taylor.

Murray, Janet H., ed. Miss Miles (1890), by Mary Taylor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Murray, Janet, and Myra Stark, eds. The Englishwoman's Review of Social and industrial Questions 1866-1910. 41 vols. New York: Garland Publishing, 1980-1984.

3. Murray, Janet H. Strong‑Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth Century England. New York: Pantheon, 1982.

4. I was particularly influenced by the work of Claire Kramsch, who pioneered communicative language learning methods, and Peter Elbow and Linda Flower, both of whom pioneered the teaching of writing as a process‑centered, rather than product‑centered, activity.

5. The programming language was LISP (LISt Processing language), a language designed in the 1950s by John McCarthy for use in artificial intelligence research. The introductory software engineering course at MIT (6.001) uses a dialect of LISP to train students in designing software systems. The instructors have been known to wear wizards' hats and to display yin/yang signs to describe the almost magical interpenetration of data and procedures in LISP. See Abelson, Harold, and Gerald Jay Sussman. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996.

6. LOGO, which is based on LISP, allows children to master procedural thinking and abstract concepts like recursion—the ability of a function to call itself, which LISP allows—in the course of building things. In addition to acquiring mathematical concepts by choreographing on‑screen sprites, children learned principles of geometry by writing computer scripts for a turtle that drew lines as it moved across the floor. In his later work, Papert established a partnership with the Lego company and created systems that let children build and script their own robots. See Papert, Mindstorms, for Papert's early microworld theory and practice, and Turkle, The Second Self (especially pp. 141‑54), for descriptions of children working with LOGO microworlds.

Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas. New York: Basic Books, 1980.

Turkel, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984.

7. Lippman, "Movie‑Maps." ACM SIGGRAPH 14 (1980):3.

8. The Athena Language Learning Project 1983‑96 was funded by the Annenberg/CPB Project, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Apple Computer, and the Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning. It explored three technologies for language learning: natural language processing, speech processing, and interactive video. Natural language processing proved impractical for student use, speech processing proved promising for adult learner pronunciation practice, and interactive video was widely successful with language teachers and learners; see Murray, "Lessons Learned." The most successful product of this effort to date is A la rencontre de Philippe (available on videodisc), which has won numerous awards, including a Gold CINDY and an Educom Special Recognition Award, and was codesigned by Gilberte Furstenberg, Ayshe Farman‑Farmaian, Stuart Malone, and me. It is an interactive narrative with seven possible endings and many possible paths. For a description of No recuerdo, a more complex ALLP narrative currently being redesigned for CD‑ROM, see Morgenstern, Douglas, and Janet Murray. "Tracking the Missing Biologist." Humanities 16, no.5 (1995): 33-38.

Murray, Janet H. "Lessons Learned from the Athena Language Learning Project: Using Natural Language Processing, Graphics, Speech Processing, and Interactive Video for Communication-Based Language Learning." In Intelligent Language Tutors: Balancing Theory and Technology, edited by Melissa Holland and Jonathan Kaplan. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1994.

9. The MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive Project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and directed by Peter Donaldson, Larry Friedlander, and me. It is a successor to Larry Friedlander's Stanford Shakespeare Project of the 1980s, a videodisc project that linked multiple performances of key scenes from the plays with the text. The MIT Shakespeare Electronic Archive Project is linking modern editions, photofacsimiles of early editions, art collections documenting performances, and film performances. For a description of the project, see Donaldson, Peter. "The Shakespeare Interactive Archive: New Directions in Electronic Scholarship on Text and Performance." In Contextual Media, edited by Edward Barrett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995.

The Virtual Screen Room project, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and directed by Henry Jenkins, involves the development of a prototype of a multimedia learning environment that would replace the conventional textbook for introducing students to techniques and critical concepts in the study of film art.

Among the many impressive projects created elsewhere that have confirmed my sense of the usefulness of the medium for teaching things that could not be as well conveyed by other means are:

Crane, Gregory. Perseus 2.0 Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. [This was developed at Harvard and Tufts]

System D: Writing Assistant for French.  Created by James Noblitt. Boston: Heinle and Heinle. Computer software, 1993. [This was developed at Cornell University and at IBM's Institute for Academic Technology, affiliated with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.]

Dickens Web, The.  Created by George Landow. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems. Storyspace hypertext. 1992.

"In Memoriam" Web, The.  Created by George Landow and Jon Lanestedt. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems. Storyspace hypertext, 1992. [This was developed as part of the Hypermedia Project at Brown University.]

10. The variorum Shakespeare is overseen by a committee of the Modern Language Association. The identity of my hosts has been disguised, and this momentary reaction does not reflect the current attitudes of the committee. The anecdote captures the anxiety felt in this and similar circles as electronic publication began to be taken seriously in the early 1990s.