The rhetoric of evasion and silence of surveillance: Hypertext origin narratives from Vannevar Bush to Richard Lanham

Current theoretical approaches to electronically-networked hypertext reinforce pre-existing literary theory discourses, which emphasize the liberating aspects of using hypertext. Hypertext theorists continue to perpetuate the myth that electronically-networked hypertexts promote reader evasion and hinder surveillance by building their arguments upon the premise of an oral/textual dichotomy and the teleological argument that our journey between oral and written cultures leads to greater freedom and “evasion” by the viewer. This dissertation uses Foucault's concept of synoptic power and Richard Lanham's “Q question” to reframe and evaluate the way scholars view two hypertext origin stories, Vannevar Bush's “As We May Think” and Theodor Nelson's Literary Machines and to demonstrate that closer examination of different aspects of Bush's essay and Nelson's book can unite the two visions of hypertext—the early vision of hypertext as wild frontier where an undetected user could explore, and the recent vision of the hypertext as a space where user movements can be closely monitored and surveilled.; Vannevar Bush's essay provides a rich case study for explaining many of the rhetorical commonplaces hypertextual theorists depend upon for describing the rise of hypertext. Theodor Nelson's humanistic emphasis of Project Xanadu with the capitalistic and democratic rhetoric of Literary Machines contradicts itself and demonstrates how sidestepping dystopian forebodings strengthens “the rhetoric of evasion.” Finally, Richard Lanham's book of essays The Electronic Word uses a different teleology to obscure electronically-networked hypertext's ambiguous origins. Lanham's affinity for the social progression argumentation helps him promote the idea of personal synoptic power while omitting the historical precedent of electronic hypertext's synoptic power over users. To counter this blind spot, the “Q question” provides a valuable tool to evaluate how people implement electronic hypertext.