Hypertext on the Web: The Beginnings and Ends of Web Path-ology

At one time archives were all about dust. For extended periods of time they served as little more than pillars or rudimentary building blocks for spider webs. Such boxes offered a place for us to place information, histories, pictures, and memories. They also served as a seasonal reminder of taxes, of family visits over holidays, spring cleanings, and dreaded household moves. Hidden behind and under more readily accessible wares, such domestic archives are, moreover, often banished to the recesses of our homes, tucked away in spaces that rarely see the light of day. Conversely, as a medium characterized by continuously flickering lights on a screen, the internet introduces distinctly visible and networked perspectives to the study of archives. For example, on the domestic front, many computer literate users routinely upload family pictures onto their homepages on the world wide web. And while we might be inclined to argue that such networking of archives makes their contents fully accessible for all with a computer, modem, and internet service provider, the reality is much more complex, and moreover, restrictive. In this paper, I suggest that the web as earchive, is in fact a highly stratified medium, a hierarchical form of structuring information that over the past few years has increasingly incorporated techniques to push, pull, or otherwise cajole users into following certain paths on the web. The study of mobility, navigation, storage, and retrieval of information archives has until very recently been reduced to overly technical discussions dominated by the field of information and library sciences. In addition, since computer-mediated communication, not remote access to computer programs and data, became the first ‘killer application’of the internet, broader social, cultural and political questions of archival practices were initially marginalized. As a consequence, early research and criticism of the internet tended 1