New Media Presentation Series

Diane Greco

“Hypertext: A Girl's Guide to Getting Over It”

April 5, 2000

With the advent of the World Wide Web, the ubiquity of the word hypertext has made it almost completely meaningless. Diane Greco offers some observations, derived from her experiences as both a writer and editor, about the efflorescence of new media forms that has made hypertext an empty and perhaps even obsolete term; she will also consider how possible it still may be to talk coherently about hypertext as a medium and/or a movement within (largely academic) writing communities. As well, she will present and discuss her new work, "Simple Harmonic Motion, Or Josephine Baker in the Time Capsule," begun as a short story and since transformed into a web-based hypermedia document.

About Diane Greco

Diane Greco is both an author and editor. Her best-known hypertext work is the highly regarded Cyborg: Engineering the Body Electric, a digital fusion of cyberpunk criticism and feminist analysis, which has been praised by N. Katherine Hayles as a "truly a cyborg text . . . completely interwoven with the  electronic prostheses through which we encounter it." Greco holds a Ph. D. in the History and Social Study of Science and Technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently Editor of Acquisitions at Eastgate Systems, the premier electronic publisher in the United States.