http://www.geocities. com/Heartland/Prairie/ 9179/walter.htm

The explosive growth of the World Wide Web in the last few years has resulted from its opening to commercial advertisement and sales (most notably of sex products) and mass media broadcast-style content. Scholars, scientists, and educators, whose messages were the original business of the Web, often see this expansion as schlockification, vulgarization, and exploitation of the new medium. In any case, the Web now provides a wide and comprehensive, though scarcely deep, image of the occupations and entertainments of late capitalist societies, mostly Western. To surf is no longer a highbrow activity: all brows can play.

The purpose of this site is not to lament or inveigh against this revolting development (in Daffy Duck's words) but to display and celebrate the counter formations of satire on the Web. The web is a natural place for satire to flourish,

• because it so easily reproduces miniatures, samples, clips, of everything else,
• because hypertext is a made-to-order device for juxtaposition, incongruity with effects ranging from wittiness to monstrosity,
• because it offers myriads of adolescent males digital tools and distribution for their parodies, send-ups, mustaches on Great Art, bullshit-busting truth telling and other transgressions,
• because it is an international platform for the declaration of post-Gutenburg/ pomotheorypraxis avantpop interventions.

A good bit of Web satire is on the order of the cheap shot, the one-line zinger, and the perverted logo (as for example this and others at www.hotweird.com). These are not organized into sustained parodies and they tend to be shots at very well-established targets. And even the better web satire is a menippean farrago of voices, sounds, images, logos, and links in diverse directions. In short, we most likely will not see another Gulliver's Travels online.

Web satire does however have resources not available to Swift and has developed out of 20th-century graphic art as well as literature. The strongest influence is that of the brief but quintessentially modern/postmodern Dada movement, along with Surrealism, Lettrism, and Situationalism that sustained many of its tenets and techniques. Among these are four:

• bricolage: the making of Dada art out of common materials and things intended for other uses. Marcel Duchamps' exhibiting of a urinal as sculpture is proverbial, as well as some of his other "ready-mades" including the bicycle-stool herein depicted, and an iron coatrack. Others included bits of junk, newspaper clippings, and so on.
• collage and photomontage: organizing a composition into one representational space smacked of bourgeoise realism; Dadaists preferred the juxtapositions and overlays of collage, evoking an incoherent multiplicity of signs;
• text-in-image: rejecting the separation of pure art from text and message, Dadists mixed them, and happily embraced "conceptualism" (a work could be "about something")
• the body repulsive: Dada aimed to shock and disturb; the physical body appears as diseased, grotesque, cadaverous, its nakedness unbeautiful, its sexuality preposterous.

The acute reader will have noted that the first three of the characteristics might be descriptions of the Web; in that sense, the Web is Dada all over again.

The last trait is by no means special to Dada--it is a regular trait of satiric graphic art (e.g. Hogarth, the Brueghels, Bosch) and of satire from the time of the Romans on. In short Dada was militantly "anti-art" and a good current Dada site is www.anti-art.com. Pursuing its logic to the end, Dadaists would have no use for the notion of "work" itself--with its connotations of a place in an archive of officially approved objects of aesthetic value--and one development of Dada was into performance art.

*"rapid refresh" uses a META HTTP-EQUIV= "refresh" with 0,1, or a few seconds delay before loading the next page. The pages are linked in unstoppable sequence, but not with href and the reader is not offered a choice.

dadanetcircus.org is actually a group of kindred spirits in Houston Texas joined for the purpose of doing performance art. The general manager is Jimmy McGary, a science guy but also a digital artist who has been mounting stories and other webby things on the Web for four years. He used to refer to his collection of sequences as netsam and calls them "web rides." His most recent (not too recent--1996) suite of rides all all links from a screen called Click Me, and contains four sequences with some cross linking, but distinct themes and linear sequencing in each ride. The site is strongly satiric and its targets are the treatments in the mass media of

• the female body ("Fit"),
• video porn in many styles ("Rocco"),
• and the strange lure and obsessive involvement of the Web ("Dada") and ("Tantalus").

"Dada" subjects the question of web-obsession to the probing of network journalism and talk shows; "Tantalus" traces the pact of Faustus with Mephisto for a free 24 hours of online service and differs from the others in that the voice/language parodied is not a bundle of massmedia gabble but Faust, Part I.

"Dada" invokes the mode of network TV and uses a number of timed HTTP-EQUIV "refreshes" to change the screen automatically and to play some sounds. This returns control to the author in the manner of TV. He also uses "rapid refresh"* to deliver a "poem" of short lines completing the frame "I am __". (Compare a similar rapid fire (5 seconds/screen) of lines in Grammatron). The text is interactive, or pseudo-interactive, however, as it consists of questions posed over and over to the viewer as to "why you do what you do when you do the net thing." And follows that with a series of "8 signs of addiction" to snorting information over the Net ("Has the use of information ever interfered with our job?" etc.)

The basic structure of the four rides is that of the hub-and-rim, aka a Table of Contents with "next" links from each page to the next and "spoke" links from the hub to each individual page. Thus the subpages are quite strongly sequenced, but the hub allows one to enter the sequence from the side, or at various points in midstream, thus shortening the path (and missing the earlier parts of the “ride.”) The map at the left shows one such hub and wheel ("Fitness Channel"--"fit" is the hub); it is relatively short (with 14 local nodes) and has only 24 edges (almost entire wheel and spoke links) and no external links.

The "Tantalus" ride is very similar, but it lacks a hub--it is a strictly linear retelling of the Faust story--and hence almost all of its 17 edges are used to connect its 15 nodes.(See Popup Graph)

"Rocco" and "Dada Net Circus" are considerably larger and are hub-and-wheel; Rocco has 49 nodes plus 10 external links and is the longest ride; DNC has only 20 nodes, but another 210 external links (170 of them off one page in tiny print). Not surprisingly, DNC might be subtitled "Mass Media meet the Net."

There is some cross-linking between the "rides" in their middles, especially via the "italian" page of Irmgard's Grammar Gopher so that a webby sort of sliding into another ride sequence is possible, but on the whole the experiences offered the reader are fairly tightly enclosed and ordered. All the rides are joined at the central double hubs of full-notext and me represented in the diagrams with diamonds.

On the limitations of structure and the virtues of irregularity, see Mark Bernstein's Hypertext Gardens: Delightful Vistas

Jakob Nielsen strongly supports labelling of links via a tooltip balloon as an aid to navagation; now if the major browsers would! Alternatively, you could use a little icon like as the source anchor of every link.

With this set of rides, we come to a point where link topology fails to account for differences. Although three of the four rides are organized as hub-and-wheel, they have very different effects, mainly because of what the hub page reveals or conceals.

These three hubs range from a menu with numbered sequential items to a 3x3 matrix to an odd sort of non-evident wheel. The first two "TOC's" give pretty clear signals as to how to browse the ride in order, but the third does not, does not make it clear how many subparts there are, and does not place them in linear clockwise or counterclockwise order. So this site ranges in the way it structures and enables browsing, from a ride with virtually no choices and no external options to one which makes wandering almost inevitable (and offers by far the most links away from the site). So we can answer the riddle "when is a table of contents not a table of contents?" with "when it is in no obvious way a table."

HTML style guides often treat ease of navigation as the sine qua non of hypertext sites, and such ease is valuable not only for purposes of finding and retrieving information, but even more broadly just to be able to get back again some point/page. HTML shows its double ancestry here: if it is on one hand the successor to "info" and "help" documentation in technical communication and library science, so too is it a successor to Dungeons and Dragons, and the experience of wandering can be valued quite as much as the efficient, directed search (or tightly plotted narrative). In "Clickme", only DadaNetCircus encourages wandering, which, as it turns out leads only to a succession of more or less one line answers to the question "Why do you do what you do when you do the net thing?"

A second point where topology tells us little is that of the character of the link--the basis, that is, of the association of target item to source. Here too the link may be perspicuously or enigmatically labelled (and the "label" may be an image or a piece of text, sometimes both). On one extreme, the reader can make a fairly well-informed choice about whether to click and what to expect; on other, the reader is turning over rocks to see what lies beneath--guess, surprise, the witty linking: these are the order of the day here. It isn't a question whether people will click or not click--overwhelmingly we know that people click on links--but the degree to which expectation is aroused and either satisfied or otherwise played with. I am not claiming that links are always or inherently enigmatic, and these leaps into the unknown are generally low risk--the worst thing likely to happen is getting stuck in a slow load from Hong Kong.

There's nothing new here with hypertext, one can imagine someone saying; we learn to cope with uncertainties and expections first of all with footnotes and cross references in print--there too we have to decide with little to go on whether to break the stream of our reading to go to the other text. Footnotes (or end notes), though, are marginalized for a reason: the information in footnotes is subordinated to the main line of the text. One can, and does, read and simply ignore the footnotes. But the hyper link is so much of the essence of Web that ignoring the links would usually be a narrow and limited (and brief!) experience. Some links are like rabbit hole Alice fell into or the wardrobe to Narnia, and one would not say that of most footnotes! One could label links--with Cascading Style Sheets, one could even color code them for importance or relevance. It is not clear that uncertainty surrounding links is a problem requiring a technical solution, or even a problem, much of the time.