Anyone who has ever read a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book understands the concept of hypertext fiction, storytelling that is non-linear in its organizational structure. Modern readers can understand the concept of hypertext because they are familiar with hyperlinks, connections from one hypertext file to another (for example, clicking on the hyperlink "View my complete profile" on the right will direct you to the hypertext file that is my Blogger profile).

Hypertext fiction is a remarkable creation for two reasons. First, it unfetters literature from the shackles of linearity and temporality. No longer do books need to be read sequentially from start to finish; authors are able to guide their readers to skip around in space and time. Second (and more significant), writers penned hypertext fiction before engineers invented hypertext.

In July 1945, Vanevar Bush -- the Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (a federal agency during the Second World War) -- published the article "As We May Think" in The Atlantic Monthly. In it, he proposed a proto-hypertext computer system that he called "memex"  (a portmanteau of memory and index), which would create links between two pieces of information. "The process of tying two items together is the important thing," Bush wrote, predicting hyperlinks. "This is the essential feature of the memex." But it wasn't until 1967 that this concept was given life and the Hypertext Editing System (HES) research project was conducted at Brown University.

Twenty-six years before the HES and four years before Bush's article, Argentine poet, critic and writer Jorge Luis Borges published "The Garden of Forking Paths," arguably the first work of hypertext fiction ever published. In this short story, Borges explored the theme of alternate realities and the forking of a narrative in space and time -- "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times," or hypertexts. Borges wanted his work to replicate a labyrinth; readers should be dropped into it at any instance in the story and forced to fumble their way around from point to point within it. (This fumbling around is a similar idea to starting off, for example, on Bob Dylan's Wikipedia page and ending up on that of Oslo, Norway by clicking on various hyperlinks.)

Published in the same year as "Garden," Borges's "An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain" predicted "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels thirty-eight years before their inception. He thought of a book that trifurcated twice backward in time to create nine different stories, providing the following diagram to illustrate his point. The reader had a choice of any of nine different beginnings (x 1-9), any of three events that followed (y 1-3) and ended up at the same conclusion (z).

The internet has made hypertext and hyperlinking such a commonplace idea that it becomes difficult to appreciate Borges's innovations. If he were alive today, perhaps he would abandon print as his medium of choice and migrate to the World Wide Web, where his vision of forking paths can be realized more easily. In fact, here is University College London student Vaios Papanagnou's project to create a hypertext version of Borges's "Garden." You can also check out University of California San Diego student Shannon Chamberlain's hypertext version of Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1961), a literary masterpiece and perhaps the first novel-length work of hypertext fiction ever published.

Earlier today, I went to an event sponsored by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in which he answered twenty questions asked of him by audience members. The popular press prefers to call such a gathering a "town hall meeting," a name I find myself questioning. The City of Philadelphia is not a town by any measure and our University's student union building is no town hall.

The term is, of course, meant to evoke the establishments of local governance whose history in our country can be traced back to the legislative bodies of New England colonies (a tradition that continues in some places across the nation). But it wasn't until the bicentennial of America's independence that the modern political concept of the town hall meeting emerged.

While campaigning in the 1976 presidential election, Jimmy Carter discovered that the town hall meeting was an efficient way to increase his emergent popularity. After the idea developed for a couple of decades, Bill Clinton furthered its prominence by televising his town hall meetings. George W. Bush considered the events to be so crucial that he often made sure his audience contained no dissenters. Why did these presidents consider this relatively recent political phenomenon to be so important?

 Sidney Blumenthal, a journalist and former Clinton aide, credited the rise of the town hall meeting to the "disintermediation" of politics -- that is, the elimination of the intermediary that is the media. Politicians benefit from this disintermediation by growing popular support for their policies and initiatives without having to field (what are usually) tougher questions from trained journalists and without having to address follow-up questions, all the while making themselves appear to be populists who are in touch with common people -- all in a setting that is more of a public relations opportunity than a press conference. The public (supposedly) benefits from having greater direct access to the politician.

These days, all politicians -- from the President to the most minor public official -- seem to be holding their own town hall meetings. But these superficial attempts at conversation add nothing to, and perhaps even detract from, the public discourse. The vitriol that came out of the completely ineffectual town hall meetings on health care this summer prove that point.

If politicians truly want to connect with the public and improve this flawed model of town hall meetings, they need to find a way to revert to the historical beginnings of these gatherings in colonial New England. The reason its town halls proved so successful was because of the diverse participation they promoted and the informed dialogue they supported. Today's town hall meetings would do well to learn from their ideal of truly deliberative democracy.

A few weeks ago, I bought four posters for my dorm room: Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night Over the Rhone, Wassily Kandinsky's Farbstudie Quadrate, Edward Hopper's Nighthawks and (because I couldn't have walls covered with only serious pieces of art) Homer Simpson's Edvard Munch Scream.

These posters are, of course, only reproductions of classics. So although I wouldn't technically be lying if I were to say that I have a Van Gogh hanging above my bed, no one would let me get away with claiming that I do. What is it, then, that separates "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 1888. Paris, Musée d'Orsay" and "Van Gogh, Starry Night Over the Rhone, 2009. Philadelphia, Wilson Room 303"? Aren't they identical images with the same color, composition and value?

In my Cinema Studies class last year, we read a text by German essayist and critic Walter Benjamin titled "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)." Benjamin argued that the reproducibility of art allowed by the innovations of the Second Industrial Revolution degrades the work and results in the loss of its "aura," the awe-inspiring experience of witnessing the piece up close. The cheap "exhibition value" of reproductions displaces the inherent "cult value" of the authentic artwork.

Indeed, it's one thing to look at a photocopied Starry Night stuck to my wall with tape. It's quite another (I assume) to observe the original -- to bask in the magnificence of its Post-Impressionist aura in the Musée d'Orsay.

A century after the end of the Industrial Revolution, we find ourselves in the heyday of the Digital Revolution. Seventy-three years after Benjamin published his essay on reproducibility, I am publishing the first post of my first blog. In these entries, I replicate my thoughts, my ideas and myself -- offer myself for exhibition. This blog is not my first digital reproduction; I've already made copies of myself on Facebook, Twitter, Digg and countless other websites.

As I start this blog, I hope that Benjamin's critique of reproduction limits itself to the twentieth century. I hope the work of art in the age of digital reproduction can find a way to use the piece's exhibition value to augment its cult value. I hope the publication and replication of my thoughts in this blog don't do too much harm to the aura of my real self. And I hope that if you ever meet the real me, your impression won't have suffered terribly from knowing my digital reproductions (just as I hope that looking at a poster print of Nighthawks every day only helps me to appreciate the real work of art that much better if I ever go see it in Chicago).