Borges and the Internet

Although I have read “The Garden of Forking Paths” several times, but I wasn’t sure how it would work as a hypertext fiction. After reading it in this light, I felt that the story worked as an introduction to digital media on two levels. First, the internal story of Ts’ui Pen’s novel, the fictional labyrinth which branches infinitely over time, is a model for the circularity and infinite variety available through computing and the internet. Secondly, the frame story also happens to describe the context of the birth of computing, which Vannevar Bush is writing out of. It describes a situation of World War II intelligence and codes, of increased communication and global contact. It also shows an increasingly complicated world enshrouded in many layers of intellectual ambiguity. All of these themes are the same ones that contributed to the development of the first computers.
In the New York Times article, the author points to several Borges stories as containing prescient metaphors of Internet technologies. But these stories were originally intended as metaphors for ideas much more metaphysical, spiritual, and epistemological. Conversely, its interesting to think of these Internet technologies, like wikipedia or Google, and how they can be theorized as metaphors for these same ideas, as microcosms and models for human existence and thought.