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Assignment 1

‘As our notions of the nature of text change, so must our means of composing it’ (George P. Landow, Hypermedia and Literary Studies, p.102). What is the challenge presented to the modern author by electronic text, and specifically hypertext?

Landow and Delaney established that ‘so long as text was married to the physical media (i.e.print) readers and writers took for granted three critical attributes- that text was linear, bounded and fixed’[1]. Since the advent of Gutenberg and the printing press, writing has provided an unchanging record of language, preserved in meaning and specific form. However, this acceptance of text as the original words of the author, quoted as authority and prescribed for study, is shattered by electronic text which as Bolter suggests , ‘offers us a new kind of book and new ways to read and write’[2]

Initially there does not seem to be a great change from earlier formats. The starting point of words printed within a page contained within a computer rather than a book is not so different. The words suggest abstract ideas or are a description of something we recognise. Traditional reading is still possible. ‘The difference is that traditional reading is shadowed or doubled up by a new kind of reading in which the computer helps define the paths to follow. The words in an electronic text suggest their own reference, because they are contained within topical units that relate to topical units in a variety of ways. The topics themselves are signs, complex signs that may consist of one paragraph, or a whole chapter of prose. Each topical sign is defined not by the words it contains, but also by it’s relation to other topics.’[3]

Hypertext is a term originated by Theodore H Nelson , who along with Douglas Engelbart realised that electronic documentation could revolutionise “the word” through interconnectivity; the creation of webs of inter-related information.[4] ‘Translation of print into electronic form permits us to relate to the text in radically different ways.[5] Nelson realised that no longer would authors need to write for the average reader- hypertext allowed a number of readings of the same information with varying degrees of detail and difficulty offered by the author.‘ In place of a closed and unitary structure, (writers)must learn to conceive of their text as a structure of possible structures’.[6]

The hypertext author or group of authors will link information together to create a path through related material, annotate texts, create notes, point to existing bibliography or a body of referred texts so that readers can browse in an orderly but sequential manner. The writer loses certain basic controls . Of necessity the text must be broken down into manageable ‘bites’ in order that the reader can follow the links without becoming disorientated, or ‘lost in hyperspace’[7] These elements take on their own identity and become more self-contained because they don’t depend on what went before or what came after. In any hypertext, readers move back and forth between reading the verbal text and the verbal structure. When they are reading the verbal text they may temporarily forget about the hypertextual structure and concentrate on the voice in the text. When they are moving about in the structure, readers are brought back to the hypertext as a network of elements. A good hypertext is constructed so that movement between these two kinds of reading is almost effortless. The oscillation between looking through and looking can become so rapid that the two experiences merge’.[8] Good hypertext is always inherently dynamic. Authors may follow the example of the Editor of the Oxford edition of Ulysses, aware that Joyce had utterly flummoxed many readers because Ulysses ’looked like a novel, but it also looked like a drama, catechism or poetry or music depending on which page one happened to open’, he set out to write an introduction ‘ in the hope of... opening enough doors that the reader will want to walk through’.[9] Precisely the challenge of hypertext.

Above all, electronic writing is both material and immaterial- it is invisible in form. We cannot pre-judge the content only experience it. Electronic text offers the reader no visible clue as to the beginning and end of the piece, it ‘invites exploration as part of a vast network of writings, pointing the reader both to itself and to other books. Electronic writing therefore breaks down the familiar distinction between the book and such larger forms as the encyclopaedia and the library’.[10] Landow points out that ‘hypertext does not permit a tyrannical, univocal voice...as readers move through a web or network of texts, they continually shift...the focus...of their investigation and experience.[11]’ It is a medium ‘that better accommodates to the way the mind works’.[12] Derrida points out that ‘the development of the practical methods of information retrieval, extends the possibilities of the ’message’ vastly’.[13] This has enormous implications for us all in terms of politics, education and of course advertising, the author must ensure he or she is responsible in this new role.

All texts in all technologies of writing are bound together by an ‘ infinite number of implicit references, echoes or phrases’ but only the computer allows both the author and the reader to trace such echoes.[14] In addition to enhanced searching possibilities this ability has led to a further form of electronic writing found in hyperfiction. Korolenko describes this as ‘text that is on-line and that any number of people can become involved with, either as participants, readers or writers’.[15] In this form electronic text takes the reader back to a time of impermanence of text and offers further possibilities within that impermanence, rather than making the text impermanent per se. There is no longer a permanence of version, but neither is there a restriction of length, style, shape nor size of text according to print convention. The author’s uniqueness is threatened because unlike the hand-written trace, the computer depersonalises the text. It removes all traces of individuality and identity from the writing.[16] Readers will be judging content according to new criteria. As Bolter is quick to point out, ’Multiple reading inevitably passes into multiple writing’.[17] It is a matter of record that ‘the computer encourages writers to revise text, it encourages reversibility and insertion of text.’[18] Rather than feel threatened by it, authors must embrace this possibility of revision.

Not all agree. In ‘Dissimulations’, Max Whitby argues that ‘successful communication involves a great deal of craftsmanship and authorship and point of view and storytelling and narrative’ he argues that ‘by giving the audience control...you give them precisely what they don’t want’.[19] This argument is developed further by Shetterly who believes that ‘ the point of art is to experience the artists vision’.[20] How readily they imagine the author to lose control! The writer has new opportunities, ‘even with the simplest matching technique and the tracking of previously visited episodes, the author can create a fictional space of great flexibility. Readers may be allowed to examine a story in chronological order, or in a complicated sequence of flashbacks. They may follow a character through the story and then return to follow another. A reader might be asked to play a role...to influence events’.[21] The hypertext writer is a detective- it is his or her job to plan for multiple outcomes and try to second guess the route any reader might take.In Hypertext-Theory into practice, Cliff McNight, John Richardson and Andrew Dillon conclude that ’while it is common place to argue for a user centered approach to design, we should remember that the initial user of a hypertext system is the author not the reader’[22]. The design enables the author to keep control whilst anticipating all possible directions of readership in any given document.

It is clear that ‘creativity remains with the author, who might put any number of restrictions on the reading order. The extent of the reader’s freedom in examining the literary space depends on the links that the author creates between episodes’ .[23] Electronic text is not necessarily random. The balance of the relationship between the reader and writer has changed, but the author has not been superseded by the reader’s demands for the text- precisely what characterises this New Age of Information are the new partnerships between authors and the new relationship between authors, or ‘content creators’ and their readers or ‘users’. With good navigational tools, the writer can encourage a better reader - a reader with a more questioning approach to what is being read.

This new technology ‘demands a sense of possibilities, a willingness to adapt...skills to an evocative new medium...that is the heart of digital literacy’.[24] Whereas traditional media offers content, this new media requires the reader to build content from the huge resources it puts at (their) disposal’.[25] Paul Fisher, writing in the Telegraph argues that ‘the organisation of what resides in computers encourages people to dip into text’, but ‘what is new is not so much the branching of hypertext as that computers don’t invite...reading of anything right through’.[26] Whilst it is of course possible to read a text in its entirity, it is not demanded.

Jerome Bruner in his book ‘Actual minds, Possible Worlds’ advocates a new breed of developmental theory. The concern is ‘how to create in the young an appreciation of the fact that many worlds are possible, that meaning and reality are created not discovered. [27]If we accept the premise that ‘all texts wander in meaning’,[28] how should the author proceed?

Landow’s ‘nineteen rules’ [29]stress purposeful and significant orientation and navigation of text and above all, the linking of text in a stimulating way to ‘encourage habits of relational thinking in the reader’ without violating the original text. Successful interpretation of the text must come from the design of the electronic text. In this new relationship the writer will help the reader read efficiently with pleasure rather than distraction. All routes through the text will be indicated, but none insisted upon.

Jim Mc Clellan maintains that people who have grown up with computers relate to text in a different way. ‘On screen text is different to the printed word. It’s more fluid, less fixed. You don’t just read it- you scan it, cruise it, re-work it’.[30] Further, the relationship between Art and Text is being transformed. Kaplan and Moulthrop suggest that ‘the idea of composition will expand from the proper ordering of words to the interweaving of visual, aural and textural meanings’.[31]Others such as Gunter Kress, a professor at the Institute of Education identify a threat to text in that ‘our world has become more visual, what is learned and taught is being presented as pictures’[32]Just as early films offered either film or text in alternating sequences, and Derrida perceived cinema to be ‘a rival to print’[33], it is wrongly perceived that that elements in hypermedia are competing for space rather than complementing each other within it. Ulmer points out that it is a ‘trace that provides the linguistic collage or montage’[34].

Frieling believes that hybrid forms of text and image have been at the core of artistic movements during the twentieth century ‘ preparing the ground for the pleasure of multimedia text and the flourishing of text in space, what might be called textscapes.[35]. His examples include Cubists who used printed words in their paintings as did Surrealists and the Pop-Art movement. Is this the future that Richard Lanham sees in which digital technology will produce multimedia in which ‘word, image and sound will be inextricably intertwined in a dynamic and continually shifting mixture.’[36]?Not everyone is convinced. Thomas Furness suggests that the written word will, for a time be de-emphasised, but there will be a re-emphasis.’ Frieling points to ‘painted, formed, lit or projected words in an art context which are perceived as being concrete and abstract at the same time- cognitively rather than intuitively understood ’[37].

If we accept that the relationship between reader and writer has become more intimate, then the author has become the enabler. He or she makes the text accessible. In electronic text the reader can join the text in a variety of different places and therefore must be properly invited in whatever or wherever that entry point might be. Once there, the reader must be told where he is, what else surrounds him and the route out. A writer will have to consider the text from all points of view and all points in time. We accept that the text can be linear, but it is not necessarily so and there may be a number of versions of the same text. An author must learn to be acknowledged for the first version of a text at a fixed time, rather than for the entirety of a text for all time.

The copyright issue is one of the most difficult to reconcile. Richard Lanham points out that ’electronic information seems to resist ownership...we will have to create a new marketplace based on a new conception of intellectual property and copyright protection and make sure that the constitutional guarantees of free speech made good in the print world prevail here too. Such re-adjustment will not come easily’.[38] Even if authors accede to the notion of generous global interaction and exchange of information, will there be any value to this new form?

Trevelyan warned of a ‘vast population able to read, but unable to distinguish what is worth reading’ [39]and Stoll gloomily predicts ‘ a library without value’.[40] Writers must ensure that critical literary standards are maintained - the author as a visionary, will have to absorb many disciplines of the traditional print editor, and as Dan Franklin rightly concludes ‘Whilst editors may not know best, they usually know better than anyone else’.[41]The challenge to authors is in part technical, but moreover I believe it is a philosophical challenge , a change of emphasis which effects readers and writers equally and demands examination of content ‘with a mind honed on rationality and scepticism.’ Indeed ‘if this (network) truly is a revolution in the way we communicate, then it should stand up to severest scrutiny’[42]

Yuri Rubinsky sums up the challenge thus :‘ new skills are required, but data persists and also opinion both informed and not. Together they create information. Information persists if it is accessible...it must have it’s entry points and tunnels and one must recognise its shape and not be overwhelmed by it’ . More importantly he continues, ‘Imagination persists..in this case (I mean) both imaginations : the imagination of the creator/supplier/presenter of information- the imagination to select wisely, to present eloquently, to charge appropriately. And the imagination of the reader/user/ seeker to ask the right questions, to appreciate the best possible answers and to imagine requirements that push the supplier to meet one halfway’.[43]

In conclusion,as writing changes , so does our expectation of it. We look to hypertext to enliven, to ‘map’ routes through text, to point to available additional sources and references, to search the text itself and most of all to be more than the sum of it’s parts. This is the ‘added value’. Additionally as Frank Catalano suggests ’ Interactive multimedia might force other types of writing (or media) to become more focused on what they do well, but it won’t supplant them.[44] Electronic writing isn’t better, it’s just different and as we adapt to the new possibilities it offers so it will evolve and change and there will be a further difficulties for the author.The success of authors is dependent on their ability to work creatively in many different dimensions, to know their audience and to work collaboratively with them.

In ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’ Jorge Luis Borges’s character Ts’u Pen ‘abandoned all to make a book and a labyrinth’[45]. It was assumed that these tasks were different - not one and the same. The current challenge to authors is to write a book and to construct a maze, but above all thy should keep in mind Mark Posner’s theory that ‘precisely what characterises advanced societies in the C20th is the emergence of new language experiences that are electronically mediated, fitting easily into the parameters of neither speech nor writing’[46]

Not withstanding the above, if Frieling is right, the real challenge to the modern author will be that ‘in the future, writing a text will become a visual operation in a much broader sense.’[47]

Bibliography

[ 1] Landow G., Delaney P. Hypermedia and Literary Studies MIT Press 1991

[ 2] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[ 3] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[ 4] Nelson T.H. ‘Getting it out of our system ’ in Informatic retrieval:A Critical Review Schechter G., [ed]. Thompson Books Washington DC 1967.

[ 5] Landow G. , Delaney P. The Digital Word MIT Press 1993

[ 6] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[ 7] Berk E. , Devlin J. [ed] Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook Intertext Publications.

[ 8] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[ 9] Johnson J. [ed.] James Joyce Ulysses OUP 1993

[10] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991
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[11] Landow G. Hypertext-Convergence of Contemporary and Critical Theory John Hopkins University Press 1992

[12] Landow G. Hypertext-Convergence of Contemporary and Critical Theory John Hopkins University Press 1992

[13] Landow G . Hypertext-Convergence of Contemporary and Critical Theory John Hopkins University Press 1992

[14] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[15] Korolenko M . Writing for Multimedia Wadsworth Publishing Company 1997

[16] Posner M. The Mode of Information Polity Press 1990

[17] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[18] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[19] Cameron A . Dissimulations http://www.wmin.ac.uk/media/VD/Dissimulations.html 10/1/97

[20] Korolenko M. Writing for Multimedia Wadsworth Publishing Company 1997
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[21] Bolter J. Writing Space Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc New Jersey 1991

[22] McAleese R. [ed.] Hypertext into Practice Intellect Books 1993

[23] Bolter J. Writing Space The University of Chicago Press 1993

[24] Gilster P. Digital Literacy Wiley 1997

[25] Gilster P. Digital Literacy Wiley 1997

[26] Fisher P. Daily Telegraph Death of a book exaggerated 28/10/97

[27] Gay G. Mazur J. ‘Navigating in Hypermedia’ in Berk E. ,Devlin J. Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook
NY Intertext Pub.1991

[28] Bolter J. Writing Space The University of Chicago Press 1993

[29] Delaney P., Landow G . Hypermedia and Literary Studies MIT Press1994
The rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some rules for authors.81-102
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[30] McClellan J. Observer Newspaper http://www.gold.net/oneday/jim/column/30.html 10/16/97

[31] Landow G., Delaney P. The Digital Word MIT Press 1993
[32] Fisher P Daily Telegraph Death of a book exaggerated 28/10/97
[33] Landow G. Hypertext-Convergence of Contemporary and Critical Theory John Hopkins University Press 1992
[34] Landow G. Hypertext-Convergence of Contemporary and Critical Theory John Hopkins University Press 1992

[35] Frieling R. Hot Spots- Text in Motion and the Textscape of Electronic Media in Leeson Hershman L.
Clicking In hot links to a digital culture Bay Press Seattle 1996

[36] Lanham R . The Electronic Word University of Chicago Press 1993

[37] Frieling R. Hot Spots- Text in Motion and the Textscape of Electronic Media in Leeson Hershman L.
Clicking In hot links to a digital culture Bay Press Seattle 1996

[38] Lanham R. The Electronic Word The University of Chicago Press 1993

[39] Dyson E. , Homolka W. Culture First Cassell
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[40] Stoll C Silicon Snake Oil Macmillan 1995

[41] Owen P Publishing Now Peter Owen 1996 (Rev)

[42] Gilster P Digital Literacy Wiley 1997

[43] Rubinsky Y Electronic Texts the Day After Tomorrow in Okerson A [Ed] Scholarly Publishing on the Electronic Networks The New Generation Assoc of Research Libraries Washington 1993

[44] Korolenko M Writing for Multimedia Wadsworth Publishing Company 1997

[45] Borge JL The Garden of Forking Paths in Ficciones Everyman 1993

[46] Poster M The Mode of Information Polity Press 1990

[47] Frieling R Hot Spots- Text in Motion and the Textscape of Electronic Media in Leeson Hershman L
Clicking In-hot links to a digital culture Bay Press, Seattle 1996.
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