I have to hand it to Sheldon: last week’s classroom discussion really dovetailed into the reading we were assigned. The article was interesting—for its content, yes, but also for its decidedly hypertextual design. Hypertext fiction—and hypertext documents, in general—is one of my pet research subjects. I just wrote a paper on hypertextuality in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, for example. (No, I don’t know what grade I got on it yet. Maybe hypertext fiction won’t be one of my research interests for very long, if the paper falls on its hypertextual face.)
Usually, when discussing hypertext writing, I like to focus on the form itself and the options that it opens up for the reader. For example, in Absalom, Absalom! (and you’ll forgive me if a crib a bit from what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately), the different strands of narratorial perspective give the reader different—and differing—options: which way does the reader want the story to go? Who do they want to emerge as the hero? The villain? Do they even want to have a hero or a villain? I like the control that hypertext gives the reader. It’s a little scary for a writer, sure, to think that the reader isn’t going to interpret your story the way that you want. However, I think that’s inevitable, hypertext or no hypertext.
Anyway, what this all made me think about was our discussion on Monday, wherein we were talking about the academic bias against text-messaging and other forms of communication embraced by the young whippersnappers these days. If anybody understands the notion of hypertext—without knowing what the word hypertext means, of course—it’s those young whippersnappers. For example, when they choose to send a text message, there is a lot of cultural capital required to 1) write a text message, and 2) know how to interpret the text message when it arrives. They need to know who they’re writing to; they need to know the technological limitations—or abilities—of their cellphone (and the cellphone of the person they’re texting); they need to make sure that the person they’re trying to contact can put all the disparate bits and pieces of words that constitute text message language together into a coherent thought. Putting all these ideas together—all while trying to communicate an actual message—could be considered a kind of hypertextuality.
There’s an interesting point that the article brings up, and that’s that the ancient rhetorical canon of delivery has re-emerged into modern discourse with the addition of today’s technology. The author notes:
Richard Lanham, of course, has argued that with the addition of the digital to the set of media in which we compose, delivery takes on a critical role, and I think that’s so. But much more specifically, what a shift in the means of delivery does is bring invention and arrangement into a new relationship with each other. The writer of the page has fundamentally different opportunities than the creator of a hypertext […]. In other words, you can only invent inside what an arrangement permits—and different media permit different arrangements. By contrast, the creator of a hypertext can create a text that, like the page, moves forward. In addition, however, hypertext composers can create other arrangements, almost as in three rather than two dimensions. You can move horizontally, right branching; you can then left branch. The writer invented in a medium permitting these arrangements is quite different—a difference of kind, not degree. (317)
Technology, then, enables delivery to be raised (although many teachers would probably say lowered) into the realm of hypertext because of all the arrangements that the aforementioned technology makes possible. I think that’s pretty darn nifty, myself. Never really thought of it that way.
Of course, the author hints at the future of writing, as well:
The third source-what Leu calls “envisionments of new literacy potentials within new technologies”—is provocative. Here is what he is referring to: the ability of someone to take a given technology and find a use for it that may be at odds with its design (319).
I’ll just have to think about that one for a while.
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