“You can’t tell me I’m wrong…
…only that you don’t believe.” -The Unknown
The Unknown is a hyptertext novel that Dr. Bill Wolff has assigned to his Writing for Electronic Communities class, which by this time I am sure you are aware that I am enrolled in this course.
The hypertext novel is fascinating. Generally, I struggle accepting left-of-center writing styles, like Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I wonder why? Maybe I’m linear.
Could I be a linear thinker? A left-brained, non-creative, generic, ordinary, passive, linear reader??
The vote is in after reading The Unknown and it looks like I’m not as linear as I had feared. I think the problem was that certain mediums lend themselves more easily to certain styles. For example, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid is a trade book, printed with black ink on white paper; the medium is linear but the style is associative. Hence the struggle.
Another example: George P. Landow’s Hypertext 3.0 is another linear medium, but the style is also linear, hence no struggle. The reading can flow.
My final example: The Unknown is published in an associative medium (hypertext) and the style is also associative. What this means is that when the writer wrote The Unknown, he (they?) wrote small pieces that could stand alone but that better associate with their sister pieces.
One problem that Landow sees with hyperlinking is if the link brings a reader to an unanticipated result. Above, I linked “Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid” and although you didn’t know where the link was going to bring you–a review, a sales site, an academic paper–you expected it would bring you to something relating to the novel. And it did. But had I linked you to something else, you would have gotten confused and distracted.
Why? Because my blog is a linear medium (one-to-one linking) written in a linear style, and if I had thrown an associative link at you, it wouldn’t have served a purpose unless my purpose is to confuse you. Sometimes that works, but it is not my goal.
Moral of the story: Hypertext is brilliant.
