Misunderstanding of narrative

Fear of incoherent hypertext arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative.

The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.

The misunderstanding of narrative, the naive belief that narrative is linear, is both pervasive and wrong-headed. Let us consider, for a moment, that most seemingly-linear of forms, historical narrative in the tradition of Thucydides, Gibbon, McCauley, Henry Adams, Bury, and Shelby Foote. Moreover, let us focus exclusively on the historian's traditional audience of colleagues, advanced students, and serious adult readers; we will ignore any aspirations to address mass markets, children, distant cultures, the MTV generation, or any of the other peripheral strengths at which hypertext writing is believed to excel.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor


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Incoherent hypertexts

People who aren't very familiar with hypertext writing, but who nonetheless want to impress you with their knowledge, often claim that hypertexts are incoherent, that they lack the structure and rigor of conventional, linear prose. For example, Sven Birkerts writes in his Gutenberg Elegies that

Humanistic knowledge . . . ultimately seeks to fashion a comphrensible narrative. It is, in other words, about the creation and expansion of meaningful contents. Interactive media technologies are, at least in one sense, anti-contextual. They open the field to new widths. . .

The danger should be obvious: The horizon, the limit that have definition to the parts of the narrative, will disappear.

Others simply fear that there is no place for links within a coherent narrative, that hypertext is the exclusive province of technical manuals on the one hand and incoherent postmodernism on the other.

This fear arises from a combination of three factors: superstition, sloth, and a fundamental misunderstanding of narrative. The roles of superstition and sloth are simple. Those who dislike computers (especially those who aren't very familiar with them) fear that their mysterious force will somehow damage the sort of writing they enjoy. Those who don't take the trouble to read much hypertext, similarly, often delude themselves by imagining that their failure is a virtue, that hypertext isn't worth reading because it cannot be worth reading. The sheer improbability of myriad successful artistic forms throughout the eons should make us doubt such ab initio arguments about human expression.


Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts-Enter Jean-Philippe Pastor


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Continents of knowledge

At the heart of the problem of hypertext lie the essential design issues of "filtering" and "navigation."

In its raw state, any system that "links continents of knowledge" would overload its user with choices. An undergraduate encountering Heart of Darkness might want to know something about the geography of the Congo, the history of Conrad's travels in Africa, and the iconography of light and dark in western literature -- but she probably would not want to visit these discursive places before exploring the world of Conrad's narrative.
Hypertext demands a mechanism that affords users flexible, filtered access to information, something that has been described as "broadcatch" (Brand 42-45). Once filtered for relevance, information has to be put before the reader in a way that preserves both the coherence of a present line of thinking and the freedom to explore alternative pathways.

See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
Enter Hypertextual as a member