I'd like to start off by saying my arm's much better! Nothing a weekend of ice and relaxation won't cure.
On to more important matters: hypertext.
One, it took me forever to find to what hypertextuality refers. According to the Bedford it "refers to writing that is nonsequential...represents ideas in a nonlinear way, contrasting hypertext with the authorially-organized linear mode of presentation typically used in other media" (232).
Naturally I had no idea what this meant. I want to argue that even while I'm browsing through pages on the internet (hypertext and whatnot) I still feel it to be "sequential." Ever play the wikipedia game. Think of two completely unrelated topics, then use only (at most) seven wikipedia page links to get from your first topic to your second. That's a linear sequence, but I suppose in terms of reading a novel it's completely different. While reading a novel you go from what scene to the next with each scene in reference to the last. Researching tends to take you everywhere as Landow so describes:
"All hypertext systems permit the individual reader to choose his or her own center of investigation...if they enter the system looking for information about an individual author, they tend to spend most time with lexias devoted to specific texts" (38).
Lexias: "points in space that contain all other points, because from the vantage point each provides one can see everything else.
Apparantly lexias are the zenith of the internet. And here I thought it was Facebook. I've lost my train of thought. ....sequences...lexias....there's no real way for me to prove any sort of point in this argument. I think I'm just babbling, but essentially I don't agree with the whole "nonsequential" nonsense. There doesn't have to be a plot for their to be sequence.
1 comment:
I could just be going crazy, but the non-sequential part of hypertext makes some sense to me. I might be thinking of it wrong here, and if I am I really hope someone calls me out on it before I write a paper on it or something. For now I'm basically thinking of the internet as the best example of hypertext, so I'll just refer to that I guess. The way I think of it is that there's no real start or end of the internet, so there can't really be a sequence set in stone for it. I couldn't tell a group of people to go to website number eighteen and have them all end up on the same site. For the wikipedia game, it's a good example of this non-sequential aspect, for the same reasons you say it proves sequential-ness. Even if two people picked the same two topics, the pages they go to to get from point A to point B could be completely different, depending on each person's ideas.
I have no idea if this makes any sense actually. We'll go ahead and blame it on being tired from work.
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