Week 6 Readings

For all that, the book that
changes every time you read it, responding to your moods, your
whims, your latest fetish is, perhaps tellingly, a fantasy that has never been explored in print

with that said, this reading talks about how print and hypertext are different in a sense that for hypertet the outcome is variable because it allows the reader and the author to interact whereas in print, it is ‘set in stone’ which actually reminds me of the book examples adrian uses in our symposiums, print media is bound up by it’s fixity, the changelessness of its text. but hypertext allows choices as it is liquid.

Hypertext is a  network of texts and links, that is the form of technology, which in part two of the reading Douglas, J. Yellowlees mentions

Even a hypertext action as brief
as Joyce’s “Twelve Blue,” with ninety-six segments of text bound by 269 links, contains multiple sequences that feed into other strands,crisscross them, loop endlessly, or arrive at points of closure, with no single reading exhausting the branching and combinatory possibilities of the text.

Unlike print narratives, where each chapter builds upon the preceding one and leads to a single, determinate conclusion, the narrative strands in hypertexts can lead to numerous points of closure without satisfying the reader. Or the reader can be satisfied without reaching any point of closure at all.

it seems to me that hypertext allows users to have a choice and that it is the new and improved book that allows the viewer to decide on the ending that they want. However, i feel that books should not have a ambiguous ending where the reader decides, it’s like a open conversation that never ends because of the back and forth interaction, it’s just a little… mind boggling that we as human do not want closure.