Linearity
The reading this week, ‘Reconfiguring Narrative’, focused on the impact hypertext has had on narrative and ideas of linearity, as well as some potential consequences.
The first thing that jumped out to my was the quote from Michael Joyce, described as one of the first major authors of hypertext fiction: “In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes”.
Joyce describes how hypertext challenges the idea of a linear narrative, one where the author predetermines where the story will go, and how the audience will read this narrative. Hypertext allows readers to navigate their own way through a certain narrative, through links or searches, and this renders the idea of a linear story as troublesome.
The reading claims that hypertext narratives should be measured in terms of a number of axes, formed by degrees or ratios of:
- Reader choice, intervention, and empowerment
- Inclusion of extralinguistic texts
- Complexity of network structure
- Degrees of multiplicity and variation in literary elements, such as plot, characterisation, setting etc
A hypertext narrative that takes full advantage of the potentials of this technology would measure on the high end of most of these aspects, it would allow a high level of reader choice, would include extralinguistic texts and the plot elements would have a high degree of multiplicity.
The reading describes hypertext as challenging aspects of narrative and the literary form that have been current and relevant since the days of Aristotle.
Hypertext allows a story to become “multidimensional and theoretically infinite, with an equally infinite set of possible network linkages, either programmed, fixed, or variable”. The reader can actively contribute to the narrative in these stories, and subsequently become much more than a ‘reader’.
I found it a little strange that we were assigned this reading as it is entirely focused on fictional writing, and we aren’t really emphasising this in our blogs. But I can see how it relates to the course, with these ideas of interactivity and the absence of linearity in writing directly applicable to our blogs.
We can use the spectrum mentioned in the reading to measure our own blogs, in terms of how much choice the reader has in what to look at (range of post etc), whether they are open to comments, how long the posts are and so on.
The idea linearity is also very important for our blogs, as we have no real idea how readers will find our work, or where they will begin. A reader may reach our blog through a google search, or through a link, or any other possibility, and this may not be to the latest post. We have to ensure that our blogs are coherent and readable from any point, and we also can’t control which post the reader will go to next, if any.
As the reading identifies, with hypertext media, the reader decides when the narrative finishes, merely in not being interested enough to continue, or thinking they have found a certain closure, and it is our aim as bloggers to hold the reader’s interest for as long as possible, to engage them with what we are writing, and encourage them to interact with this.