Week 6 reading.. Hypertexts – The safari of Narrative.
When someone says the word hyperlink to me, I immediately think back to primary school. It was about 2002 when I was taught to embed a hyperlink into text, on this new and exciting program called ‘Microsoft Word’, have you ever heard of it?
The way in which hyper linking allowed me to network my stories about my favourite TV shows on ABC Kids to pictures on the web of the bananas in Pyjamas and Mixy the bunny, was an exhilarating concept for me that was quite peculiar compared to just the straight forward typical ‘write a narrative on a piece of paper’ type task.
As we have progressed not only in growth and age since 2002 but technologically this once modernistic cont of Hyper linking has developed even further into a whole new realm – Hyper texts and Hyper fiction.
Hypertexts basically add more complexity to the ideal of texts, and reveal a new organization of the typical narrative. These are some of the concepts that stood out for me in this weeks reading by Landow;
Hypertext redefines not only beginnings and endings of the text but also its borders – its sides, as it were.
That whilst indulged in a hypertext linearity becomes subjective to the reader, because narrative byted do not follow a typical narrative ‘page turning’ format.
To me, the way in which a reader is to follow a hypertext resembles a safari – an online safari! The way in which it encourages you to Explore the realms of a story and all different nooks and crannies of its content; just as I would imagine myself exploring a jungle.
I can only imagine what the world of ‘Hyper’ (links, texts..) will bring in the future, and perhaps looking back on this reading in years to come I will be baffled by the simplicity of a once complex notion of Hypertexts.
READ LANDOWS COMPLEX IDEALS NOW. YOU WILL BE PERPLEXED
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