One of the questions from this week’s symposium was:

What is the untapped potential of hypertext?  Will we ever be satisfied with it?

It led to discussion about books vs. online and if they have shape. In last week’s symposium we discussed how everything online is equally distanced. So receiving news from the US would would the same as from the UK. This is opposite to a book of course as we can’t change the distance we have to a country physically. He went on to say that it doesn’t have a shape because it doesn’t have a beginning, middle and end. I liked Beatty’s point that it “shape shifts”.

Code as the material from has shape but the content doesn’t have shape? Or perhaps we create the shape of the content. We chose which links we will go to next and where it stops and ends because there is no set structure. There is a point that can be made that it doesn’t matter if you read a book from page 1 then skip to page 10 but there is already a set structure within it.

Due to the form of the hypertext world, we are encouraged to link to other things, the more the better almost as we are fulfilling the form. There are new set rules for the medium that are different to books. They don’t need a beginning, middle and end because there are forever linking to other things. However we can choose when to stop reading or where we start reading and I think that is where part of the confusion comes from.