We all wonder about Hypertexts. Why does it feel like it is such a difficult concept to wrap your head around it? The readings on Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization by George Landow was a little difficult to grasp at the first read but it got a little clearer with the class discussions and conversation with friends. Earlier in the course, I had written a post, A Novel with No Endings?! ,regarding inconclusive endings or non-linearity flow but I had to write another one on Hypertext to further understand it. As the course continues, I start finding different understanding on this topic so I had to share my thoughts on it:
Although in some distant, or not-so-distant, future all individual texts will electronically link to one another, thus creating metatexts and metametatexts of a kind only partly imaginable at present, less far-reaching forms of hypertextuality have already appeared. (Landow, p. 69)
As Landow had mentioned on how everything will be interlinked through the Web be it directly linked or linked by other links. It will be a series of web that is never ending loaded with infinite information related to each other. In the near future, everything will be linked to each other, thus creating a library of information quick and easy to find. I think with the use of hypertexts, the Web 2.0 has created a virtual library that is extremely accessible and you do not have to find books to try and match them. They will do it for you in a snap.
Food for thought:
This is a little late to post this topic but I immediately had to write a post on it when I found an interesting concept on hypertext. Funny thing was when I had a conversation with my friends the other day. I stopped and asked how did we even get to this topic about something so random like milk? We sat there for a bit, backtracking our conversation to the very first topic and we realised it was about a game. We were baffled on how we managed to get to milk from computer games! Studying this topic on hypertext definitely had me making a few connections. I had this sudden thought about hypertext in reality and that was exactly what we were doing! We were linking something key concepts in one topic to another and going on and on till we reached something unrelated to the very first topic. One of us could have said, “Oh today I had chicken rice for lunch” and then the other would have cut into the conversation saying, “speaking of rice, there is this awesome sushi place down the road.” The conversation could stay within the topic of food or it could bend out and branch out to other topics. This was an interesting link altogether from my perspective. It definitely would be great to hear some debate over it.