So many readings on this blasted concept, which is essentially the internet today.

Interwoven strands of information or narrative. Yeah, it’s the internet. Why do we have to look so indepth into it? You know what? I get it. The information part, anyway. I understand, I think. What interests me is the idea of a narrative told through hypertext, an idea a few of the readings have raised. How can normal literature conventions be implemented in a media that has no defined beginning or ending, and where almost any part of the story can be accessed from any other part? It’d be like if Wikipedia was considered more a story of the world rather than a simple linked-in encyclopedia.

Rather than tear apart the ideas of narrative in hypertext, let’s actually get into it. Let’s write a story. I’m gonna break the mould a little though; there is a beginning. Or, rather… an ending in the beginning. My theory is that a real story does have a sense of causality, so it has a beginning, middle and end, but when we look back on what happened we don’t see it like that, we jump. One second we think about how it ended, then we think about how it got there, then we think about pancakes. It’s a premise!

Anyway, so I have begun ‘Breathe’, a weird, hypertext explosion that is supposed to be a narrative. For someone who isn’t the greatest prose composer in the known universe this is going to be… crappy. Bad… awful. Which, on a side note, used to mean the same as awesome.

THE MORE YOU KNOW.

Moving on. A quote from Michael Joyce from the conclusion of the ‘Reconfiguring Narrative’ reading states that ‘closure is, as in any fiction, a suspect quality, although here it is made manifest. When the story no longer progresses , or when it cycles, or when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends.’. This simultaneously explains how hypertext narratives end when the reader decides they do, and how readings end up being pointless by the third page or so.

‘Breathe’ is in progress.