I’m a hyperhypo

• I’m feeling thoroughly confused about hypertext the more I read about it. To me it seems like it is one of those things that you have to be enveloped in to understand – from the examples I’ve read online I feel I have an understanding of what hypertext is, however the theory surrounding it is exhausting.
• I gather the non-linear aspect and the challenging of the narrative and the literary form – something I find quite interesting and amazing: how can people make these beautiful and intricate stories that can be read like a pretzel and still make sense?! But personally I’m still drawn to the story as a having a distinct thread, a definitive sense of change and growth, however I’m willing to admit that that may be simply because that’s all I’ve ever been taught before: the linear is ingrained just as the essay, just as the one size fits all approach to education.
• A big design fiction-esque question raised in Landow‘s piece on hypertext is how it might affect the literary form. Blogs may be a perfect form to me at the moment. I love the idea of being able to read a piece with a definitive beginning and ending, yet also given the option to explore within the story. I can come back to the section I was up to, or I can read from start to end and then go through the 57 tabs I opened.
• I like the idea that “hypertext … makes certain elements … stand out the first time” – going back to the blog example, there’s something about the blue underlined text that encapsulates the same way the yellow highlighted section in a reading does.
• “Hypertext story space is multidimensional and theoretically infinite.”
• Sometimes I finally feel like I understand hypertext, then go on a website devoted to a hypertext story and all I feel is welling rage and fury because I DON’T UNDERSTAND.
• I’m trying to remember that it’s not broken just because it’s uncomfortable, to make it relevant, and just because I don’t get it doesn’t mean it’s ‘bad’, but this is a hard practice when my precious scaffolding of beginning, middle, end is taken away. I’m acknowledging I like the scaffolding.
• Ok breathe Zo, breathe. Douglas‘ explanation of the Titanic choose-your-own-adventure actually sounds really cool: “It is 9.30PM: you have slightly more than four hours to wend your way through a series of tortuous plots and subplots, deciding which to follow and which to bypass, before the ship begins her plunge to the ocean floor.”
• Hmm, perhaps hypertext has a place in theme park type scenarios? What if that Titanic CD-ROM could be played out in a theme park inside a huge ship, with its “elegiac music,” “eight decks of public rooms” and “well-written characters”.
• I’m intrigued by Douglas’ question of whether future readers will read print works differently to how they do now with the increase in interactive mediums. This is very interesting, and now I am recalling my feelings of inadequacy at predicting the future. I’m sure it’s true that I listen to a vinyl record differently to how my father would have in the 70s – I can pick the differences between the vinyl and an mp3, which I am accustomed to, with ease. I too wonder what specifics will be picked up when future readers read a print text, just as I can get transfixed on the sound of the needle being placed on a record, or that unique sound of dust that doesn’t exist in a digital rendering.
• Ok, off to have hypertext dreams.