It is the first lecture back since the mid-semester break.

Adrian took the examples of “a Hundred Thousand Million Poems”  and a children’s book, with 10 pages and 3 flaps on each page which can make like around 1000 combinations. As for the poems, there is a set of ten sonnets, which are printed on the card with each line on a separated strip. Any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others. Adrian used these examples to explain the idea that hypertext has endless possibilities, more than only in the way of “creating your own adventure”, which actually has limited routes.

Brian said that genre is a kind of classification. A genre in the industry is for audience formation; let audience be familiar with certain type of stuff. It relates to the media literacy – the ability of people to analyse, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms and genres. Documentary is a genre? Or there are different genre of documentaries ? Adrian further mentioned about the difference between fiction and documentary: fiction is talking about a world while documentary is talking about the world.

I took another note of the point that authors can’t control the readers’ minds. Authors cannot control how audience interpret their narratives. “All media is dead”. It is interesting to learn that not the author, but his narrative has the personality. Authors have things to communicate in their narratives; at the same time audience decode in the way they think is reasonable.