The articles on the abilities and networks of hypertext reminded me of a few novels I enjoyed reading as a child, the “choose your own way” type books. These were often scary stories or mysteries that, at various points, offered the reader the option of how to progress further action, to choose for the character. The choices branched further reading off to a new page further in the book, creating a web of paths that led, sometimes to back in circles (which is less like the idea of a tree-map and a lot more like the case study), but mostly to various ends. As a child, this control was a very interesting concept. I could actually determine what happens to the characters in the book.
Readers in general have a sort of agency, freedom in the way they can interpret a text, but hypertexts add a whole new layer to this agency. One is still only limited to the choices given in the text, but this ability allows the reader to really create the types of characters for themselves. This creation is an extreme form of reader-agency, a product of networking within hypertexts.
Often when I made an important choice in these novels, I would scan the other options or branches of decision to see how they too panned out. This interlinks the types of characters that can be creates, contrasting the decisions and networking between a multiplicity of voices generated by reader-agency.
And when the action connects back to previous sections (in a way that conjures images of Burrough’s “déjà-vu” fold-over technique), the networking system of the hypertext allows for a comparison of voices, a heteroglossia in which varying decisions/voices of character play off of and add to each other. A web is created within the novel, giving the reader extreme agency over the characters and allowing them to see the implications of their decisions by creating a web or network of all possible compared and contrasted decisions.
http://media280.hero-worship.com/?p=640
ReplyDeleteI remember reading choose your own path type novels when I was younger, including the some of the Goosebumps books(which I hope most of the members of the class are familiar with). As a child I did not realize the advantage the agency the type of text gave readers, however; it also traps readers and gives them a "job" while reading, which can be viewed as a downfall to certain genres of text (texts for leisure reading) that interrupts the "flow" of a text which is linear. I believe the linear can include waves of climax and resolution which can call a reader back to a previous dialogue, this being the proof about my confusion of hypertext as a genre.