Books Without Pages

If the book is a highly refined example of a primitive technology, hypertext is a primitive example of a highly refined technology.

I found this quote from the other Week Six reading, ‘Books Without Pages – Novels Without Endings’ to be a great way to summarise the relationship and contrasts between the book and hypertext, and show how in Networked Media, we are engaging with, and studying, a technology that is still in its infant stage.

The reading focuses on the abundant possibilities of hypertext fiction, and the affect this would have on linearity and the good ole book. It quotes Michael Joyce saying “What if you had a book that changed every time you read it?”, and this is what a hypertext fiction can deliver. According to the reading, it would be an interactive, adaptive fiction that allows the reader to guide how and where the narrative goes, as well as when it begins and finishes.

This level of an open-ended story can somewhat be seen in computer games that are around today, with the likes of Skyrim and GTA featuring such expansive maps and AI that near-limitless possible narratives arise. This is a very exciting prospect for the narrative.

As the reading states, the book is characterized by fixity, no matter how many times you read it, the text will be exactly the same. Our own perceptions of it may change on each re-read, but what we are reading is unchanging. I’m sure everyone gets immensely angry at the decisions made by a character, or who the story chooses to focus on, but with hypertext, these aspects may well be controlled be the reader, signaling where and how they want the story to go.

The reading defines hypertext as “a tool that lets us use the printed word as the basis for a technology that considerably extends writing’s reach and repertoire – mostly by removing text from the single dimension it has on the printed page”. Hypertext fiction can have a plethora of voices, and this “plurality is virtually omnipresent in the hypertext”. It allows the author and the reader to interact as equals.

The reading claims that printed text acts in much of the same way as a legal decision: it settles the conflicting claims and the elaborate narratives constructed by each side with a single decision at its conclusion. It’s like an episode of CSI, at the end, the murderer is revealed, and everything goes back to normal; there’s no room for audience interaction or controlling of the story.

A quote that jumped out at me was: “Reading print can seem a tad like listening to a monologue or a lecture, where you basically have two choices: listen or leave”. This is an idea that has already been introduced by Adrian, and used as the justification for the symposium style lectures. I really like the analogy between printed text and lectures – they are both a very much so a one-way dialogue with clear authority and a very low level of interactivity. We’re doing these ‘unlectures’ to remove these problems, and to function that hour in a more hypertext-like fashion based on interactivity and engagement.

And just like hypertext fiction in general, it has a lot of potential.