Issues

For this week's "alt-syllabus" readings, I decided to read "Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature." I mainly chose this article because I thought it would be a useful toolbox for the upcoming midterm and I'm very happy I did! The paper was a great counter-argument to all the pro-hypertext pieces that we've read throughout the quarter. The authors' main problem with the possible future use of hypertext as an alternative or replacement to the linear book was that with such liberation through the choosing-of-link process that comes with hypertext fiction, the reader becomes too preoccupied with the linking-mechanisms that the narrative itself becomes secondary. Moreover, the authors conducted studies that concluded that readers that were using the hypertext liberation format had trouble keeping up with the narrative compared to those that were reading with the traditional linear book format. Thus, the authors disproved the optimistic outlook that many literary critics in the 90s had; that hypertext would become the killer of the almighty book. After reading the paper, I had just one question: how would linking-mechanisms affect the reading of a wiki post? So, as a little experiment, I decided to make every word of this post a link to see how distracting it could be.