After browsing through several different hypertexts, websites, and online novels I have settled upon taking a closer look at Shelley Jackson’s, “My Body – a Wunderkammer.” “My Body” is an example of a hypertext. Jackson takes readers on a personal journey, describing her body and her feelings towards it. The online story is filled with directional links, sound, graphics and utter confusion. Each link takes readers to a new “body part” or sometimes takes them back to one they had already read about. There is no middle and there is no definite end. How can literature be taken seriously if its environment draws readers away from the word and leaves them wandering through an array of links?
Due to their confusion, distraction and misdirection I believe that hypertexts such as “My body – a Wunderkammer” should not be considered literature nor should they be studied within the school environment.
Katherine Hayles claims that,
“The MINDBODY is engaged, not merely mind or body alone…material metaphors, for they control, direct, and amplify this traffic force between the physical actions the work calls for and structures and the imaginative world.” (pg 48)
Hence, she feels that readers are more connected to the story when they are given the chance to interact with it on the screen. Instead of simply reading the story, they are choosing it and playing with it. Readers can better place themselves in the story when not only their mind but their body is involved. I completely disagree with Hayles point of view. I believe that we are less involved in the story when we must deal with the agitation of links and graphics and noise.
I realize that many people will agree with the views of Katherine Hayles, believing that hypertext’s are so great because the reader is involved in the navigation that they get lost within the text. That’s the whole point of reading a novel anyways right, to just get lost in it? But wait, on the contrary the reader isn’t actually lost in the text; he’s lost in the environment. He’s lost in the links and the circles, in the data and in the ambiguity. How can this be considered real literature if all it is doing is losing its readers to its own environment? Let alone refer to it as literature, why would someone want to teach this in a school? Maybe they believe that children will be more interested in reading if it’s seems fun and engaging. In response to that, I wonder why children should need to be bribed to read using technology and the fun that comes with it. This only furthers the assumption that hypertexts are not literature, they are a game. If I had been introduced to reading hypertext as a child I probably would have decided that reading is distracting and confusing, less relaxing and more like work. Children should be exposed to bound books first, real literature in which they don’t have to worry about choosing their path of links.
As much as I have disagreed with the opinions of Sven Birkerts in the past, in this case I believe that we have very similar ideas. He also believes that “Words read from a screen or written onto a screen- words with appear and disappear, even if they can be retrieved- have a different status and affect us differently from words held immobile on the accessible space of a page.” (pg 154) Words on a screen and words on a page are completely different. While many might argue that words are words and will have the same meaning no matter where they are located, I beg to differ. Words get lost on a screen, in the case of Jackson’s “My body,” it’s impossible to intentionally go back to the “page” before, in fact it’s almost impossible to intentionally do anything. The surprise factor of the links on each page leave readers lost and confused within the story, a story that gets so lost that it might as well just be data. While it may seem like the reader has complete control of the text because he chooses where to go, maybe it can be argued that they have less control. If the reader can only move forward, do the words before even exist anymore?
Posted by Sean Meehan on April 20, 2010 at 1:13 am
your focus on the problem of intention with the reader is a great point–can see you developing that into a very effective answer to counter-argument: hypertext does seem to bring more control to reader–but can also be argued that the dispersion of intention (and attention?) is a loss of control.