I don’t often read my own posts after they’re written…oh all right, if I thought they were particularly eloquent I might, but do check when I wonder if I’ve made sense or if a comment draws my attention back to what was written. Yesterday’s New Media: Hypertext left me a-gigglin’ and a-wonderin’ with this line:
"As soon as I am able, I will seek out an online course perhaps that will more quickly teach me the direct paths to answers for the questions. The side trails take not only time but disturb the pattern of the thought process when we wander off and double back and crisscross over needlessly, until the sense of where we’ve come from has been lost, and the most direct route then, never truly found."
Recalling that the point of the post was to extol the virtues of new media methods and hypertext in particular for both the planning and the presentation of a particular work I’m still chugging away upon, the above statement is both pro and con towards hypertext (same with IF), and seems to beg me to open up the can of worms of "Well, which is it then, a good thing or a not so useful thing, since the "side trails" are exactly what hypertext is all about.
Shall I then learn to write hyperfiction, go through all the trials and trails and trauma and frustration to master the art and then proceed to present a piece that offers readers all the trials and trails and trauma and frustration as well?
I think, yes. Not only is there fun and intelligent interaction offered from such method along with the pain, but it would as well put the reader through the process if as Barthes claims, he is indeed the writer of what he reads…let him work a bit.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology