|
|
| |
| |
Somnio, ergo sum
Donald Challenger
Bridge as landscape
|
|
|
|
|
| |
In a very broad sense, we recognize linking and the navigational options it creates as the fulcrum of nearly all that we think and write in and about hypertext. Like the terms difference and text, link has become one of those signifiers almost buried in its own fecundity; we ask it to do a great deal, and then lament its very versatility as a source of imprecision. And yet our understanding of linking remains largely mechanistic. As Johndan Johnson-Eilola has noted,
The problem of "navigation" ... is one of the most researched and discussed pitfalls in hypertext; nearly every analysis notes the potential difficulty. In hypertexts that make the reader feel "lost," the decentering and confusion -- traits that hypertext seems to solve in terms of deconstruction -- return with a vengeance. At least with print, readers despairing of their attempts at deconstruction can return to the original, linear text. Many hypertexts offer no such fallback position. In cases where navigation through a hypertext becomes a strain, reading hypertext may not lead to empowerment but to silence for readers and writers. (34)
Compounding this difficulty, Nicholas C. Burbules suggests, is that we have yet to problematize "the apparently neutral character" of links by investigating their tropical structure as well as their ideological baggage. He calls on theorists and teachers
to invert the order of how we normally think about links and information points, nodes, or texts: usually we see the points as primary, and the links as mere connectives; here I suggest that we concentrate more on links -- as associative relations that change, redefine, and enhance or restrict access to the information they comprise. (35)
|
|
|
|
| |
"In another kind of chaining, many narratives ... ask us, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, to assume a kind of innocence by association: we trust the friends of our friends and the enemies of our enemies."
Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
