“…typing will add text at this point. In a book, readers can always move their pencil or finger across the printed page, but one’s intrusion always remains physically seperate from the text. One may mark a page but ones intrusion does not effect the text itself. The curser adds reader presence , activity and movement…” (Landow, Pg 60)

After reading the first few pages of Landow’s Hypertext 2.0 (Axial versus Network Structure in Hypertext, Visual Elements of Hypertext) I feel I have managed to take some of his ideas, and grasp them in my own context and have begun to form my own ideas about his exploration and claims.

I condensed my reading into three major ideas/concepts which I will discuss over the next couple of entries:

1. What is the role of a writer? When writers confine themselves to just one mode of expression are they stunting their ability to write relevantly?

2. What is the value of visual information, how does is it effect the ‘status’ of a piece and how does the way we treat visual language change the way we relate to information?

3. How does hypertext and the act of granulating textual information into self contained lexica’s effect writers and readers alike?

Firstly, I just wanted to define some brief geek terms that I had decode:

concepts of textuality - general notions about what a text should be in its nature.
rhetorical structures - a text that in its organisation is made to present a legitimate viewpoint but is divided into sections and has a hierarchy

blocks of signification – self contained ‘kernels’ of information which convey distinctive information.

Okay, moving right along…

Landow is highly critical of societies treatment of visual language, suggesting that by ranking it’s value as subordinate to that of the written testimony, that we effectively close to the door on a greater depth of understanding. This is especially relevant when we consider the way that history has utilised both pictorial and oral methods of recording information. I thought it was particularly interesting that Landow pointed to a writers regard of visual language as reductive of their ‘status’ as a writer and somehow undermined their creative integrity and that by reducing words to images, we somehow undermine the organic nature of thought.

I began thinking about children’s story books, and the way we are taught to ‘read’.

“The injunction “just to write” assumes the following: first, that only verbal information has value, second that visual information has less value” (Landow, PG62)

Think about it, in Primary school, we began the process of learning to ‘read’ by looking a picture books, and when our teacher felt we understood the linear messages these pictures were intended to convey, we got ‘moved up’ to the next stage where pictures may have been accompanied by words, or short sentences. This hierarchy, where the more words on the page indicated improvement not only in literacy skills but in perception and understanding automatically embeds the idea that words convey a more sophisticated and well rounded account of a story than pictures can. By high school, if your still reading picture books, something is seriously ‘wrong’. But is it really? I would argue that pictures contain a whole visual language which is complex and requires a distinct amount of decoding and understanding.

I cant help coming back to this idea of Shakespeare’s language, which can be discussed in conjunction with Landow’s idea that visual language creates class divisions and hierarchy. In Elizabethan times when Shakespeare was writing, his plays were performed in his Globe Theatre which set out a basic hierarchy of society:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/theatreblog/2007/jul/11/theviewfromthegroundling

The elite would sit in the seats, which were expensive but sheltered from the weather. However, by sitting in these seats, the rich were separated from the ‘groundlings’ (the peasantry) who stood for the entire duration of the show but didn’t have to pay.  It’s said that the groundlings wanted to stand so they could be close to action, so they could focus more on the visuals of the performance and in some part ‘take part’ in the story by yelling out encouragement during bloody murders, fight scenes and suicides. The wealthy wanted to be elevated above this barbarity, and were more focused on absorbing the beauty of Shakespeare’s prose.

I think this example shows the kind of underlying attitude we have that does artistically value the ‘beauty’ of analysing words above the simple cognitive ability of recognising a picture. Its embedded in that notion that drawing a picture for someone who doesn’t understand an idea makes it simpler and breaks its down into ‘one’ idea.

I suppose I have only really addressed one of the ideas I intended to, but as usual thinking has followed an abstract path kind of like hypertext, but it has lead to some new revelations.

Landow, George P. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1997.