• What happens if there is no beginning, middle or end?
• How will links change the way you structure your essay?

I had a really productive Networked Media day, and have done a lot of work on the hypertext essay. Yay!
Here’s my notes from the lecture:
Adrian Miles on hypertext

Web hypertext system, http, html. but only one type of hypertext, the biggest one and the one that took of.

Timberbox? Tinderbox? Storyspace – hypertext fiction/non-fiction

Early theory: hypertext can and ought to include the following: writing and dialogue, modern pathways,

Text singular in terms of narrative(fiction, sport, doco)

Strict linearity is unessasary in hypertext. In essay, everything that contradicts the main narrative is avoided. You’ve been trained.

In twentieth century, this not so common? Things are spreading out; traffic, money, biology (structures), also text.

Single person in the middle seeing everything, while you can be in the periphery looking at him.

Print is linear, beginning middle end. Writing in dialogue: all writing is dialogue, with text surrounding it.
When you see a romance film, you know it is a romance film because you recognize the elements within it. Cultural taught. Dialogue with the writer and the text and the writer.

Text writing you; when an idea arrives without knowing where it come from (experience of something else).

Hearing a song for the first time, still knowing what the next line is going to be. Logic and previous experience gives expectation of whats to come next.

Essay, no pun, no personal comment, opinion. Dry, third person voice. Report stores away, and the progress of writing it is lost.

Introduce the personal and the social into your writing. No longer be discrete and selfcontained. Link across documents. We take it for granted.

Linearity. Not in hypertext, only a middle. Only connection between paths. Doesn’t need a center.

“Traditional forms of writing have tended to emphasise a consistency of tone and writing style that is a product of print technology. At its heart, there is a certain protestant suspicion of textuality in our development of black print on white papet arranged in highly regular patterns across consecutive pages.

This singularity of writing style or voice iis the exception, rather than the rule, of our communicative competencies. In any given day I speak as father, son, husband, teacher and student, to name a few, and each requires, often literally, a different voice and style.

Hypertext writing, through all of its formal properties, is able to utilise and incorporates these different voices, these different ways of writing. Hypertext theory seems to validate the inclusion of these diverse tones (or tongues) so that the document becomes not only a palimpsest of what has gone before or into the writing but becomes a plural arena of all those writings that are implicit but excluded in all writing.”

No pictures in writing. Black on white, protestant German. Scientific writing. More strongly protestant than black and white. NO images.

Catolic churc? Bleading. Catholoc invented printing, maybe different?

If writing reading is about knowledge and joy, why no colours. Don’t leave your webpage black and white!!

There is no single voice. Multiple voices. Celebration in hypertext, we can use whichever voice we want. Not like the strict essay writing.

Definition. Digital, computer, multi linear writing and writing system. Called soft media.

Multimedia, most important definition?

Films hypertext? Pulp fiction with a multi linear narrative.

Pragmetic reason: Hypertext needs to involve a computer. Have to make sense.

Not linear, not an object with a linear form. There is no page 2. No pages in here. Only ever be read as a multi linear form. Look at page 36, in hypertext that means everyone would have a different page. In book, it would be the same.

Books are going to disappear. Like opera, moving to a specialized art community.
100 journals in a bookshelf, or everything gathered in one piece. Books becoming designed objects, because they’re not acquired anymore.

3^rd reason. Digital and linkning. Hypertext made up of link, internet link structure. Link creates paths, connects to anything. Picture, text, movies, music.

Each shot is equally far apart. Every webpage are equally distance from each other. Do not have to follow, no bound structure. Link is a promise, might go where it say it will, might not. Moment of risk, you don’t know exactly. Protestants and catholics. Protestant links sleep around, like teenagers. Raising the links. If going to homepage, it has to say home. Anxiety around links?

Indecent links. How will it affect my work? People might loose interest,

Think of your links as drunken teenagers, messy. Edit always a risk, what is it going to link to. Juncture and disjuncture.

Reading and writing.
Huckleberry Finn: there might be different interpretations, but text is still the text. This sentence follows this sentence. In hypertext that is not the case. It can be rules on reading history, showing new available screens. Exercise: everyone sit down and read for fifteen, then pause, then fifteen, then pause, and on third time people realise it is like listening to music. Repeated reading.
Repetition is fundamental. Each person who reads it will go different ways.

Cinematic? Put shots in different order to create different narrative. Each note is self-contained. Multiple relations between those paths.

You can dream about it all your life, but you are not a filmmaker before you actually start making a movie, so you’re not a hypertext writer until you actually write hypertext.

No one knew about editing, 50 years it took before anyone thought of it. Same with hypertext. Editing/links.

Which words to link from and why? Everyone link from nouns! Make it more interesting. I love my mum. Link from love. The more abstract the word you link from, it changes the way your writing works.

No front page or last page on the internet. Navigation menu or links in the text?

Therefore, hence, thus, all assume linearity. They are GONE in hypertext writing. “Earlier” doesn’t make sense to the reader, cause earlier might come later. LINK IT.

Good point: you don’t write a blog post in relation til every single blog post you’ve ever made. People can understand it without reading the whole blog first

Your essay cant have a front page.

We create hypothesise based on patterns (compare to The Big Sleep). We want to create meanings. Patterns in language, and in hypertext links creates patterns.

If you can read the pattern, the connections becomes richer.

A link that says home can send you somewhere else

No dead ends in an hypertext: ALWAYS LINK SOMEWHERE!! Remember for essay. Repetition is OK. Remember to write crucial information, because someone might come to a random page (not the “front” page) and won’t be able to understand the context.