As long as I made this...

One of my biggest fears about using any sort of technology more advanced than a burnt stick and a cave wall in the classroom is this: when the tech fails, how do we assess it?

So, since my own advanced technology decided to seppuku its own video card all over the place on Tuesday, I decided to post it and my rambling notes on this blog. Also, because I keep trying to remember an HG Wells quote about increased literacy and Marie Corelli, but I can't find the presentation I used it in a few years ago, I thought it would be good to keep this stuff in multiple places. That way, the next time I spill coffee directly into my laptop, it'll all work out.

John M. Slatin’s “Reading Hypertext: Order and Coherence in a New Medium” is hard to read with twenty years of hindsight. It’s like that Futurama episode where the slick, 80s businessman with bone-itis gets out of the cryogenics lab and joins the Planet Express crew. We all know that his plan of building the company up with classy 80s business tactics won’t end well for the crew (we’ve seen it play out in real life), but we’re stuck watching just to see how he goes about it.

 Likewise, when Slatin opens by describing our “normal” (read: 1980s) reading style as “embarrassingly simple” (870) in contrast with new computerized texts as their own “medium for composition and thought” (Ibid), many of us probably shared the same thought: slow down there, Skippy, no need to get so excited just yet.

But then, it’s easy to be a Debbie Downer with so much experience using hypertext.

 Documents with “multiple points of entry, multiple exit points, and multiple pathways” (871) seem fantastic, and I don’t use that word lightly. It’s hard to think of hypertext, especially when discussed at the end of the 80s, as divorced from some of the earliest commercial uses of it, text-based games like Adventure! and Zork, or their graphical descendents Myst and L.A. Noir. Even if we leave the realm of the nerdy and just go to non-computerized hypertext books – Choose Your Own Adventure – (have we left the realm of the nerdy?) the mode had quite a bit to offer.

So, in trying to look at this as positively as possible, I’ll drive towards everyone’s favorite question: what do I do on Monday?

[Eesh, it is freaking impossible to get text on one side and an image on the other with any sort of regularity here.]


Slatin’s basic premises are still sound. Widespread digital literacy is a comparatively recent phenomenon. Hypertexts, for all their power to break the mold, still typically have a clear beginning and clear points of exit. We still have a desire to “fix” a text in space, time and understanding – we want it to stop wiggling around so much. And, hypertexts must still have some combination of predictability and chaos to be successful, and here, I’ll define success as holding a reader’s attention from an intended entrance through an intended exit.

First off, the problem of widespread digital literacy. Back when computers were so new that no one questioned the plot of Hackers, the compositional and intellectual frontiers of the digital world gave digital composition a neat aura. Slatin says that hypertext can only exist in an “online environment” (874), and although I’d point to texts of similar functionality existing off-line, we’ll run with this idea. Going hand-in-glove with the online-only readability of hypertexts, “the organization of memory in the computer and in the mind… makes [hypertext] fundamentally different from conventional text” (Ibid). True. But, over time, we’ve crafted software like OneNote, and we turn Cooper and Selfe’s wonderful, digital discussion board, full of boundless opportunity for equality and democracy, back into the oppressive notebook we tried to get away from. Although Slatin claims that the “rapidly evolving technological environment” forces hypertext authors to work under a different set of assumptions, he is assuming that this departure from the norm will stay intelligible to readers. Widespread literacy and digital literacy do as much to open the doors to new possibility as they do to normalize both sides of the screen. Our blog posts attest to this – how many of us really have the freedom (or desire) within our respective blog services to create something that doesn’t look like a long sheet of paper? Having created something that really is fundamentally different from traditional text, how many of us would find regular readers willing to develop a new literacy?

Slatin offers a challenge along with this premise. “The difficulty [in holding a reader] is compounded because hypertext systems tend to envision three different types of readers…. One function a rhetoric for hypertext will have to serve will be to provide ways of negotiating it” (875). Unfortunately, that rhetoric often mirrors the rhetoric of a traditional, static text, with link-clicking standing in for page-turning.

To keep the text intelligible, though, Slatin does note that hypertexts must have clear entrances and exits. Otherwise, we’re all like little Donnys, wandering into a theater, trying to figure out what’s going on. So, on the upside, although hypertext’s power has been subverted, we can still act more like “browsers” (in Slatin’s terminology) than “readers.” One power that a theory of hypertext grants us (as opposed to the practice of hypertext) is that of design. I would argue that hypertext is ultimately more limited in means of expression than static and non-digital text, if only out of practicality – I’m still reading hypertext from a two-dimensional screen, and my reading-program must share the fonts, templates, languages, etc. of the author’s machine.

 But, it does make design easier, especially in terms of Nelson’s “non-sequential writing” (qtd. on 876). If I was a terrible person, I could write all of my notes for this presentation in Comic Sans. I could make the quotations blue, my topic sentences red, and put marching ants around things I wanted emphasize. I could cut the second paragraph and move it to the end if I felt it was necessary. Most importantly, “non-sequential writing” and its traditional-authoring uncle, freewriting, is incredibly easy. Although the final product for a student, and for most authors, will be something resembling static text, the authoring and design process is aided by the fact that I can explore many avenues of thought in my writing and keep them all without crafting a brand new document every time. Imagine how many times Hemingway would have rewritten the final lines of The Sun Also Rises if he’d been able to just make a new document for each ending, or if he’d been able to put a script into his writing that changed the final lines every few seconds.

The final premise and challenge I need to deal with (since I have one count against using hypertext on Monday and one in favor) is that hypertexts, like all texts, must have some combination of predictability and unpredictability to hold their readers. Because we as readers always want to get the “right” reading of a hypertext, or perhaps just a “complete” reading (how many of us bookmarked Choose Your Own Adventure books so we could go back and try every branch in the narrative?), hypertext creates trouble. It looks a lot more like natural thought when we consider Slatin’s descriptions of nodes and links. “The freedom of movement and action available to the reader – a freedom including the possibility of co-authorship – means that the hypertext author has to make predictions” (877). How many ways can a reader really imagine what I’m trying to communicate? In terms of practice, I’m imagining students using something like Tomboy Notes – a simple, notebook program that uses tools like hashtags to link words to other Tomboy documents. But, again in practice, this often looks like a citation method rather than a new form of composing. At the very least, it’s the ultramodern “ipse dixit” of our society. By giving the reader the power to check the link immediately or continue reading, though, we’ve backtracked even further than referring to the Master; we’ve re-entered Socratic discourse. Yes, author, continue with your thoughts until I find a tricky point.

I’m two-to-one in favor of hypertext composition in the classroom, if only because the theories of why it could be so powerful (theories old enough to take to the bar, mind you) still resonate with what we’re trying to do today. Unfortunately, the power of hypertext has been replaced by the banality of hypertext. Widespread basic digital literacy (the only kind we can expect of students not in a program that develops e-literacy) has normalized it to the point where Wikipedia, the go-to hypertext example, is really nothing more than an encyclopedia with easier to turn pages.

I don't know if that's actually the text/slide pairing I was shooting for. But I think it's close. Now, then, cruel hand of fate, you may do your worst to this laptop, for Google has my back.

But really, though, don't do your worst. I finally got this thing working again.