Linking and the Reader/Author Distinction
I’ve been asked to write a review of Marie-Laure Ryan’s Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. So far its discussion of immersion seems detailed and interesting, deserving of a place at the table when we discuss the immersion ideas in Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and Manovich’s The Language of New Media. I’m not as positive on the material on interactivity, but I haven’t finished the book either.
What prompts this post, however, is an error in Ryan’s book that’s so common as to probably not be worth mentioning in the review—the error of thinking that pre-Web writers on hypertext were writing about Web-like hypertext. We see this as early as page 8, where Ryan talks about 1980s and 90s hypertext theorists (Landow, Joyce, Bolter, and Moulthrop are lumped together in her argument) who talked of linking leading to a blurring between the roles of reader and author. Ryan’s discussion proceeds as though these theorists were talking purely about link following as creating this blurring. The argument seems developed without awareness of the fact that in the hypertext systems these authors used (e.g., Intermedia) or helped develop (e.g., Storyspace) one could move smoothly between activities of reading and writing—adding one’s own material to the network and creating links to it in pre-existing material. That is, these systems were perhaps more like today’s wikis that today’s garden-variety Web pages. And this smooth movement has long been part of hypertext’s history—going back through the work of hypertext originators Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart (whose names, by the way, are absent from Ryan’s index and bibliography, despite the fact that hypertext is a primary subject of more than one of her chapters—also a sadly common occurrence).
Of course, pre-Web hypertext theorists didn’t always make this dual nature of linking clear enough. Storyspace hypertexts, after all, are only “constructive” (to use Joyce’s term) when they are encountered in the full Storyspace program. When they are encountered in stand-alone form they are essentially Web-like and “exploratory.” The fact that theorists (who tended to own the Storyspace program) and average readers (who tended not to own it) would have a quite different experience of the “same” hypertext should have been made clear more often. There should have been more notes like the one added by the editor to J. Yellowlees Douglas’s “Understanding the Act of Reading: the WOE Beginners’ Guide to Dissection”:
The copies of WOE and IzmePass on the accompanying disk exist in a stand-alone or “reader” format which displays the text’s structure in only one of the several modes Douglas mentions. The complete Storyspace program is available from Eastgate Systems.
Had that happened, maybe we wouldn’t keep running into this error now.