Hypertext: from reading to writing

... I am here to talk to you about hypertext, about writing and reading hypertext, in particular about how the relationship or divide between writer and reader is rearranged in online environments.

But first a definition of hypertext: hypertext is an information medium that exists most obviously online. A structure composed through the non-linear linkage of information as distinct from a linear arrangement of information (as in a book). Basically, in any given text there are a number of means of negotiating and moving through that text. So a hypertext is constructed partly by the writer who creates the links and the reader who decides which paths to follow and in so doing forms the work. This is the basis of interactivity.

I think what the web provides is an inherently transgressive medium through which a number of (reading and writing) conventions can be displaced. However, in saying that, I don't intend to transfer agency to the computer. To anyone who has used the web, these things probably seem self-evident, and indeed experiential. For the practice of interactivity to have any kind of efficacy, it probably needs be more than an abstract condition or intention.

So the idea I am coming to you with this evening is one that is perhaps intrinsic to hypertext, that the reader is partly responsible for the creation of hypertext work, or in other words, is a collaborator in the making of the work, not just its reading or interpretation but its formation. That the reader plots an itinerary through narrative rather than just goes along for the ride, to reach a given destination. In the idiom of Deleuze and Guattari the hypertext reader might be 'on the line', engaged in a rhizomatic structure comprised only of lines and segments, of in-betweenness and pluralism, of maps and lines of flight. So these are the promises of hypertextual reading. Even though I am very fond of these discourses which plot the path of resistance, [de]construction and rupture, to me, sometimes these claims also seem like pipe dreams.

In other words , I would like to think that this applies to hypertext work, or how it might be as the technologies of interactivity make connectivity much more seamless or extensive, that through the labyrinth of reading/writing choices the reader is actually making something other than shuffling through a set of finite links made available in any one text.

As I say, I like these 'open text' ideas a great deal, the reader is a priori: preceeds perhaps even causes the text. Just as an aside, I started doing a masters thesis about evolutionary theory and the posthuman. I really wanted to play with ideas like non-lineal evolution; postmodern physics; the notion that technology and communications are signs of homo sapien civilisations; blah blah blah ... Quite often our relationships with technology are couched in terms of evolution. Technology and human relationships, all too simply, fall into a cause and effect discourse. Cause and effect or linear discourses always leave me cold. Sure one thing can lead to another but I don't think that our evolution and our systems of signs is as simple as the presence of homo sapiens causing the extinction of Cro Magnon, as a progression from savagery to civilisation, as I have heard it said. Or to couch it in terms of writing and reading: the web hasn't made the book obsolete.

To me cause and effect narratives are just the same as all the other binarist discourses in the world , a hierarchy and a fait accompli: man/woman, self/object, writer/reader ... I am skeptical of simple reversals of those binarist arrangements and am rather more sympathetic to the idea that such binarims can be displaced. I think that's how hypertext works: it displaces, at least in theory, the opposition of cause/effect; writer/reader. In hypertext terms, the reader produces the work, is both cause and effect, both writer and reader. Let me say that this doesn't mean that we don't have writers and readers anymore, but rather that the relationship between them has changed, become more collaborative, more open, more dialogic, less fixed, etc ...

Our relationships to texts have always been active and interactive. Catherine Lumby puts it this way:

we live in a society which is saturated with images and information. However, since they're no longer located in discrete sites, we don't have a contemplative relationship to them. Even if we're reading a philosophy book, the phone still rings, the fax goes and so forth. The skill of interacting with images and information today, or the process of consuming them, is a much more lateral one.

And really that's a point I wanted to make about the relationship between reading and writing; that it's connected, that its structure in a hypertextual context is network. Once again it's a medium is message scenario. And in hypertext, through the practice of reading, as an interactive engagement with text/s, the reader makes demands of not only narrative and the work, but of reading itself, as a step towards a more open work in which the reader's experience of chance and choice somehow creates linkages as well as constructs non-linear narrative.

To be perfectly honest, I don't know if readers have that experience of my work. The three collaborations with Josephine Wilson, and my current work, 'speak', are still in the point and click stage, agglomerations of sound, animated gif, text and images. As writers, we try to ensure that the works are text-based even though we appreciate the multimedia notion of texts, reading and writing. The construction of our works is contingent on our access to technology and knowledge, as is the reader's access to works.

In these days of Netscape/Communicator, the Pentium 3 and G3 processors, soon G4, Dream Weaver, Flash, Fireworks and so many other innovations, point and click looks quite dated. My everyday practice of reading is very much limited by my own technology which is a first generation power mac. I am exluded from reading or accessing works that use or rely on those more recent software innovations, at least using my own hardware. In fact, my experience of reading on the web is plagued by broken connections, wrong plug-ins and crashing browsers ... I'd like to think even with click and point web-based works, you get a sense that you are jumping around from one place to another and that your experience of reading those works is still hypertextual, and at the very least, different to reading a book.

Of reading hypertext, Ilana Snyder argues that "the reader is forced", although I would say compelled, "at every screen to reflect on the experience of reading. Reaching out to other texts, the electronic text invites reader to participate in their own construction. With hypertext it is the reader who integrates the multiple and scattered parts into a whole."

And that's the point isn't it? That's what cyberspace or electronic writing can do for us. It can extend our experience, adding new possibilities for new and different ways of life and its everyday practice. And let's say among those everyday practices is reading. In a print based culture, a number of assumptions have consistently underpinned our understanding, expectations and practice of reading. According to Marshall McLuhan every new medium contains that which has preceded it. Given this, there are obviously sites on the web that reiterate the print based assumptions of reading, distribution and broadcasting. However, in terms of the conceptual engagement of hypertext with network, a different set of assumptions about reading is introduced. In the everyday practice of reading on the web, reading is perhaps still reading, but it is also connectivity, openness, dialogue, interactivity, collaboration and flow ...

Presented as part of a.d.a.p.t. conference, crossing boundaries sesion, September 10, Metro Arts - MAAP99, Brisbane