Creative Hypertext
Nate Burgess (cloudman@newscorp.com)
Wed, 14 Feb 1996 13:53:29 -0500
Hello,
The first major point that I'd like to address here is whether or
not hypertext is a worthy medium for creative expression. In order to
express ideas or concepts creatively, there must be some underlying
structure to carry the signal of the message and keep it from degenerating
into noise. The concept of a "debris field" seems very appropriate with most
of the hypertext works I've seen. The flow across nodes is (in my opinion)
often poorly handled, and rarely congeals into smooth conceptual or
narrative transitions between the nodes.
Most of the creative structures seen so far involve an endless
tangle of loops, circling through the content in such a way as to revisit
several nodes inevitably. When turning a page, one usually expects to find
fresh new content instead of the same text that was read just minutes
before. Color-coding the distinction between links that have and have not
been previously visited is an interface-based workaround, but my point is
whether or not revisiting the same text on the screen increases the
"noise-to-signal" ratio in a detrimental way. While "tree fiction" can have
multiple paths through a story, the author's intention is (usually) for the
reader to follow only one path each time it is read. The intention of the
circular tangle structure seems to be for the reader to examine all of the
multiple paths exhaustively. This repetition of nodes causes the reader to
switch between reading and skimming the text, depending on whether the text
is new or stale. Is this constant switching tolerable or tiresome?
Both Falco's "Sea Island" and Gess's "Mahasukha Halo" rely on an
external navigational tool in order to trace your path through the
"informational space". Without the use of the mapping tool, there is no
visual clue whether touching a word or phrase will bring you to text that
you have already seen before. "Mahasukha Halo" goes so far as to force the
navigational interface upon you, bringing up a pop-up window with a list of
potential destinations. When forced to use an external tool (that most
readers would be unfamiliar with) to dig through the maze of content, it
shatters the immersive quality of most other creative media. When reading a
novel, watching a movie or play, or otherwise observing some form of
creative expression, the reader/viewer
can usually fall into a suspension of disbelief. This suspension is a loss
of self where the viewer can temporarily forget that they are viewing the
medium, and instead focus their attention on the events that are going on
within the medium itself. Have these authors mishandled the medium, or is it
inherently impossible to create an immersive viewer relationship in a
non-linear work?
Nate