The Differences between Hypertext and the Printed Page :: Art Painting Language Essays

The Differences between Hypertext and the Printed Page Two painters, alone in the night, fervently work on their objets d’art. One, concerned with borders and lines, and the obviousness of it all, creates on her canvas a network of lines, circles, and primary colors. The other, thinking more about the medium (or rather the way she can master the colors and images), whimsically lets her hands wander on the surface, combining hues and smudging shapes. As the sun peaks its head over the hillside, each artist will have created her own oeuvre. Networks of lines and shapes, blurred lines and indistinguishable endings, like the paintings, hypertext has achieved that same structure. The goal of hypertext, it would seem, is to create works of increasing abstraction so that the way in which we relate to a written work gradually moves away from its informational content to the object, in and of itself. The transition is, by far, not an easy one. The academy is fraught with controversy over the obscurity of the hypertext medium. Lando w, in his section of Hyper/Text/Theory entitled â€Å"What’s a Critic to Do?,† attempts to reconcile the differences between hypertext and the printed page—differences that are as blatant, yet as subtle, as those between an abstract painting and an impressionist painting. The blurred edges of hypertext are represented by the concept of seemingly indistinguishable authorship. The author function becomes less significant as hypertext modes of textuality allow for a cacophony of voices to be included in each work. In contrast to the read-only versions of hypertext (those which cannot be annotated or amended), networked textuality allows for greater flexibility. The particular importance of networked textuality—that is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer network—appears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or â€Å"wreaders,† because any contribution, any change in the web created by one reader, quickly becomes available to other readers. This ability to write within a particular web in turn transforms comments from private notes, such as one takes in margins of ones’ own copy of a text, into public statements than, especially within educational settings, have powerfully democratizing effects (Landow 14). Hypertextual liberation comes from the shift from an expressive author who bears his or her soul in writing, to a community of voices who individually shape the text.