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

The Differences between Hypertext and the Printed PageTwo painters, alone in the night, fervently work on their objets dart. One, concerned with borders and lines, and the obviousness of it all, creates on her test 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 purge 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 photographs, hypertext has achieved that analogous 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 study to the object, in and of itself. The transition is, by far, not an easy one. The academy is fraught with controver sy over the obscurity of the hypertext medium. Landow, in his section of Hyper/Text/Theory authorise Whats a Critic to Do?, attempts to reconcile the differences between hypertext and the printed pagedifferences 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 textualitythat is, textuality written, stored, and read on a computer networkappears when technology transforms readers into reader-authors or wreaders, because any contribution, any change in the web created by one reader, quickly become s available to other readers. This great power 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.