Hooray for the banality of linking.
I occasionally hear from a (usually new) reader that reading one of these hypertextual
essays is an interesting challenge. I'm always a bit confused with this sort of
confession, primarily because it suggests that there's something difficult in
reading a construct of this sort. Rather than being difficult, I'm quite convinced
that writing of this sort has become very commonplace. I tend to think that anyone
who reads texts with a mouse in his or her hand (and many people do that)
has acquired at least the most basic of skills for
reading a hypertextual essay. Certainly it's not all technical - knowing how and
where to click - and I'd be the last to claim that a certain amount of higher
level thinking can't hurt when it comes to trying to figure out whether the links
are continuations of the text or contradict it, or perform one of a number of
other possible functions. But this should be true for just about any sort of reading.
And that's part of why I continually wonder whether there's really any point to
all this linking. True, sometimes it's perfectly clear (to me) that a particular
thought belongs on a page of its own, not just as a parenthetical remark buried
somewhere on the main page of text. But at other times I find myself repeatedly
asking whether there's really any justification for a particular link standing
on its own, whether a thought has been linked simply because I want to add an
additional page to the total number of pages that this project consists of. It
seems to me that questions of this sort are questions than any writer, in any
genre, has to ask him or herself, and readers today don't necessarily have to
choose to read hypertext, but instead read all sorts of writing, including writing
that tries to make extensive use of associative links.
Go to: The (ir)relevance of hypertext