Nothing in the nature of hypertext demands that it be interactive, polyvocal, or free from the author's dominance.He identifies a basic misconception when defenders of hypertext confuse "the medium with the activity of the reader". This leads to the mistake in which "interactivity, plurality, freedom from authority - all belong to 'hypertext,' not to the act of reading."
In response to the claim that hypertext is about giving the reader options he writes:
limiting the reader's activity to "choice" confuses reading with consumption.While Kurtz attacks hypertext from the "so what?" point of view, David S. Miall, in Hypertextual reading: What's the difference?, questions the effectiveness of the medium. He refers to a study conducted by Charney, claiming
Readers find it difficult to tell where they are within a group of nodes; they cannot judge whether they have read something essential and tend to give up too early; they find it hard to decide on an appropriate sequence through material.He adds that the
central and compelling point is that hypertext designers currently work largely in ignorance of what is known about the reading process.David Shenk, author of Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, tries to cut straight to the point. In an interview for National Public Radio (1997) he states:
Our sentences work best when they have a subject, object, and verb. Our stories work best when they have an ending. As we surf the Internet, we're in danger of forgetting this basic truth.Sven Birkerts is easily the most identifiable of the hypertext critics. His books and articles have been widely quoted. Birkerts attempts to reclaim the centrality of reading and the book from a technological society that seems intent on superseding it. In a chapter entitled Close Listening from The Gutenberg Elegies - The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age (1994) (excerpts) Birkerts attempts to identify what is lost in the electronic text:
With hypertext, endings are irrelevant, because no one every gets to one. Reading gives way to surfing, a meandering peripatetic journey through a maze of threads. The surfer creates his or her own narrative, opting for the most seductive link immediately available.
As a research technique, this is superb. As a mode of thought however, it has serious deficiencies. Faster is not always better and segmentation is not always smarter.
Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don't just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity. The printed page becomes a kind of wrought-iron fence we crawl through, returning, once we have wandered, to the very place we started.As a sort of counterpoint to this experience, in the chapter Hypertext: Of Mouse and Man, he writes that
the effect of the hypertext environment, the ever-present awareness of possibility and the need to either make or refuse choice, was to preempt my creating any meditative space for myself. When I read I do not just obediently move the eyes back and forth, ingesting verbal signals, I also sink myself into a receptivity.Birkerts claims the proper place of the author in any textual encounter:
The premise behind the textual interchange is that the author possesses wisdom, an insight, a way of looking at experience, that the reader wants.If all the author gives the reader in a hypertextual document is a series of choices, he or she is ultimately relinquishing the mandate that the reader gave him or her in the first place.
Jorn Barger is a far cry from being a critic of hypertext. From his web site he seems to be totally immersed in the practice and promise of hypertext. But even he is well aware of some of the drawbacks of the medium. On a page entitled WHERE'S THE &%$*@# CONTENT??? he writes:
This whole branch of my site began when I tried using Lycos with the search-terms "hypertext" andI can only hope that among all the other problems in this section of the Boidem, there's something else here besides "links to links to links". There is, after all, a good deal of wordy content. Perhaps that content is even worth reading.
"education". All I could find was links to links to links to links... to talk about hypertext and education!
Go to: On
Rereading Bolter, or
Go to: Prove
you're not making all this up