Landow’s
hypertext and critical theory passage was attention grabbing due to the fact
that I had never thought of hypertext in that fashion. To me whenever I had
heard the word hypertext I had always thought a clickable link on a webpage
that would take the user to another point in the web, nothing more nothing
less.
Landow explores that hypertext has the implications of giving readers direct, simple
contact to a digital library of sources as well as unparalleled jurisdiction of
what and how they read. So it could be said then that hypertext is a non-linear
way to present information, couldn’t it? Hypertext is what makes up the
foundations of the digital world, being able to clink a link and being
transported to another direct source of knowledge and information. Thinking of
it as a vast digital cyber-spider web helped, and one is able to visualize the
capability of Internet linking.
The digital world is changing so fast and is
growing so big that its heading in the direction to say that soon, books will
become a system of "closed" authorial publications
and unlock the door for the "open" systems, such as the hypertext and
hypermedia. A large portion of people already get a majority of their news from
online publications, soon newspapers will become an absolute model of the past.
It can be said for novels and textbooks, the populace will read and gather data
from hyperlinks and hypertexts on their tablets and smart phones. Hypertext is always changing and evolving
as the people, “users”, continue to expand and develop the Internet. Socially,
culturally, and systematically, the Internet changes into something else
everyday and it’s almost daunting to see in your mind's eye its immensity.
Sometimes I really think about the future and wonder what it holds for us. Around the 1800s the world was such a big and unexplored place. It was a time of ships, exploration and adventure. Now in our age, since we have then completed our world maps (and found out that the globe is indeed round, not flat) we venture into the digital world. What is out there for us? How far can we go? Can there be another venture past the digital world? To be continued...
HI Jewls,
ReplyDeleteGreat Post! I definitely think you're right about hypermedia and hypertext changing the ways we engage socially, culturally, and systematically. I definitely get my own news from various external tools such as twitter and facebook and use those sources as a method of seeking out news articles and information through the click of a hyperlink. Hyperlinks and hypertext are very intertwined especially if we think about wikipedia. Wikipedia is just a vast web of information connected through hyperlinks. Have you ever heard of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_Degrees_of_Kevin_Bacon it's this idea that if you click on a particular actor or actress it would only take you six clicks to get to kevin bacon (if you only click on other celebrities). It's not actually based on hyperlinks, but I believe it could be done through wikipedia or imdb.
Best,
Joelle Garcia
I think that Landow's article did a great job at putting into words aspects of hypertext that we all might know but never really think or vocalize deliberately. Despite being the World Wide Web sometimes in is easy to disregard how interconnected it is. Digitization and our reliance on the internet is still new enough for us to have more questions than answers, so I think that as times goes on the Internet might stay daunting but we will getting better at dealing and interacting with it.
ReplyDeleteJewls,
ReplyDeleteAlthough you look at their arguments in the scope of communication, exploration, history, and technology, I think the main scope of rhetoric and these types of theories is ultimately centered in the brain. Biologically, humans aren't that different, and can label and explain different things in different ways: prime example being the curriculum for this week. Since we are all working using the same tools (brains), there should be so many theories concerning the subject, especially ones differing so little from one another. Looking at the future might actually end up being more practical as it has to do with what's the state-of-the-art today and how it might affect us and change our lives in the future.
It's also interesting how hypertext, like the hyperlinks both of you mentioned, are shared between people in a similar way that our brain process and think of information through connections. Is the form of the internet a direct derivative of the nature of our thought processes? It makes sense.