Comments on: hypertext

By: Sherman Dorn

Sherman Dorn — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 20:53:45 +0000

Are you sure that people are as trapped in “the codex” as you claim? My guess is that most professionals spend far less working time with bound books than with other formats for written matter. We read e-mail, circulate memos, print drafts, read drafts, print and read loose-leaf PDFs, put together or read 3-ring binders of materials. etc. And that’s not even counting Death by PowerPoint!

By: KF

KF — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:23:03 +0000

I’m not sure we’re actually in disagreement here, if I’m reading you correctly; this paragraph is actually meant to be citing what I read as a species of utopian thinking on the part of early hypertext critics…

By: timothywmurray

timothywmurray — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 00:19:38 +0000

I am with you on everything so far except for this. I completely agree that a new for will be transformative. But never because it elevates the reader to a place where the reader is required to create the meaning of the text. Make it easy for the reader to understand the text not harder. As teachers we all want our readers to actively engage us. The reality is that we are lucky if we on the only screen they are reading from at any given time, let alone in the only window they are reading. Conceptually I recognize that what is desired is a better way to convey the context of the piece of text being presented to the audience. And the simultaneous desire to let the audience define what is relevant as context. But we will rarely succeed in gaining attention if we make the audience put down their coffee, and close the twitter window. We need a platform that conveys context effortlessly and intuitively. Not “full participation” rather the ability to be meaningful in sporadic and burstable attention.