New Media Communication @ Tunxis CC - Spring 2007

Identifying relationships, and the first one that we’re identifying is reality.

Real Space and Fictional Space.

We exist in reality and we cannot physically go into the story, the world of the story. We want to, and while we’re experiencing the story we “get into” it and forget about the real world. We actually believe that the events taking place in the story are real. We suspend disbelief and buy into the story world being real. A story creates its own reality.

For example, the Julio Cortazar (I may be spelling his name wrong, I forgot my texts at home!) story creates a story space within a story space.

These things happen in the real world within the story space:
Signs Power of Attorney. Gives someone joint ownership of his estate. Goes to his study to read. Sits in a green chair. He’s in the final chapters of the book. Starts to read, metaphorically moving into it. The characters take over.

These things happen in the story space within the story space:
The man and woman character meet in the cabin. The woman patches up the man’s cut on his back. They both leave the cabin, and split up. Man goes to estate. He goes through the house and finds another man sitting in a green chair reading a book and kills him.

Is it possible for a character in the story to kill the person who is reading the story? Only if the events in the story by some coincidence mirror the events in the readers life exactly.

The narrative of the Cortazon story is linear, because it was written by a typewriter.

We’re checking out Microsoft Word, which is just a digital transcoding of a typewriter. Across the top are several icons, some of them outdated (like the floppy disk for saving files). MS Word is a good linear representation of a typewriter. It makes sense, and is usable. Microsoft Word is a linear environment.

Steve Ersinghaus doesn’t think in a linear way.

Information Explosion
You can’t easily or practically deal with massive amounts of information in a linear way.

Memex may have been the first hypertext machine. Vannevar Bush article in the Atlantic called As We May Think.

Cross-referencing systems are non-linear, and as such the memex is proto-hypertext (according to Wikipedia).

The Limitations of Technology
1. The amount of information that you can see on the screen at one time.

Shitty Software (David Winer’s term) is always under development, and is never complete. It always asks for user input to make it better. By his definition, all software is shitty.

According to John Timmons, most people use 10% or less of Microsoft Word’s functions.

Hypertext - Deena Larsen’s Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts
We check out a hypertext story called Firewheel, and click arbitrarily. The text window that pops up has a passage with four hyperlinks. Is it the beginning of the story? It is now, because it’s where we begin. If we want to find out where we are, we can check out the storyspace, which is a map of the non-linear hypertext story. In hypertext, we traverse the text. We traverse the text by using the links as paths.

In the course of traversing the the text, we are editing the story. Every link we choose to follow is an edit. We can find our own meaning in whatever path we take.

In hypertext there is always an origin and a destination.

The origin is the text box that you begin in (in a web browser, the origin is the home page). The destination is the place you go when you click the hyperlink.

Lies by Richard Pryll