In chapter 11 of the Glutenberg Elegies Birkerts reveals to us his take on hypertext. He opens up with his first encounter with hypertext and goes on further to explain how he felt about this new medium. Birkerts’s first encounter with hypertext was similar to my first encounter with Patchwork Girl. Just like Birkerts I found myself waiting patiently for that “empowering rush” but it had never followed through. Now knowing that even Birkerts (someone who’s life revolves around reading) shares the same difficulty with reading hypertext as I do, tells me that hypertext contains some simple flaws. People today have come accustom the the traditional linear format of a book. And when that format changes, even someone who falls at the highest levels of reading and writing, will feel lost in what they are reading. Birkerts asks ” Is hypertext a Hula-Hoop fad or the first surging of a wave that will swell until it will sweep away everything in it path?” This question is similar to the question I brought in my previous glog. Will hypertext replace the book? For now it doesn’t seem so but who knows what could happen in the future.
Birkerts surprisingly does not go into the differences in format between a book and a hypertext, but instead he digs deep, looks past the surface of the two, taking a very close and specific look on how the two differ. He talks about how the text that appears on a screen of a hypertext is very different from the text imprinted on the pages a book. He brings up an interesting point saying that the same word is completely different if read on a screen than if read from a page of a book. He makes it clear that one is not better than the other, they are just simply different. It is interesting in how on the surface things can seem very similar, but if we dig deep and look very close at two things we can find huge differences that can open our eye to a new world of perceiving things.
Leave a Comment
No comments yet.
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
