Hypertext Fiction flops……for now

Many thought that with the rise in popularity of e-books that this would quickly lead to a changing landscape in fiction and how non academic readers read. It was expected that this desire would be a social driving force in the creation of cyber books which could have a large scale impact on how people wrote fiction.

Would the process for writing change if the story was going to involve interactive, hypertext?

What would be the effect on the brain if this is how children read their favourite story books?

How would this remediation effect society?

These were a few questions and concerns from the onset of the cyber book excitement. Yet, they never really caught on. Turns out the main reason for is something very simple, what some might even call boring: Tradition.

What now seems to be nostalgia for the texture, smell, and weight of a book in our hands influences how we experience reading a digital book. “Books feel good. They operate well. It turns out that hundreds of years of publishing have field-tested for us the best ways to display text, to compose pages” (Kostick, 2011, 136). Steve Portigal explains “we’re at that inflection point where we bring our analog expectations to digital. It’s hard to adopt new technology if it’s not done really well, and we don’t have a model for a digital reading experience” (as cited in Kostik, 2011, 137).

Even in the almost 3 years since the above quote, cyber books have not caught on as some futuristic readers may have hoped.  When it comes to hypertext, it stands that individuals are fine to become aficionados in web spaces. But it is more than just tradition.

E-readers have utilized the book metaphor to provide signals, cues, and hints to the reader on how to navigate the text in a way that symbolizes the reading of a actual physical book. When trying to stay with the book metaphor, there isn’t room to include a hypertext story line and authors struggle to create an organic piece of writing.This issue of remediation is seen in the first-generation hypertexts as Hayles says because “technological limitations and a book culture built on print models kept these early attempts from breaking truly new ground” (Hackman, 2011, p. 88).

So, what is the future of digital fiction in this late age of print? There are some creative and brave souls trying to break the linear expectation of stories in traditional books.  David Mitchell, a British author, published 20 tweets a day to tell a story and to promote a new book. In truth, it was more of a marketing tool than a publishing tool, but no one had attempted long form writing in this short form arena yet.

Here is another take on the future of hypertext fiction :

For now it seems like the majority of readers are not ready for their online social and academic reading habits to transfer into their land of daydreams and imagination. But it also seems that this is mostly because the right combination of new technology and old technology have not found the right balance.

I know I am curious to how that relationship evolves.

Refrences

Hackman, P. (2011). “I am a double Agent”: Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the persistence of print in the age of hypertext. Contemporary Literature. 52(1), 84-107

Johnson, S. (2013, April 16). Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story. Wired Magazine. Retrieved from http://www.wired.com/magazine/2013/04/hypertext/

Kostick, A. (2011). The Digital Reading Experience: Learning from Interaction Design and UX usability experts. Publishing Research Quaterly, 27(2), 135-140