The Internet as Electronic Labyrinth
First, I must credit Rachel’s “Modern Literacy” post and Victoria’s response to it for sparking this post. Rachel says “I will say that I initially experienced a sense of disorientation when reading The Electronic Labyrinth and felt overwhelmed when I clicked on the first link, which brought me to a page with four new links.”
I felt the same way, and if the site didn’t have “Labyrinth” in the name, I may have worried about it. But I must say that now, on my 7th and 8th MET courses, I’m used to it and I feel like this feeling is a bit of a microcosm of MET, or eLearning in general. It is very easy to follow one link to another until you are far away from your original page, and without a vigilant sense of purpose, you may find yourself with no idea what you were reading or looking for in the first place.
In contrast, while reading a book, a textbook, or going through a set of questions, the very linear mode of traditional writing makes it almost impossible to get lost. An analogy might be directions in a city. “Go down Queen St. until you get to 1000 Queen St.” vs. “Go down Queen Street until you get to Sherbourne. Turn left or right, and go straight through the next intersection, or turn left or right at that intersection. Keep doing that for a few more blocks. Look around and notice the architecture. Avoid eye contact with the people there, or don’t. Then try to remember where we were going again”. Back at The Electronic Labyrinth, I clicked on a few links and within 3 minutes I was in a place where, had it not been for the back button and the menu at the top of the page, I would have been at the point of no return.
The Electronic Labyrinth is obviously dated and I think that in itself shows how far the Internet has come. The cramped New Times Roman paragraphs stretching the full width of the window across the screen are not really conducive to reading. The very fatigue caused by the format influenced me to click on a link, rather than having to read another line 3o or 40 words long. By shrinking my window, though, I was able to follow longer passages much more easily.
Keep, McLaughlin and Parmar write about “decentring” as a feature of hypertext and postmodernity in general. “As more connections are made, the possibility for contradiction increases. This is the paradox of all self-engulfing and centreless systems.” (Keep, McLaughlin and Parmar, 1993, Connections without Centre: Inifinite Hypertext, para. 6). One must embrace this paradox and a little bit of a feeling of disorientation in eLearning as opposed to the measurable control (I have 1 chapter left to read) of linear text.
Keep, C., McLaughlin, T., & Parmar, R. (1995). The electronic labyrinth. Retrieved from http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0266.html.