First and foremost, I feel this Twine story assignment really helped illustrate to me the concept of a hypertext network with its restructuring of text where “all the individual pages may be of equal importance in the whole text, which becomes a network of interconnected writings.” (Bolter, 2001, p. 27). I created my Twine story for ETEC 540 by following two primary threads with approximately four secondary branches loosely (and hopefully humourously) based around my struggles with procrastination in education. My first steps were to flesh out a single thread of story which I was then able to branch off of and link back to. As I created my slides/pages, I found myself aligning with Bolter’s statement that when working with hypertext networks, “[t]he medium itself encourages brevity” as I would create short and basic titles for easier indexing and accessing from different slides. In several of my slides and linking decisions I hoped to mimic an internal monologue for which I used informal utterances as described by Gretch McCulloch to Helen Zaltzman. I feel this informal writing style communicates a more accurate representation of language which, as seen in our previous assignment of speech-to-text, is far different from our standard form of written language.
As I look back at the visual representation of the Twine, I am struck by Bolter’s statement that “the electronic writing space can represent any relationships that can be defined as the interplay of pointers and elements. Multiple relationships pose no special problem” (2001, p. 32) as links can be made between any of the pages regardless of where they may appear in a “linear” structure. Using the hypertext network to create the electronic ‘choose your own adventure’ platform seemed in harmony with Bush’s declaration of a mathematician who is
“a man of intuitive judgment in the choice of the manipulative processes he employs. All else he should be able to turn over to his mechanism, just as confidently as he turns over the propelling of his car to the intricate mechanism under the hood.” (1945)
Adopting the digital platform frees the reader from having to flip from page to page in a traditional book allowing the creator to guide the reader or user through the experience without removing them from the experience.
Bolter did have me questioning its true interactivity as he shares how some “challenge the hypertextual definition of interactivity: letting the reader choose links only gives the illusion of control, which is really withheld from the reader.” (Bolter, 2001, p. 43) This had me consider if perhaps this could be related to Zaltzman’s worry that auto-correct will begin choosing words for us causing us to link our ideas in a different way, prescribing to the auto-correct algorithm’s version of language rather than our own? Will our remediation of print and adoption of digital technologies remove our own agency and expression through language?
The Allusionist, Helen Zaltzman interviews Gretchen McCulloch, Internet linguist.
Bolter, J.D. (2001). Writing Space: Computers, hypertext, and the remediation of print (Links to an external site.). Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 77-98.
Bush, V. (1945). As we may think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1) (Links to an external site.), 101-108.
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