Will's Reflection
The Deep Play of Hypertext Learning

Nowadays, it's fashionable to foresee the end of books or to promote the computer possibilities of hypertext. Although I cherish my books and believe buying first edition books will be even more fun than holding onto baseball cards was in the fifties, and although I love computers and have designed and implemented a computerized classroom, I'm quite happy to think that 21st century reading will involve reading both hard texts and hypertext. However, I also suspect that we have not seriously or fully considered the possibilities of hypertext, and it is the purpose of this article to begin doing so.

What is hypertext? The term was coined by Theodore H. Nelson in the l960's, who said that hypertext means "nonsequential writing--text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen. As popularly conceived, this is a series of text chunks connected by links which offer the reader different pathways" (0/2). In his l992 book, Hypertext, George Landow furthered Nelson's thinking by explaining that hypertext is "text composed of blocks of words (or images) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains, or trails in an open ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms link, node, network, web, and path" (3). Reading hypertext means that one travels through a text in more ways than simply reading pages and turning them. Hypertext is intended to echo the way we think--don't our minds often follow a series of associations shaped by ideas and developing into other ideas?

The World Wide Web, our foremost hypertext, increasingly enables learning transactions. Readers on the Web are offered tools that allow them to find a number of alternate paths through their screen experiences. How a screen appears, and in what order screens appear, no longer produces the turning of pages. Hypertext adds new dimensions to the reading transaction. Robert Coover describes this process in his essay, "The End of Books":

With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose, for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories. The most radical new element that comes to the fore in hypertext is the system of multidirectional and often labyrinthine linkages we are invited or obliged to create. Indeed the creative imagination often becomes more preoccupied with linkage, routing and mapping than with statement or style, or with what we would call character or plot (two traditional narrative elements that are decidedly in jeopardy). We are always astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. This is to say, the text fragments are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narrative runs between them.(24)

Computers are reading tools that increasingly encourage readers to find alternate paths in which more and more of the text occurs in the links and in the reader. Computer reading not only enables readers to insert their own writing, but it also dethrones authorial prijmacy and linearity as texts' ruling structures by inserting a democratic mix of ongoing, alternative structures. In this regard, modern readers of hypertext will do much what Reader-Response critics, Deconstructionists and Post-Modern thinkers have theorized; 21st century readers will rewrite texts with their electronic eyes.

In spatial terms, the reading transaction occurs on a modern network of multi-lane highways instead of on narrow, two-way streets. As Jay David Bolter might add, "the key is the electronic link, which allows us to build and explore trees or networks, to turn trees into hypertext" (Writing Space). The fact that there are many paths through a computer text is one of the most explosive changes in reading. The "privileged" path is now privileged by readerly actions that parallel what writers do to order their texts.

Certainly, with such an increase in reading possibility virtually exploding on screen, educators must decide either to let the Web become a place of commerce and entertainment, or to stake out territory on the web for valuable learning resources. It is difficult to compete with the flash of commercial sites and the dazzle of Madonna or whoever is hot at the moment, but it might be possible to "play" with those attractions and at the same time exist educationally on the web.

In order to think about how educators may avoid the "TVing" of the Web, consider first Clifford Geertz's use of Jeremy Bentham's concept of "deep play." In his classic essay, "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," Geertz describes "deep play" as play risking stakes so great that it is, from a practical standpoint, irrational for people to engage in. Nonetheless, Geertz goes on to show how a particular form of deep play (cockfighting) was integrated into the very fabric of Balinese culture. Indeed, reading Geertz's essay can make one notice varieties of "deep play" in all cultures and understand "deep play" as a key means of increasing meaning in our lives.

Imagining that education can exist on the World Wide Web is a bit like building a school right next to a multiplex theater and hoping students won't cut class to go to the movies. However, because hypertext so powerfully echoes thinking modes, and because the Web makes hypertexts so publishable and accessible, it would be silly for educators to ignore the learning resources of the Web. We need to accept the "deep play" challenge of creating Web pages that educate because making meaning is the essence of both "deep play" and education.

One of the ironies of reading Web pages is that the more links in the page, the more likely the reader will value the page, though not necessarily by staying in it. Not only is there "deep play" in risking our students' eyes on entertainment screens, but there is an even more basic form of "deep play" that any text with links is likely to make the reader leave it rather quickly. The risk of leaving a Web page, however, is moderated by the use of bookmarking--creating an ongoing computer file of interesting Web addresses. If a Web page is of value to readers, they will easily add a bookmark to their own hypertext of web experience and can easily return to the Web page for future experience. This changed reading dynamic means that educators must supply their sites with plenty of links, that the sites must be worth bookmarking, and that educators begin to understand that hypertext reading is something very different from more traditional reading acts.

Works Consulted

Bernhardt, Stephen A. "The Shape of Text to Come: The Texture of Print on Screens." College Composition and Communication 44.2 (l993): 151-75.

Birkerts, Sven. The Guttenberg Elegies. New York: Fawcett Columbine, l994.

Bolter, Jay David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Eastgate Systems Inc., l991 (electronic version) or Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates, l991 (paper version).

--- . "Alone and Together in the Electronic Bazaar." Computers and Composition 10.2 (l993) 5-18.

Coover, Robert. "The End of Books" New York Times Book Review 21 June l992: 1,23+.

--- . "Hyperfiction: Novels for the Computer" New York Times Book Review 2 Aug. l993: 1,8+.

Elbow, Peter. "The Uses of Binary Thinking." Journal of Advanced Composition 13.1 (l993): 51-78.

Geertz, Clifford. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." Ways of Reading 3rd ed. Boston: St. Martin's Press, l993.

Landow, George, P. Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology. Baltimore: John Hopkins U P, l992.

Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. New York: Vintage Books, l995.

Nelson, Theodore, H. Literary Machines. Swarthmore, PA: Theodore H. Nelson, l981.