My Reading...

My reading . . . what a much more complicated construct given that in hypertext reading is much more unique because sequence of spaces will vary for each reader. Sequence varies, and I wonder, does that simply mean line(s) of argument vary? As Kolb acknowledges, though hypertext may offer an array of choices, and though the writer may have an architecture in mind, the reader experiences each space one at a time.

I found this to be so. As I experimented with navigational choices, I found that with each variation I could still only read one thing at a time. When I would choose a space and follow the sequence of links imbedded by Kolb, the ones that move from one space to the next by simply pointing and clicking the icon with the double arrows that point left and right, I would be on a thread which often diminished--each text space getting smaller, often times coming to final culmination in a bibiliographic entry.

At other times I would browse differently, sometimes revealing links in a list and choosing one among many; this took me in more circuitous patterns, often including returns to spaces previously encountered. Sometimes the return felt merely like a matter of orienteering where the re-encountered space served as a marker; at others the space seemed to dressed in a different light--the words were the same, but the journey back to them caused me to read them differently.

I must admit that I didn't expect this to happen, though it seems perfectly natural now that I take the time to think about it by writing about it. After all, I reread books, come back to them, and in the time between readings I have been changed, as have my thinking and reading; thus the rereading gives me a different meaning than the previous time through the same book or article.

What I think happens in good hypertext, where the writing and ideas are captivating (as are Kolb's), is that it concentrates that phenomenon, that thing we all do where what we have read, thought and written before always informs the reading and writing and thinking before us. Hypertext concentrates it in the time and space of the reader's progression through links and nodes, much the way a play or good literature concentrates human intelligence and emotions and their evolution over time into the space--the arche-texture--of their forms, forms which determine their own rules for establishing truth and beauty. Hypertext is then, when it works well, a more dramatic reading experience.

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Address your comments to Nick Carbone at nickc@marlboro.edu