Comprehension Metaphors (reading reading)

To understand how the new media operates, we need to reconsider such fundamental concepts as “text,” “reading,” and “writing.” As many critics note, throughout the last century, writers and filmmakers have experimented with non-linear storytelling, potentially laying the groundwork for audience acceptance of hypertexts and cyberfictions. 

Long before readers could literally change the direction of a text by selecting a link, hermeneutics informed us that readers selected the directions of their own interpretations by using the “surplus” of meaning inherent in every text. No two readings, even by the same reader, would ever lead to exactly the same interpretation, as Paul Ricoeur noted when he wrote that the text “may be compared to an object, which may be viewed from several sides, but never from all sides at once” (77). Even in 1976, it seems Ricoeur was not completely happy to classify text as an object, and with the reality of interactive media, it may be time to take Ricoeur’s definition one step further – to define text not as an object at all, but as an the act of viewing it. 

Although text in interactive media may exist in object “chunks,” these individual page, “scriptons,” or sections do not in and of themselves make up a meaningful text in the traditional sense; meaning is activated only through the act of forging the connections the author has placed (intentionally or unintentionally) before the readers. In other words, the distinction between the object text and the act of reading narrows dramatically in hypertext.