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Date:         Wed, 4 Nov 1992 13:37:44 -0500
From:         Nick.Carbone@WRITING.UMASS.EDU
Subject:      Reply to Re: is the end of "the paper" in sight?

Hypertext does offer readers more choices, and it does make it harder for the
writer to argue linearily.  But since the writer controls the choices, creates
the links, and these may or can include hypermedia as well,  the writer
still controls the argument.  But instead of an argument that proceeds point
by point, it may well be an argument that persuades by suffusion, by presenting
an array or constellation.  Persuasion by immersion maybe.
    But hypertext doesn't necessarily have to free anyone, writer or reader.
I flip through Fowler's dictionary of usage from time to time, and it contains
links.  At the end of a piece on colloquialisms it might say to see section on
hackneyed language, and at the end of that section it might say to see section
on foreign phrases.  So one reference keeps you linked to otheres, and you read
other sections, all in the voice and tenor of Fowler, coming away with a fuller
sense of his views of usage than a quick look up would offer.
    I saw a film on hypermedia that Paul LeBlanc showed to class I took here
at Umass.  It showed an IBM hypermedia version of Tennysons's Ulysess.  It had
dictionaries, critics discussing lines, orators using lines from the poem in
speeches (Ted Kennedy quoting the end of the poem at his '80 concession speech
at the Democratic Convention), actors reading lines different ways--ironically,
soberly, etc, it had videos of some sort and also pictures of things students
might not know of--a hearth for instance.
    Overall a complex hypermedia, and one that brought a lot of resources
on the poem to the reader quickly, there to use as the reader felt inclined, but
all of it put the author's of the hypertext in control of the poem and the
range of interpretations.  There was nothing in the model IBM used that allowed
students to offer interpretations of their own or prompts of some kind that lead
them to reflect on what they read...it was all given to them by an array of
authorities of one kind or another.
   I imagine a young student, unsure of her reading and writing skills, might
feel overwhelmed and intimidated by this, and I can see the kind of paper that
might come out of this hypertext reading as being one that parroted back what it
told her, or if she wrote the paper in hypertext, even that doing the same
thing.
    It still comes down to the teacher and to the author of the hypertext.  How
the teacher introduces students to hypermedia, how they are taught to interpret
it and to use it as a reader, how to read it critically, and it also depends
on how authors write hypermedia, if all the choices in it are of a kind, if they
all reinforce some one thing, then the  freedom of choice is really a freedom
not of movement but ways of being restricted or lead.

nick.carbone@writing.umass.edu
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU